Prejudice In Property And How To Triumph Over It: A Lesson From The 1960s Buildings don’t just appear out of thin air: They are conceived, designed, funded and built by people who bring with them their lives, experiences, backstories and influences, both in their careers and in the world outside real estate. For this series, Bisnow undertook highly personal interviews with a range of developers, famous and less well-known, to dig into those experiences and influences to find out how they shaped the people that shaped our world. The 1960s and 1970s were all about liberation and radicalism, right? Not so fast. The City of London was still dominated by bowler hats and pinstripes, and life in most of post-war Britain was narrow, cramped and routinely prejudiced. You could watch flower power on the TV, but there was little flowering of new opportunities if you went to the wrong school, were Black, female, gay or Jewish. Neil Sinclair built a series of London-based property businesses during the 1960s and '70s, became one of the surveying business leaders in the 1980s and '90s, and today is a doyen of the industry as co-founder and chief executive at investor Palace Capital. But getting to the top has required determination and mettle, and 50 years ago, it also meant overcoming prejudice in the property business. 
Sinclair’s CV reads like a rundown of the UK property business over the past five decades. Jostling for space with his original business, Sinclair Goldsmith, are names like Baker Lorenz and Conrad Ritblat, Tops Estates and, since 2010, Palace Capital.Sinclair looks like a property insider.…  Read the full story here. | | |
