Mr Heatherwick's future projects include the world's first all-glass bridge, and a public square in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which will take the dramatic and humorous appearance of a gigantic, electric-blue carpet landing, as it were, from outer space.
Newcastle's arching TyneBridge, Liverpool's modernist Philharmonic Hall and the classical rotunda of Manchester's central library, which held 300 readers in what was then the country's biggest reading room outside the British Library in London, were all products of the civic and, in some cases, philanthropic determination of local leaders.