5 minutes with … Jack Newton at RSHP

2023-09-29T06:00:00

The firm’s associate partner on struggling with dyslexia at school, increasing diversity in the profession, working under Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour and watching his children playing with his Lego

Why did you choose construction as a career?

I’m not sure how I chose my career but, looking back, you can see how the dots joined together. As a child I liked science fiction, spacecrafts, model-making and drawing cartoons of cities of the future. I was also interested in politics, probably influenced by my parents who both worked for local government.

These interests combined with growing up in Lambeth, south London, in the 1980s where the city around me was in a poor state and in desperate need of a new vision. These were contributing factors to my journey to architecture.

The other and perhaps more fundamental factor was my dyslexia. I could not write my own name until I was seven years old. Writing or anything deemed academic was almost ruled out for me.

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