Sex Pistols, screens and big brands: Philip O’Ferrall on his vision for media venture Outernet

theguardian.com:

For a descendant of a 14th-century Knight of the Garter, Philip Bourchier O’Ferrall looks surprisingly at home in a room covered in edgy Sex Pistols graffiti.

We’re standing in a former silversmith’s workshop in London’s Denmark Street that the punk outfit called home in the 1970s, examining frontman John Lydon’s handiwork. In black marker, there’s a drawing of the band’s svengali, Malcolm McLaren, clutching a wad of cash, and on one wall, scrawled in capitals, the words: “Johnny wont go to heaven or the south of France.”

The Pistols’ room, soon available for rent, is a quirky part of an unlikely marriage between the capital’s rock’n’roll heartland and a shiny shrine to advertising that is dividing Londoners.

O’Ferrall is chief executive of Outernet, a media venture in a semi-open building outside Tottenham Court Road tube station wallpapered with high-resolution screens. Dubbed “The Now Building”, it offers what feels like an immersive version of Piccadilly Circus, displaying ads, artwork and TV shows in a space used for public and private events.

The aim is to offer brands and artists a single location for gigs, product launches and premieres. O’Ferrall says it is a “first of its kind” project, part of a property development spanning offices, high-end apartments, a cluster of bars and music venues, a boutique hotel and a planned recording studio. It has been created in partnership with fellow shareholder and low-profile West End property tycoon Laurence Kirschel, who owns the whole complex through his company Consolidated Developments.

It has taken Kirschel, a peer of the late pornographer and Soho kingpin Paul Raymond, more than 100 individual acquisitions and two decades to reach this point. He led the property push,