Bloomberg builds empire in London; Bloomberg Place = one city block [View all]

[HiPointDem]

It is the biggest development in this city’s buzzing financial district, and even Olympics-jaded Londoners call it grandiose: two bronze-and-stone towers, connected by sky-bridges atop the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Roman temple.

Bloomberg Place, roughly the size of a Manhattan city block, is the future European home of Michael R. Bloomberg’s company and charity. But it is only one piece of the New York City mayor’s growing British empire. He is underwriting a major expansion of one of England’s most prestigious galleries, in Kensington Gardens, designed by the noted architect Zaha Hadid.

He has the ear of London’s raffish mayor, Boris Johnson, who dispatches aides to City Hall in New York for tutelage in municipal management.

Mayor Bloomberg and his aides court the city’s elite, holding expensive dinners for tastemakers and Downing Street officials. The buzz is so great that a chief aide to Prime Minister David Cameron impishly floated the idea of a Bloomberg candidacy, for mayor of London.

As he imagines a more global life for himself after City Hall, unshackled from the 24/7 needs of running New York, Mr. Bloomberg — an Anglophile with a taste for English Regency style — is exporting his vast quantities of financial, social and political capital to this ancient city, where he has long yearned for influence.

“There is no question,” Ms. Peyton-Jones said, “he’s among the most important supporters of contemporary culture in this country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/nyregion/bloomberg-builds-an-empire-in-london.html?pagewanted=all