"The only serious time off I had in that time was a six-month study break in the 1960s," he says. "So now I'm going to take three months to travel round the world." But before he left, he took time to look back on a rich and varied career.

"I've always been a nuts-and-bolts man," he says, "more interested in maintenance, service charges and especially the on-site people than in Landlord & Tenant." And that interest emerged at the very start of shopping centre development in the UK.

In the early 1960s he was taken on by a Winchester-based property company whose md happened to be Trevor Donaldson, senior partner of Donaldsons. In those days conflict of interest was a foreign concept to agents, and nobody looked askance at those who invested in their own right.

In 1964 Donaldson built the first open-air shopping precinct in the UK, the Fryern Arcade at Chandlers Ford in Hampshire. Cowper worked on the project and was fascinated. "I was intrigued by this idea of taking people off the streets," he remembers.

All the while he worked with Donaldson, Cowper was studying for his RICS qualifications by correspondence. In 1970 he qualified and Donaldson took him to one side. Cowper still remembers the conversation that was to change the path of his working life: "Trevor said to me: 'There's no polite way of saying this, but I don't think you'll ever make a great developer. But I do think you'll make a managing agent.'"

So within months he joined Donaldsons - the firm not the man - in the shopping centre management division working as number two to Rodney Whittaker. "In Whittaker Donaldsons had the top guy," Cowper remembers. "He was my mentor and I had an enormous amount of time for him. There really was nobody who contributed more to shopping centres in the 70s and 80s."

At that time and at least for the next decade Donaldsons was pre-eminent in UK shopping centre management, managing the whole of the Hammerson portfolio and pioneering shopping centre management as we know it today.

Cowper's first scheme was one of Hammerson's - the Liberty in Romford, east London. With the local authority's blessing the developer had been permitted to knock down a vast swathe of the town centre and replace it with 400,000 sq ft of shopping and two office towers above, and Cowper remembers it as absolutely typical of its time: "Unimaginative, functional, monolithic, inward facing, open to the elements, poorly lit, windblown and lifeless."

And the management approach was definitely old-school. "The centre manager was an ex-Regimental Sergeant Major, and he still wore a military-style uniform," Cowper remembers. "

Rough and ready approach

But then - before the big security contractors arrived on the scene - this rough and ready approach worked. "We didn't have the security problems then that we do now," Cowper says. "By and large the kid's weren't out to beat old ladies over the head: they just wanted a place for a sly fag and a place to be a bit naughty."

The anchor tenants like BHS and C&A were on 35-year leases, and the smaller tenants on 21-year leases, but in those pre-inflation days rent reviews only came round every seven years. "We had a service charge but it was pretty unsophisticated," Cowper remembers. "Management was just a matter of good old-fashioned housekeeping."

Cowper worked on other Hammerson schemes, including Victoria Square in Southend and Old George Mall in Salisbury. But in 1974 he first got involved with planning the management of Brent Cross. The scheme was the brainchild of Hammerson's founder Sydney Mason and Trevor Donaldson, who had spotted the potential of the former Hendon dog track and the adjoining Johnson's chemical works.

Brent Cross had already been almost 15 years in the making, during which time Mason and Donaldson made repeated visits to the US to study trends in mall design and operation. "Brent Cross was the first regional mall and it broke the mould," says Cowper. "It was covered, air-conditioned and built to an extended cruciform design to maximise footfall between the two main anchors.

"It was still inward-looking and relied almost totally on artificial light, but the lighting, features and finishes were exceptionally high quality and - previously unknown this side of the Atlantic - rest areas were carpeted and had mahogany seats and exotic planters."

Because it was operating in unknown territory Hammerson built a full-scale mock-up of the mall areas in the old chemical factory, and Cowper visited almost every week to comment on different finishes and services. "All they wanted to know was: 'will this work?'" he says. But despite all the preparation the Daily Telegraph still ran a story on opening day - probably by the late Bruce Kinloch - reading 'White Elephant Opens in Hendon.'

