8 things King’s Cross gets right about customer experience: Reflections from our Experience Makers study tour
September 25, 2026
There are many neighbourhoods I love in London, but the King’s Cross estate is up there as one of my favourites. Location counts for a lot because I live in Hertfordshire and the Thameslink gets me there in about 20 minutes.
But there is something else about King’s Cross - it makes me nostalgic for my time at university. I did my undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts with an extraordinarily beautiful campus - designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park in New York. Our campus regularly appears on lists of America’s most beautiful. But it's also that I love the buzz, and the sense that I could bump into someone I know or stumble across something interesting without having planned to.
Obviously, a mixed-use development in central London is not a university campus. But I think there is something interesting in the comparison. Both are ultimately trying to create more than a collection of buildings.
Back in May, Experience Makers heard from Henry Shearer about customer experience at King’s Cross.
It was a fascinating conversation, but there is only so much that can be understood about a place from a panel. What better way to follow it up than to actually take everyone there to see it?
So yesterday we brought our network, the Experience Makers to King’s Cross for a study tour to look behind the scenes and understand what makes it work. The tour was led by Ross McCall , Chief Operating Officer at the King's Cross Group and Katie Lythgo , Head of Estate, Retail and Events Engagement. We wrapped it up with a networking event at Electric Shuffle.
Want to see more photos? Visit our Experience Makers Galllery to see the full archive from our King’s Cross study tour.
The tour was an excellent case study in real estate customer experience done well.
For those who missed, there are many lessons to be taken from it, which are all things I emphasize with our clients in the work we do advising and training owners and operators in customer experience at RealService . If you have worked with me, none of these should come as new or surprises, but it was a great illustration.
I've written down the 8 things about what the team at KX gets right about real estate customer experience.
1. They have created one team, even when they don’t work for one company
750+ people work across the King’s Cross estate through different service partners. The customer, of course, doesn’t care who employs them. King’s Cross has deliberately worked to create a one-team culture, developing values together and training people across the estate.
I was walking around King’s Cross a few weeks ago when a friendly security guard stopped me to let me know that my backpack was unzipped. He zipped it up for me and sent me on my merry way. It was a tiny interaction, but those tiny interactions are when you know the whole team understands great customer experience.
2. They have a great activation programme
For a few weeks this summer, every time I logged into instagram I got a targeted ad to “Come visit Kings Cross”, showing everything that was on. I’ve walked past people doing yoga beside the canal. There are markets, installations, and all sorts of things happening across the estate.
There’s also the layer you don’t see as a casual visitor - KX has a B2B engagement programme for the commercial occupiers which includes networking and events. For a business choosing where to locate, the proposition isn’t simply the four walls of the office, but the surrounding ecosystem.
3. They resist the temptation to monetise every square metre
There is enormous commercial pressure in real estate to make every bit of space “work harder”. Take Granary Square - incredibly valuable real estate, but King’s Cross turns down most requests to commercialise the space.
The value of a public space sometimes comes from allowing it simply to be where people can sit without buying anything, or children can run through the fountains - during the heatwave it was incredible how much kids enjoyed those fountains. The public realm at King’s Cross works because it genuinely feels public.
4. They build their strategy around actual customer insight
King’s Cross has a proper customer insight programme. They listen to the people who use the estate, understand what is and isn’t working and use that information to shape strategy. A good CX programme should never really be finished. You listen, change something, measure what happened, learn and go again.
There is still a surprising amount of customer experience strategy in real estate based on what a relatively small group of people think customers want. Listening systematically gives you evidence. It also gives you permission to stop doing things customers don’t value and concentrate resources on the things they do.
5. They cater to all their different customer groups
I love this, because I spend a lot of time defining customer archetypes with our clients. Each strand of the CX strategy at Kings Cross is tailored to the actual group. A resident wants something different from an office occupier. Someone visiting for dinner wants something different from somebody who comes to work there five days a week.
And then there is the existing local community. There has been a deliberate effort to engage with the surrounding community and make sure that people continue to feel that King’s Cross belongs to them too.
6. Because customer experience matters, they resource it accordingly
One of my recurring frustrations with CX is organisations saying that customer experience is strategically important and then treating it as something somebody can do on the side of their actual job. King’s Cross puts its money where its mouth is.
There is a dedicated team responsible for engagement and experience across the estate, including neighborhood managers and a customer experience team.
7. They treat the spaces between the buildings as part of the product
A lot of the King’s Cross experience happens outside the buildings. Theres gorgeous landscaping and planting, fountains, the canal and seating. Walking from one part of it to another can actually be enjoyable.
It’s the benefit of managing an entire mixed-use neighborhood, you take ownership of the customer journey from end to end.
8. Finally, they aren’t afraid to experiment, and admit when something doesn’t work
I loved that Ross gave us examples of things they had tried that, with hindsight, they might have done differently. That is much more useful on a study tour than pretending everything has been an uninterrupted sequence of brilliant decisions.
Places are complicated. Human behaviour is even more complicated. You can research something, plan it carefully and still discover that people use it completely differently from how you imagined. I’d rather hear that than a sanitised case study any day.
There were many other things the team talked about - like their decarbonisation strategy and the history and future plans for the estate. This isn't exhaustive, just what stood out most to me as most relevant to our group of CX practitioners. Let me know what your favourite part of the tour was.
A huge thank you to our hosts and sponsors
Thank you to The King's Cross Group for taking us behind the scenes. In particular, I'd like to thank Siobhan Jared , Ross McCall , Katie Lythgo , and Catherine Brennan.
Thanks to the everyone who joined us: Adam Buckley Adrian K. Ally Barker Andrew Mercer Caitlin Warfield Guy Windsor-Lewis Harry Chamberlayne Hayley Atkinson Helen Barnett Huanita Wallace Ian Scott James Borg James Morris Lachlan Ezzy Lauren Buck Lindy N. Howard Lorna Pepper MRICS IMC Michelle Laramy Monika Newton Rajeev Rajput Rossy Shateva Sam Logan Samantha Jade (Saff) Williams Sara Champness Suzanne Young Tenika Young MRICS Victoria Collett
Thanks also to the event team at Experience Makers and RealService who make these events what they are: Ashtley R Gondo Lia Xinyu Zhang Louise Freethy Howard Morgan and Liam Jacobs
Want to join a future Experience Makers event?
Next up, we’re heading to EXPO REAL in Munich, followed by two study tours in November - first at the Eden Building in Manchester then at Bluewater in Kent. You can read all about our upcoming events here.
If you're reading this and wish you were there, consider joining us. Experience Makers brings together people working across real estate to share what is actually working in customer experience. Our membership options ranging from free Bronze membership through to Corporate Gold. Along the way you'll be invited to regular lunches, study tours, research partnerships and conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate customer experience. Learn more here.
About RealService
RealService is a specialist customer experience consultancy for the built environment. We work with real estate owners, developers and operators to understand and improve how their assets perform in practice. RealService maintains the RealService Customer Experience Index, an independent cross-sector CX benchmark for European real estate, built from more than 60,000 customer interviews conducted across office, retail, industrial, mixed-use and residential assets over the past 27 years.
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