The big interview: Sir Tim Smit

Mid-Cornwall’s china-clay country can be a forbidding place. Drive through on the wrong day and your headlights will be beaten by thick fog, wipers set to quit, as you pass the great barrows of waste sand and lunar craters that lurk in the gloom. It doesn’t exactly scream: “Let’s build an attraction here. And make it tropical.”

But that’s exactly where you’ll find the Eden Project, nestled into a sterile old china-clay pit outside the neglected town of St Austell. Its bubble-like tropical and Mediterranean biomes, billed as the world’s biggest greenhouses, now draw around a million people a year. They come not just for the innovative architecture and exotic flora, but also for the art and sculpture, restaurants and education centres, and a gig programme that’s hosted Pulp, PJ Harvey, the Kaiser Chiefs and Kylie Minogue.

It’s a fertile mix. And much of it bloomed from the mind of co-founder Sir Tim Smit – via sketches on a pub napkin.

“People often accuse me of being a visionary,” says Smit, who’s just accepted a mug of coffee and dropped onto a sofa in his office. He’s wearing a check shirt, jeans and desert boots, his glasses perched on his forehead. “The truth is, if you and I were to visit a dozen schools around this area, you’d not find a single child who does not imagine themselves building a large dam across a river, or a bridge or a castle. That’s what humans do. We imagine this stuff.”

Smit may be 65, but his office is done out like a youngster’s den, the walls hidden by a gallery of curiosities and obsessions he’s hung or tacked up: the trailblazing Captain Scott next to young climate protesters in London, a line of trees bending to the ground to form a tunnel, nature inviting humans to find the function in its form.

The young Smit’s dreams were fuelled by adventure stories, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Later, having built a successful career in the music business, writing hits and producing for Barry Manilow, Alvin Stardust and Twiggy, he moved to Cornwall and found a lost world of his own. One February day in 1990, there he was, machete in hand, hacking through “laurels as thick as a man’s thigh” on an overgrown old estate his friend had inherited.

He recalls feeling an immediate need to restore it. Not that he knew anything about gardens or running big projects. People said it was impossible, the grounds were too far gone. So, he pulled together a team and they did it anyway. Six years later, the Lost Gardens of Heligan opened to the public. It’s now one of the country’s most beloved attractions.

“I know now that I have a strange brain that is different to most people’s,” Smit offers. He adds that he’ll happily spend hours daydreaming about construction projects, building his own back garden or imaginary castles brick by brick. But it doesn’t stop with the walls: he also imagines how to create “a common wealth”, where his neighbours can prosper too.

Smit says he was “born not wanting to conform”. If you talk to him about project management, you won’t catch him polluting the air with talk of KPIs or corporate governance. Eden forbid. He proudly points out that the cover of the charity’s HR manual carries a quote: “Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the enslavement of the stupid.”

Instead, project management acts as a springboard for a series of long but entertaining digressions, from his favourite TED Talk (Hans Rosling) to the value of accepting every third invitation you receive. Each thought seems to spark four others that must be explored.

It was the “piratical” process of restoring Heligan that proved to Smit the power of storytelling as a means of bringing other people into his vision. Most people, he says, feel a seed of sadness inside them, and yearn to be part of a big adventure. “If the project is an orchestra, the skill of the conductor is to create a narrative in which everybody who participates can be a star of some kind.”

Construction at Eden began in 1998. Here was that ethos writ large: a project to prove that, if enough people buy into the dream, they can pull off the remarkable – transforming a site left for dead by the china-clay industry into a living celebration of our interdependence with nature.

The clay pit had its challenges: the base sat 15 metres below the water table, and had no soil. They had 134 consecutive days of rain, which required pumping out. Twelve dumper trucks and eight bulldozers shifted 1.8 million tonnes of ground material – without taking an ounce off-site. Building the biomes took 230 miles of scaffolding. Eden’s biggest feature, the Rainforest biome, is 100 metres high, 200 metres long and 50 metres wide, but it weighs next to nothing, because its honeycomb panels are made of ETFE – a light, recyclable plastic that transmits sunlight. It was built as a complete bubble, and then cut to a dome where it met the uneven ground.

Of course, you won’t manage any of that by simply telling pirate stories and stubbornly refusing to write anything down. Smit has the gift of corralling the right minds. Early on, project manager Tim Carter insisted they create a diary marking the next two-and-a-half years, and that they fill in every meeting they’d need in that time. If Smit or his team missed any, he stressed, Eden wouldn’t get built.

“He meant you’ve got to have a structure that is constantly measuring and testing progress,” Smit explains. “That’s a tremendous art. I may strain against constraints, but I would never fight that now. I’ve seen great process management and it’s fantastic. It makes people safe, enables people to know what they’re doing and enables you to pick up on any approaches that aren’t right. Otherwise behaviours become enshrined, and you want to guard against that.”

The Eden Project achieved what so few high-profile UK projects seem able to: it came in on time, on budget, with no litigation. Also remarkable, it gained general approval from the locals. ‘Our Eden Project Opens’ read the headline in the Western Morning News, Smit recalls. Eden made a cash surplus of more than £1.6m in its last financial year. As a social enterprise, that money goes back into its educational projects.

“Pound for pound, Eden is possibly the best investment made in this country,” Smit contends. “We’ve created over £2bn of new wealth. But that’s because we’re very political: we’ve done it by wanting to prove that if you want to do great business, and be a really great neighbour and partner, you must work out what other people need. I rather like the Chinese way of doing business: success is when both sides walk away feeling happy.”

That’s fortunate, as the latest chapter in the saga has Smit and the team heading off to the Far East, on behalf of Eden Project International and its remit to build an Eden Project on every inhabited continent by 2025. There are now 17 Edens in the works, including three in China, each showcasing our relationship with nature, yet unique to its location.

For Smit this has meant more “wonderful adventures”, speaking his mind to the Emiratis and discovering the joys of the Chinese sense of humour.

Then there’s the £85m Eden Project North in Morecambe Bay, currently slated for potential launch in spring 2023, and recently backed by the prime minister. This isn’t Smit’s first UK project outside Cornwall: he was a sustainability ambassador for the London Olympics in 2012, which offered a front-row seat for another domestic success.

There he credits the same galvanising vision of broader benefits – this time the aim of creating the most sustainable Olympics ever. One problem with most high-profile projects here is that they don’t consider such “added value”.

He has other views on project management – like how the industry needs “glamming up”.

“If you want to attract the brightest and best to become project managers, you’ve got to make it clear that we’re the enablers who are shaping the future of the world,” he says. “There’s a space for the creative, the informed, the emotionally intelligent project manager. In my experience, women are very good at this role, and there are certain elegant attributes that women bring to problem-solving. So how do you attract more women into the profession?”

He’s soon off on another road of digressions, taking in ancient fish traps in Australia; the tragedy of senior leaders having no time to read; and how, in the event of an apocalypse, one should take the battery from a golf buggy to rig up a windmill.

Somehow, he always manages to follow the breadcrumbs back to project management. He finally lands on the biggest UK project of all right now – fixing the country. He asks how such a smart nation can lack any organising principle that helps make life happier and healthier for everyone. And he wants to know what’s inside each of us that would inspire that change.

The monologue eventually wilts. At its denouement, it’s clear that the walls of Smit’s office are simply a reflection of the channel-hopping inside his head. But there are unifying themes – of curiosity, hope and love of nature – and they are compelling. As if, just by embarking on your quest with the right team of people and the aim of helping others, anything is possible.