The City of London is a complex place where multinational companies trade on the stock markets and do their best to play the game, making themselves a profit or loss depending on how good they are at it. Stockbroking is a very risky career, and contrary to popular belief, the money isn’t made up in those shiny glass skyscrapers.

The real business is done during the lunch breaks in the side streets and small cafes that line along the Isle of Dogs, where workers from different companies share gossip and tidbits of information. It’s these little breaks which power the world financial markets, as the brokers feed off the gossip to rely on where to gamble their money. Sometimes it will pay off, and sometimes they’ll just gawp in stunned amazement as they watch their money drain away.

Nevertheless, gossip is the powerhouse which keeps our world working, whether we like it or not. Gossip is what keeps us entertained and interested, as there’s little more than looking into someone else’s life. It’s why soap operas are the most watched genre on television.

But yet, drama and gossip are portrayed negatively, and rightly so. It causes rifts and divides as communication breaks down and people just jumping to all sorts of conclusions. I’ll deem this to be the AIG effect - there’s not actually that huge a problem, but people are starting to make something out to be bigger than it is, and before you know it there’s a huge fuss and someone has to step in before it descends into chaos.

Of course, if nobody steps in, you get the Lehmann Brothers effect. Everything collapses and there’s sense of loss and despair as people try to pick things up again. I knew a pub like that..

And the you have the case where everything tries to get covered up so nobody has any idea what’s going on, until it all just bursts out in one huge uproar.. I’ll term that as being the Enron effect. When the shit hits the fan, then you’re really in trouble.

I don’t feed off gossip or publicity.. much of the time I just ridicule it. My work in world - furniture, architecture, entertainments and events - it speaks for itself. The rest - photography, machinima, blogging - it just for me to give myself a record of what I’ve done and achieved, and to broaden my own skills. I don’t feel I have anything I need to prove to anybody but myself, and I certainly don’t cave into gossip that threatens the way I work.

One of the finest things about the Crown and Pearl bar is that it was built on drama and gossip. It was built because of the drama and hysteria of The Three Lions Pub, and me and Bailey learnt all our lessons from there to make sure we didn’t make the same mistakes again.

As the Crown approaches its first birthday, we’re confident that we have a solid foundation for the bar. It’s built on the lessons of the past, and the prospects of the future.. we do our best to make sure the ugliness that tainted the old hangout doesn’t contaminate the new, whilst working hard to make sure everyone is happy.. and it’s definately no easy feat! A lot of time and love goes into something like that, and mostly it takes skills of communication and listening - knowing what people want, adapting and accepting change is paramount. Perhaps more importantly is knowing when you’re wrong and taking steps to correct that.. people respect you when you can admit you made a bad call.

So it’s important to me to make sure that gossip is utilised properly.. not to use it to self-destruct and end up like Enron, but to build on it, learn from it and carry forward the lessons to create a Google.