AFTER two decades of false starts, the future of King’s Cross, one of central London’s biggest development projects, now rests in the hands of Heather Johnson, a 54-year-old woman from Kilburn who works with the homeless.
As chairman of Camden council’s development control sub-committee, Johnson, together with 15 other councillors, is due on March 8 and 9 to debate a £2 billion proposal for the redevelopment of a 67-acre stretch of land just behind King’s Cross and St Pancras stations.
The highly ambitious project will lead to the creation of housing, office space, leisure facilities, shops and schools — the list of new streets and venues is endless. The property developer Argent is in charge of it.
As well as a plethora of new buildings and open parks and squares, the project will aim to preserve many of the historic railway structures that dominate the area.
Despite having spent the past six years working and shaping the project, Argent’s chief executive Roger Madelin has absolutely no idea how warmly or otherwise Johnson and her colleagues are feeling about his plans.
“I haven’t got a clue,” shrugged Madelin. “There are 16 councillors on the committee. I’ve never met them. I’ve never had a conversation with them.
“I have never come across a situation before where there has been a complete and utter separation from us and the people who are going to make the decision. That’s the way Camden wanted it to be and that’s fine by me.”
That said, by the time the debate happens, in just under a fortnight, the committee will have seen a 600-page report prepared by another branch of the council that endorses the redevelopment.
But it is far from certain what sort of bearing this will have — if any — on whether they give consent for the outline planning application.
Even if Argent’s plans get the thumbs up, when it comes to the voting it will only mean that the developer has passed another staging post en route to its goal of redeveloping and regenerating this vast tract of old railway wasteland owned by London & Continental Railways (LCR) and Deutsche Post. The mayor of London must give his approval, and only then can work begin on getting detailed approval.
If there are no hitches — in planning permission or elsewhere — the occupants of the first houses and offices that make up Phase One will be free to take possession in 2010. Phase Two is due for completion in time for the 2012 Olympic Games. Work will have to proceed quickly on a project that has already taken six years in its current incarnation.
OVER the years, there have been several attempts to improve the land behind King’s Cross, which had become synonymous with prostitution, drug-taking and crime. Many developers have seen the potential to regenerate the area. Argent is the closest anybody has come to succeeding.
Perhaps the most high-profile project was that conceived by Rosehaugh Stanhope, the joint company of property tycoons Godfrey Bradman and Sir Stuart Lipton.
In 1988, their consortium was awarded the right to develop the land by the old British Rail. Sir Norman Foster designed a scheme, the centrepiece of which would have been two new skyscrapers. But the plan was later withdrawn, partly as a result of the recession in the early 1990s, and partly because of problems thrown up by the construction of the Channel tunnel rail link.
Other proposals since then have been largely community-driven but again have foundered because of transport issues. It is estimated that over the years, more than £50m has been spent on the various plans.
Tony Travers, an expert on local government at the London School of Economics, believes it is vital that something happens to the land. He described the project as “crucial”, particularly in terms of how we want to use land in Britain.
“The model we’ve evolved in Britain means the population will continue to grow but we are going to try to preserve as much greenfield land as we can,” he said. “That means there’s a great premium on brownfield sites. We have to take sites like [King’s Cross] and develop them intensively. King’s Cross is unusual by virtue of its size and location on the edge of central London.”
The Argent proposals have, inevitably, gone through a huge number of revisions, a tribute to the 9,500 people Madelin and his team have met over the past few years, all of them with vested interests or ideas about what should be incorporated into the scheme. The scale of the development has taken its toll. Madelin told one interviewer recently: “When we were selected as developer for this, I had hair, I wasn’t married, I had no children, I had a father, two brothers and a sister. I now have no hair, I’m married, I have two children, I’ve lost my father, I’ve lost a brother and we still haven’t got planning permission.”
In part, this is because not everyone has greeted the plans with euphoria. Rupert Perry, of the King’s Cross conservation area advisory committee (KCCAAC), is especially concerned that a number of “heritage buildings” between the station and the Regent’s Canal will be destroyed in the redevelopment and thinks that more could be done to preserve them.
“It’s a missed opportunity,” he said, while a report prepared by the KCCAAC brands the Argent plans as offering “a greatly over-scaled and mediocre environment, indistinguishable from large developments elsewhere”.
