We at EG have long been aware of the appeal of Capital & Centric co-founder Tim Heatley, who claimed our Social Impact Award at last year’s EG Awards. But now he’s about to go mainstream, as one of the stars of the BBC’s new four-part documentary Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom.
The questionable wordplay of the title aside (we’re guessing they’re riffing on utopia, not dystopia), it’s going to be a great watch, judging by the first episode – in no small part thanks to Heatley. As the episode one description puts it, “Local millionaire Tim redevelops Manchester’s red-light district into a fashionable new residential quarter.” And, in his first couple of minutes on screen alone, we get Bentleys and b***jobs – his disparaging opinion on the former, and a local, ahem, entrepreneur’s price list for the latter, on display as Heatley explores C&C’s Piccadilly East development site.
Whether he’s meeting squatters in one of his buildings, discussing his work with the “A Bed Every Night” project combating homelessness in Manchester, or crunching the impressive numbers on C&C’s extensive regeneration scheme (1,000 apartments under construction, total value £450m), Heatley’s a natural in front of the cameras – Coronation Street producers, take note. Although he tells Diary he has other ambitions: “I’ve got my eye on Homes Under the Hammer.”
In reality, he plans to stick to the day job, and hopes that, as well as showing other towns and cities what C&C can offer, he succeeds in telling “the alternative story that needs to be told about property development and the benefits it can bring”, without having what he calls “a Gerald Ratner moment”.
Heatley, who gave the film crews full access for more than a year, which included being miked up at MIPIM, adds: “I’m looking forward to hearing what I’ve said! I do tend to speak my mind. There’s definitely things that I’ll regret, but hopefully people won’t hang me out to dry.”
The first episode aired on BBC Two on Tuesday night, and is available on iPlayer – but, sadly, the local lockdown in Greater Manchester precluded a watch party at the Heatley household. “It’ll just be me and the missus,” he told us in advance, “and probably not the kids – they’re a bit young. We’ll get the popcorn out – and a cushion I can hide behind.”
Titter ye not
Apologies, by the way, for the b-word in the above. We know this is not what you have come to expect from a refined, family-friendly page like Diary. But, since we’ve already let you down… Our friends at Sellhousefast have had their minds in the gutters of roads up and down the country, looking, for whatever reason, at the impact of rude street names on property values.
Like schoolchildren using a French dictionary for the first time, they used an online thesaurus to gather a list of 150 naughty words to search for, then examined hundreds of thoroughfares across the UK. And they have concluded that the presence of a smutty sign where you live adds an average of £44,460 to the value of your home. Presumably the legacy of all those Carry On films, the Brits, it seems, love a bit of innuendo down their end-o.
Disappointingly, the biggest moneyspinner (adding almost £900,000) isn’t that rude here, though US readers may feel differently about Jackass Lane. Meanwhile, Hoe Lane (more than £200,000) is surely just a big hit with gardeners. But Diary has no other explanations for the pecuniary advantages of the following words in street names: Cock, Thong, Bottom, Dick, Slag, Butt, Spank and Bell End (now there’s a law firm). Clearly, housebuyers are all just puerile.
They must be avenue on
Diary can only admire the creativity of estate agents when it comes to property descriptions. They’ve got space to fill, and need to try everything to make it appealing without being repetitive. In the quiet days of August, with little going on, Diary can sympathise. So let us doff our caps to whoever at Munday’s London wrote, of a near-£1.5m home on Choumert Road, SE15: “Locally, it’s known as the Champs-Élysées of Peckham!”
For all his mangled French, we don’t recall Del Boy ever likening his local neighbourhood to the famous Parisian avenue. This is surely the crème de la menthe of estate agent-speak.
Bridge over coloured water
The kids are almost back at school, but if you need one last task to keep them busy – or fancy some restful arts and crafts yourself – here’s a nice treat from the team at Illuminated River, the initiative to light up central London’s 14 bridges. Head to https://illuminatedriver.london and you can download sketches of the bridges to colour in. Maybe you could add some pedestrians too – masked and socially distanced, of course. Although in their current, desolate form the images look very 2020.
