Was there ever such a saga as that of Capco and the Earls Court development? It’s been a litany of twists and turns over a whole decade. So much so, that the campaign has become the subject of a West End play, due to be debuted at the Royal Court Theatre next year.
And in all that time, the local residents of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates, the two council estates included in the overall Capco Earls Court masterplan (at 25 acres, with 760 homes, housing some 2,000 souls) have fiercely defended themselves from eviction, and protected their homes from demolition. It has been blood, toil, tears and sweat, by anyone’s reckoning. And, still, there’s no resolution.
Last year Capco decided it had had enough of this war of attrition. It decoupled Earls Court from its massively successful Covent Garden holding, and put Earls Court up for sale on the global markets. But just in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a lurch in a new direction.
Hot on the heels of a (surely most welcome) announcement that Delancey is in exclusive talks to purchase the Earls Court holding from Capco, in comes riveting news that Candy Ventures is “considering a bid” for the whole of Capco (both Earls Court and Covent Garden), and that it has put together a bidding consortium which includes the Public Investment Fund (PIF) backed by the Saudi Arabian government.
Shock and awe
Well! You just have to admire the sheer chutzpah of Nick Candy as he – once again – adopts a “go large or go home” approach to making his mark in the world of property. But the West Kensington and Gibbs Green communities are not to be outdone. They too will go large, before they go home. Over the weekend, in a splendid display of showmanship, the residents – backed by Andy Slaughter, their local MP – ostentatiously delivered a letter to the Saudi Embassy, addressed to His Royal Highness Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud, crown prince and deputy prime minister of Saudi Arabia, chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, and chairman of the Public Investment Fund.
As a result of this, the Saudi Arabian ambassador, His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud, has offered to meet with the residents to discuss their case. You’d like to be a fly on the wall.
These residents have bags of style. And it has to be said that the community has consistently played a canny game during the 10-year campaign. They’ve made a lot of friends. Significantly, they’ve enlisted the support of a number of progressive housebuilders in London (all the big names that EG readers could think of, really) against a backdrop of a general political consensus, which started to emerge over the last couple of years with more of a presumption in favour of existing communities. This was first articulated in 2016 by Lord Heseltine in his “nothing will be imposed, communities will propose” speech for the government’s estates regeneration initiative.
There is an increasing understanding that you cannot just raze perfectly functioning council estates, housing settled communities, solely because the land value is high. This argument was already beginning to find more and more traction, but of course the real sea change came in response to the Grenfell disaster in June 2017, which led to an irrevocable change of heart. So much so that, at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference this year, a leading councillor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea urged that the Lancaster West estate (which includes the Grenfell Tower) should be transferred from RBK&C to community ownership forthwith. And, further, that community ownership should become a central plank of Conservative party policy, given that people “with skin in the game” should be in charge.
Back to Earls Court. Despite its entertaining moments, it remains a sad and sorry tale. There are further complications with the TfL land holding. And things are now at something of an impasse. In the world of London politics 2019, the extant permission for the redevelopment of Earls Court including the estates is unimplementable. And neither the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, nor the mayor of London, will grant new permissions for any development which includes the estates.
There is simply no other solution than to take the two estates out of the masterplan.
The gold star goes to the able regeneration team at Avison Young, which has advised the local authority thus, in most authoritative terms. I would urge that whoever prevails in buying out Earls Court should work in partnership with the community to overcome the biggest challenge that this site faces: help the residents put the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates into community ownership. Quickly now. And move along.
Jackie Sadek is chief operating officer at UK Regeneration.
