When V&A East opened at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in May 2024, London's mayor turned to the room and said the hard work starts now. Not before the opening, after it. Most of the people who'd spent years getting the museum built expected the opposite: that the ribbon-cutting was the finish line, the moment the pressure eased and the project could be called done.

Fiona Fletcher-Smith, CEO of L&Q, made a similar point at July's NLA Place Partnership session in London, chaired by Catherine Staniland of the NLA. Her example was Barking Riverside, a site being built out over a timescale that will outlast several mayoral terms and general elections. Political cycles run four to five years. Place programmes run twenty to twenty-five. Funding gets reviewed, priorities shift, and the people who signed off the original vision aren't always still in post to defend it ten years in. Muse made the same point from the developer's side: nobody on a panel like that disputes that housing needs infrastructure, community buy-in and patient capital, but the institutions responsible for providing all three are elected on a much shorter clock than the neighbourhoods they're shaping. Adaptability has to be designed in from the outset, because the demographics of a place, and what its residents actually need, will have shifted more than once by the time the last phase completes.

Fletcher-Smith set out five principles for partnerships built to survive that mismatch. Long-term vision that holds past a single administration, so a change of mayor or council leader doesn't strand a scheme halfway through. Risk sharing that's more than financial, extending to reputational and delivery risk as well as capital. Adaptability designed in from day one rather than retrofitted once circumstances change. Infrastructure built ahead of housing rather than catching up to it, since transport, utilities and digital capacity need to be in place before people move in, not years afterwards. And community partnership from the beginning: not a single consultation event or a display board in a community centre, but real involvement in priorities, design, phasing and long-term stewardship. Her challenge to the room was blunt. Design partnerships that share risk and responsibility, unlock investment, and stay clear on public purpose throughout.

Places for London is one place to see these principles working at scale. It's TfL's property development company, financially independent since April 2022, with profit reinvested straight back into the transport network rather than distributed as dividends. It's already home to 1,500 businesses, 95% of them SMEs, occupying railway arches and high streets across the city. Its joint venture model splits ownership 49/51: Places for London holds the minority stake, and a development partner takes the rest, bringing commercial expertise and access to capital that Places for London matches with connected land, borough relationships and sustainability standards. The results so far include over 5,000 homes started, more than half of them affordable, a skills academy partnership that has trained 11,900 people and moved nearly 5,000 into jobs, and a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Defence to bring veterans into construction and development roles. A 2024 contribution report put its total social and economic impact at £440m, with a target of over £1bn by 2030.

The clearest account of what stewardship actually costs after the opening came from East Bank itself, the UK's newest cultural quarter at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Five institutions sit inside it: V&A East, UAL London College of Fashion, BBC Music Studios, Sadler's Wells East, and East Museum and Storehouse, with the London Legacy Development Corporation as the largest investor at £400m in capital infrastructure. Tamsin Ace, East Bank's director, described her own role as being the glue between five partners who'd otherwise operate independently, spotting where collaboration was possible and pooling resources across institutions that don't naturally share a budget line. The risk she named openly is the one every regeneration scheme faces once the launch coverage fades: partners quietly reverting to business as usual, because the people who championed the shared vision move on and nobody replaces the habit of collaborating. East Bank's answer was to put those shared values into business plans and job descriptions, not just trust whoever currently holds the role to remember them. East Bank isn't framed internally as bringing culture to east London, since east London already has plenty of its own creativity. It's framed as providing resource, platform and opportunity, with learning expected to flow both ways: what happens at East Bank is meant to reshape the older institutions in Kensington and Bloomsbury just as much as it shapes the neighbourhood around it.

South Bank offers the longest run of evidence in the room. SBEG, the South Bank Employers Group, is 35 years old, formed properly in 1991 as what its chief executive Nic Durston called a coalition of the willing among major landowners, including St Thomas' Hospital, Merlin, Shell, and various social enterprises. Its partnership runs on a political co-chairs model, pairing MPs, London Assembly members and councillors, and that model has survived 27 years of political change, including new leadership arriving from both Lambeth and Southwark without breaking continuity. A Business Improvement District sits alongside the core organisation to bring in additional investment, and South Bank Neighbours, an independent community forum, has run since 2011. Major schemes get discussed openly among partners well before they reach the formal planning process, which is a lot easier to say than to institutionalise, but thirty-five years of doing it is hard to argue with.

None of this makes risk disappear. What changes is how it's shared and which party brings the skills to de-risk a particular piece of it. Public sector partners bring strategic vision, the ability to convene stakeholders, and the credibility of a mayoral or council name to open doors a private developer can't open alone. Private sector partners bring development expertise, commercial discipline and access to the kind of patient capital that institutional investors are willing to commit to a twenty-year horizon. The constraint on the public side is usually financial, and it's a real one: local authorities are squeezed, heads-down on immediate pressures, and it's hard to lift your head up and spot the connections between projects when the in-tray never empties. Fletcher-Smith's argument was that reform is needed so being the glue for an area becomes a recognised part of public sector roles, rather than something a handful of committed individuals do on top of their actual job. One example raised in the session was BRL's willingness to invest upfront to attract partners, funding things like NHS drop-in sessions and Thames Clipper services before the wider business case had fully closed: spending to prove the model works rather than waiting for a certainty that never arrives on a scheme this size.

There's a longer-term financial question underneath all of this too, and it came up almost in passing towards the end of the session: sustainable estates increasingly need to generate their own income over time, particularly where affordable homes are involved, rather than relying on one-off capital funding to cover decades of upkeep. Muse pointed out that joint venture structures themselves are having to change to reflect this, moving away from arrangements built for a single development phase towards ones that can flex as ownership, service charge models and community needs evolve over twenty-five years rather than staying fixed at the point of signing.

There's a smaller version of the same problem sitting underneath all of this, and it's the one Alix spends its time on. East Bank's director put shared values into job descriptions because trusting people to remember them wasn't enough. L&Q was founded in 1963 with the hope that in a hundred years it would still care about the neighbourhoods it built. Both are the same instinct: treating a place, or a home, as something you look after rather than something you finish. The ongoing work of keeping existing homes safe and well cared for doesn't stop once a repair is logged as complete, and the systems built around that work shouldn't stop caring either, once the initial job is done.

Placemaking gets judged at the launch event, when the press are still in the room and the ribbon is still warm. Stewardship gets judged twenty years later, by people who weren't there for the opening and never will be, using a place that either still works for them or doesn't. That's a harder thing to build for, and a much harder thing to fund politically, since nobody gets to cut a ribbon for good maintenance. It might be the only version of the job worth doing.