Robert Soning went into the Real Estate business in 1991 selling everything from residential homes to industrial warehouses.
After four years of specialising in mixed use buildings in central London he joined forces with David Barnett to form Londonewcastle.
Having had a keen interest in cutting edge architecture and design Londonewcastle quickly became a recognised brand developing properties for the creative industries that lived and worked in London.
Currently Londonewcastle have a large land bank of buildings in some of London’s most up and coming areas with a development plan stretching over the next 10 years.
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Highlights
At a very early age, we spotted a gap in the market and we took advantage of that
I went into residential and I really enjoyed that because I like people and I like going into people’s houses and seeing how they lived and all the wonderful bits and pieces like that
We started creating these kind of really interesting apartments… slowly from there we got some recognition as being a little bit different and it just really grew from there
I left school pretty early because I was quite dyslexic so my educational options were limited
I was the son of Harvey… it gave me a huge appetite to become successful in my own right
I went into the residential part of the industry rather than the commercial part because it gave a boundary between myself and my legacy
David has been my partner I think now for well over 20 years and we just work fantastically well together
It was a very difficult period of time and very much a case of crack on or crack up
We could have returned the keys to the bank as such but we’re young, we’re ambitious, I don’t play golf, I haven’t got a boat and we wanted to leave a legacy
If we wanted to continue and be successful in this industry we would have to kind of move our "chi" if you like
We’ve got millions of square feet in planning or under development for either ourselves or our development partners
It’s been an unbelievable journey
We created a arts programme for our meanwhile use in buildings… we have been very successful at doing that and we’ve enjoyed it immensely
We’re connecting to the local community… which is really important for what we do and that kind of brings some real colour to what we do