The Music Of Kings

The concert-hall owner on proving the sceptics wrong, female composers and farming

- Peter Millican

SCOTLAND’S single biggest development in a decade is under way on 43 acres at Edinburgh Park. On a rare day off, most men in charge would put their feet up, but not Peter Millican. The chairman of property group Parabola has many unexpected lives.

To the community around Corbridge, Northumberland, he is a quiet gentleman farmer, with 200 beef cattle and 1,000-odd lambs. Down in London, another set of friends and colleagues looks forward to Thursdays, when Mr Millican arrives for two days at his very own concert hall, Kings Place, N1. At 69, he feels a way off retirement, but he has achieved a lifetime ambition in opening the much-garlanded venue in 2008.

Others have talked up undeliverable plans for new Arts venues in 21st-century London amid cuts in Government funding, but Mr Millican simply got on with it, ploughing in £100 million with no public subsidy. He was confident he’d get his money back, but not overly worried if he didn’t.

Alan Rusbridger, fellow music buff and former editor of The Guardian, credited him with ‘responding to the collective responsibility that all developers share, but which very few take seriously’. In 2015, he received an OBE for services to the Arts.

Kings Place is now a major cog in our capital’s musical life, the equal of the Southbank Centre and Wigmore Hall, although striving not to copy them. ‘Of everything I’ve built, Kings Place still gives me a buzz,’ Mr Millican says.