The contemporary National Trust has spent the last five years engaging with the city and its inhabitants through a series of research and development projects. As well as ongoing work to open up and bring to life the twelve places we care for in London, we’ve worked beyond our walls with creative producers and communities to create an urban orchard with the Southbank Centre, a pop-up beach under the Westway flyover, explorations of twentieth-century architecture, a celebration of the heritage and identity of Croydon, and a project looking at the future of the cityscape. What we’ve learned from these projects, and more, is the important emotional connection between people and place, and the way in which places from country estates to housing estates, from local parks to multi-storey car parks (viz. Bold Tendencies in Peckham) matter to Londoners. It is this connection between people and places that we plan to further explore through the Mayor’s London Borough of Culture initiative.