Celebrating London and Paris, past and future

We are now in the Bicentenary year for the Residence – 200 years ago, the Duke of Wellington bought this house from Pauline, the sister of Napoléon. To celebrate that, we are running a series of events through the year, highlighting both the past and the future of UK-French relations.

Written version (continued)

Shortly, we are doing an event here on London and Paris, two fantastic dynamic world cities. Different, linked, both enormously attractive, both with rich pasts, both also transforming themselves for the future. In London, the Olympic park has brought new dynamism to the East.  Paris also has very ambitious projects, like “le Grand Paris” for example.

So for this event, we are having 3 speakers who can come and reflect both on the past and on how these cities are changing: we have Professor Andrew Hussey, who is the Dean of the University of London in Paris, Dr Tony Travers, who is the principal of the London School of Economics, and Mr Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, who is the Head of France Culture.

Eminent speakers – who are going to have a very lively debate, which we will record and put up on our social networking sites. And we are already offering you the chance to post questions or make comments ahead of this event that can be relayed into it (please use #BE200 to post your questions on Facebook and Twitter).

I also want to urge you to keep an eye on our social media for our #BritsInFrance campaign, which is encouraging British people all around France, doing interesting, unexpected things that contribute to UK-French relations. There are some really fascinating stories already online, more being added each week, it’s worth a look.

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Event moderated by Mathieu Lefevre, Executive director, New Cities Foundation, organised by the British Embassy in Paris, in partnership with Eurostar.