Au revoir MIPIM 2012



My Range Rover parked at Cannes...in my dreams



There’s something almost comfortingly familiar about a four-day trip to an exotic sun-drenched Riviera resort ending in an Irish bar with your ear drums being hammered by 1980s disco music.

But that’s how Nottingham’s mission to MIPIM chilled out last night. There were some notably impressive performances by ‘DJ’ Ashley Cowdrey of M&E firm CPW and the impossibly hip Tim Garratt of Innes England, but those shocking revelations are for another day (or sensible negotiation).

Before you run away with the idea that Team Nottingham’s trip to MIPIM has been a thinly-disguised journey to the usual boozy haunts, let me reassure you that the downtime has been well-earned.

The model Nottingham has adopted for MIPIM is a solid and sustainable one: a core of private sector property and construction industry businesses paying their way and bringing key public sector decision-makers with them to let would-be investors know that great development opportunities will not sink under a painful planning process.
David Bishop, Nottingham City Council’s corporate director of development, maintained a professional distance from raw deals while offering authoritative reassurance that planners understood what business was trying to achieve.
Solidly supported by the widely-respected Lorraine Baggs, the city’s head of inward investment, and the seasoned experience of Mike Taylor, head of Nottingham Regeneration, the council team provided a back-up which added authority to the whole delegation and off-the-cuff advice at the kind of impromptu meetings which dominate MIPIM.
If you want to criticise the glitz and glamour of MIPIM you can, because Cannes has a lot of it. The closest I came was nearly being glued to the tarmac by a be-chromed Bentley driven by someone for whom pedestrian crossings and the people who use them were clearly an inconvenience too far.
I’m ashamed to say that I showed my appreciation of his driving in the traditional English manner.
If you haven’t been to MIPIM what you have to get your head round is the fact that this is a veneer of glitz and glamour (and sometimes grossness) which comes from a Riviera resort within spitting distance of Monaco, the place where millionaires and billionaires go to look at their money.
The veneer is there to serve them, not the likes of Team Nottingham or most of the other ordinary business people who come to pack into four days meetings which would otherwise take months to tie down.
The truth is that this isn’t a playday away from home, but a frequently foot-destroying round of meetings and discussions which stretch from dawn until dusk.
The results of those meetings I’ll write about in Business Post on Tuesday. For now we’re well beyond dusk and Cannes has gone quiet.
But Nottingham has come away with a lot to talk about.