Madelin has little time for the arguments. He said: “They can’t be more passionate than me about retaining the heritage here and they can’t dismiss the views of English Heritage and the Victorian Society, who we have been working with. (Those organisations) have dismissed out of hand the proposals the KCCAAC have put forward in a detailed and articulate way. It’s not an option that works.”
It is clear from even a cursory look at the plans that a lot of thought has gone into the heritage aspects of the proposals. One of the more striking features of the planned development is new flats built into the old gasworks structures, which are going to have to be painstakingly restored. It is not enough for the KCCAAC, however, which continues to argue that the heritage value of the site will be “severely compromised and damaged”.
The other main criticism the site has attracted is that there is a preponderance of office buildings. Madelin is dismissive of this, saying that there is a shortage of commercial space in central London.
ARGENT has ploughed several millions into getting the project this far, something that has been made easier by the fact that it is owned by the British Telecom Pension Fund, which originally bought the business for its property portfolio. As a private company, it can afford to take the longer-term view needed for a project of this size and complexity.
At the moment, Argent is simply the developer appointed by the landowners. If the full planning permission for the first phase is granted then, after a valuation exercise, Argent has the right to acquire the site, while the current owners have the right to sell a 50% interest.
Madelin said Argent was in a position to undertake the first two phases of the King’s Cross redevelopment, but hoped other investors would eventually be tempted in. In particular, he hoped to go one better than was achieved at the group’s Brindley Place development in Birmingham, where members of the public raised £50m to invest in the property.
“We don’t want to dilute our holding too quickly,” he said. “We are determined to hang in there, ideally all the way to the end. But I hope that thousands of Londoners will buy into this, through Reits (real- estate investment trusts, a tax-efficient property investment vehicle that is being created by the government). That is the kind of thing we did at Brindley Square, albeit without Reits.”
If the proposition is going to appeal to retail investors, then it had better work. Graham Morrison, of joint masterplanner Allies and Morrison, a firm of architects, said that the lessons from King’s Cross were already being used in its latest project — the development of Lea Valley for the 2012 Olympics. In particular, the biggest challenge in King’s Cross has been to avoid it seeming like a gated community or business park, separate from the rest of north and central London.
“It’s easy to design something like a business park,” said Morrison. “It’s harder to do a job where you can walk across the site and it still feels like you are in part of London.”
For Madelin, the most unpalatable thought is what happens if Camden votes against the proposals. “Well, I won’t lose my job,” he said. “If it doesn’t get passed at this stage, I am extremely confident that we would win at a public inquiry.
“We comply with local and national planning policy. And we have the backing of the likes of English Heritage. It would mean a two to three-year delay and would cost us several million in lawyers’ fees. We would get there — not because I’m arrogant but because we meet all the policy objectives.”
Despite the confidence, Madelin will be hoping it won’t come to that.
The rapidly changing face of London
THE regeneration of King’s Cross is just one of a number of big redevelopments taking place in London. Among the more high-profile developments are:
Olympic Development and Lower Lea Valley
At 840 acres, this huge development in east London incorporates the building of Stratford City, as well as a new Olympic Village and the regeneration of the lower Lea Valley. Stratford City will create up to 34,000 jobs and is being developed by a consortium including Stanhope. The site will initially be used as the home for the Olympic Village
Elephant & Castle
Demolition of Elephant & Castle shopping centre and 1,200 council homes, to be replaced with 5,300 new homes, a showcase retail development, offices, and a new Tube station. The developer is yet to be chosen. The 170-acre scheme is due to be finished in 2014
White City
The new shopping centre will be the largest in Greater London and its train station will double in size. The developer of the 1.5m sq ft complex is Westfield. It is due to be completed in the first half of 2008
Battersea Power Station
This £1.5 billion project to turn the old power station into an arts and exhibition venue with a hotel on the roof is being undertaken by Parkview and Arup. The site covers 38 acres
Arsenal
A new 60,000-seat stadium in Islington, with the existing stadium converted into apartments. The contractor for the 7.8 acre project is Sir Robert McAlpine. Arsenal football club is to move next season, with the whole development finished by 2010