In management terms Brent Cross demanded a new approach in a number of ways. "From day one the service charge was into seven figures and big contracts for all major front- and back-of-house services were tendered and re-tendered," Cowper remembers.

"The centre manager - Michael Brown - was still ex-services, a former Colonel in the Royal Signals," Cowper says, "but he represented a new breed of centre manger along with Clive Kaye at Victoria Square Nottingham, Gordon Allanson at Eldon Square and Dick Greenwood at Queensgate, Peterborough. They were chosen as much for their business acumen as for their ability to deal with all sorts of people and manage the day-to-day crises commonplace in major shopping centres."

But for Cowper two particular innovations at Brent Cross stand out. The first was the imposition of a US-style tenants association, which retailers were required to join under the terms of their lease. "With the arrival of mixed-use schemes including retail, offices and leisure, and with more money spent on unquantifiable services like marketing and promotion, good landlord & tenant relations became essential," he says. "Donaldsons decided the way to do this was through a tenants association, adapting a North American model to suit."

Not that this was necessarily of benefit to the landlord. "It was driven by the big store groups, especially Roger Groom of Sears which had seven or eight units," Cowper remembers. "If there was an opportunity to make capital out of any of the service charge clauses, then he'd pounce on it.

"In the end we got the best results because he was a real thorn in our sides, but on reflection I don't think tenants associations work in this country. Managers don't get enough fees to spend the time on them that they demand."

And the second - and most significant - innovation was the weighted floor area method of apportioning service charges.

Another ground breaking project for Cowper was Hempstead Valley, the out-of-town scheme in Kent. Totally self-contained, it needed a catering element if it was to achieve the required dwell time and Cowper was sent to the US to research food courts. "The first food court in the UK was actually in Capital & Counties' Ridings centre in Wakefield in 1981," he says. "But the next two were in centres where Donaldsons was the consultant. The following year we opened both Hempstead Valley and the Waverley in Edinburgh."

But by the mid-1980s Cowper felt the time had come for a change. "I'd been managing Brent Cross for 10 years, I felt I was marking time and by then Hillier Parker had taken over Donaldsons' pre-eminence in shopping centre management."

A catalyst for change

Arlington Securities and London & Metropolitan, backed by Far Eastern money, were in the process of putting the Whiteleys development in London together, and they approached Cowper to set up the management systems. This was just the catalyst for change he had been looking for, and with his colleagues Laurence Antill and Denis Reeves he left to set up Antill Cowper Reeves.

It was then that one of those strange coincidences that mark any career came about: Whiteley's Universal Provider (slogan: 'Everything from a pin to an elephant') had been run by Cowper's grandfather. "He'd been a contemporary of Gordon Selfridge and a director of Selfridge's," Cowper explains. "When Selfridge bought Whiteleys in 1927 he put my grandfather in as managing director."

Whiteleys offered Cowper challenges he'd not encountered before, particularly planning the second floor as the biggest single-level food offer of any UK shopping centre. And its sheer complexity forced him to innovate again when it came to allocating the service charge. "It was apportioned on a weighted floor area principle, but with variations to allow for differences in size, use, opening hours and for the restaurants' rights to use outside seating," he says.

Equally, Whiteleys was the first UK centre to tie the shopfitting guide in as a condition of the lease. But once Whiteleys was open it was bought by Standard Life, who installed their own managing agents. "Three guys working out of 1,000 sq ft in South Ken were always going to find it tough up against Hillier Parker," Cowper concedes.

However the Arlington connection led Cowper onto two more schemes; an abortive attempt to redevelop County Hall on the South Bank, and Port Solent near Portsmouth, a mixed-use development.

Cowper admits the early 90s were not a comfortable time to be in business: "Denis, Laurence and I were together for ten years, but we struggled in the early 1990s. We were good surveyors but that period taught us it was about time we learned how to run a business."

In January 2005 the firm merged with the general practice giant GVA. Cowper had already taken a back seat as a consultant.

But he speaks with justifiable pride of the business he's grown and the techniques he developed: "The 70s and 80s were the time when we were breaking new ground. Since then the market's been refining what we learned then.

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