Timing hasn’t always been on Jacob Loftus’s side. Resolution Property’s former head of UK Investment set up his own business, General Projects, in the same week the UK voted to leave the EU. Nearly four years on he was granted planning for Storybox, a 1.5-acre bunker in Vauxhall and one of the company’s most ambitious schemes yet, three weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic forced the UK into lockdown.
“For about 24 hours after the Brexit result came in, I was thinking to myself ‘has this been a terrible idea? Leaving my job and setting up on my own at a time like this?’ And I concluded that, yes, maybe it was. But I also thought that if there is one thing I know it is that in times of great uncertainty, opportunity tends to arise, so I just got on with it.”
Get on with it he did. Three years and seven team members later, General Projects has grown into one of London’s most innovative boutique developers with a 500,000 sq ft portfolio spanning five active projects. This isn’t just any old portfolio either. Loftus has built up the firm’s reputation as a trailblazer by focusing on unique projects from the Storybox basement, allegedly a former MI5 bunker, to Expressway – a 117,000 sq ft co-working space sitting directly underneath the Silvertown flyover in the Royal Docks.
With planning granted for the former at the start of March, 2020 was showing all the signs of being one of General Projects’ most exciting years yet. Then the world was turned upside down. But all is not lost. As the current global crisis forces businesses and workforces around the world into lockdown Loftus is hopeful that, in this time of great uncertainty, innovation and creativity will prevail once more. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
Designing for the end user
“Looking back three and a bit years ago, I was less nervous about the impact of Brexit than I am about coronavirus,” says Loftus. “Brexit felt like it would be for a finite amount of time, even if things went really wrong. Ultimately, we knew that the economic fallout would be resolved, for the most part anyway, by the UK and the EU as both had a vested interest in protecting their own economies. It came down to two fairly rational parties to make a smart decision to limit the damage.
“What we are dealing with now is in no one’s control and no one can determine how bad things are going to get or how long it might go on for. It’s a scary time but the optimist in me is very much hoping that once the crisis resolves itself and we start to move back to normality, it won’t be too long before a fair amount of the economy goes back to normal too.”
In the interim, while conversations around bringing in the right occupier for Storybox have quietened down, the concept and unique approach to development remains. When Loftus secured planning for it, he did so with no fixed idea of what to do with the space or what sort of tenant he was trying to attract. In a bold shake-up of the traditional approach to planning consent and development, he did not design or market the 56,000 sq ft basement under a specific asset class. “Flexibility is the key,” he says. “We have designed the space to accommodate any and all needs.”
The Storybox bunker is located underneath Mount Anvil’s 37-storey Keybridge House residential tower and was acquired by General Projects and British Airways Pension Fund in early 2019, along with 40,000 sq ft of ground-floor space. The tagline “‘an underworld of possibilities” captures the broad, open approach that Loftus has taken in terms of possible end use in a move that, while brave, makes perfect sense in a world where flexibility has never been more valuable.
As everything from lease lengths to workspace become increasingly adaptable to end-user demands, Loftus’s decision to build flexibility into this project from planning stage is arguably the next logical step in forward-thinking development. Why prescriptively shoehorn someone into a space that has to be designed to fit around that occupier’s specific needs when you can be smart and design something that is adaptable enough to suit a number of potential tenants?
General Projects has floated several ideas, including using the space as a life sciences laboratory or an underground gaming experience, but the ultimate end use is still undecided.
“We are not 100% sure what will happen with the space or who we will partner with,” says Loftus. “Instead we have worked to enhance the basement so it can cater for the most extreme possible occupancy uses, which hopefully means it will be resilient enough for every possible permutation.”
This approach does not come without its challenges, of course. Loftus concedes that marketing a space with no fixed “story” is not easy and that plenty of vision is required to imagine what the bunker could look like when occupied, given there is no way of mocking up a final look without a tenant in mind.
Usually, he says, there is a firm idea of what needs to be marketed when it comes to attracting tenants into a space but in this instance, at this early stage, General Projects is effectively selling raw potential.
“Rather than try to communicate a finished product, we are trying to communicate an opportunity for a potential occupier by applying for a highly flexible planning consent,” he says.
Loftus adds that designing a space that will effectively suit everyone is also a challenge. “We have worked out what sort of occupation would result in the most intense use of people and have planned for that,” he says. “We worked out who could be the most power and electricity-hungry and designed for that.”
An opportunity for social impact
It is this kind of innovative thought that should stand General Projects in good stead for the coming months and years. If the commentators and experts are right, occupiers and tenants will emerge from the current crisis with a renewed focus on what’s important and what they really want. Offering space that can be adapted to accommodate these requirements, rather than create barriers, will be no bad thing.
Loftus points out that there are some key areas, including sustainability and social impact, where occupiers were becoming particularly demanding before the pandemic. This, he says, is to be celebrated and is something he has tried to address in as typically innovative a way as possible.
On his Clerkenwell scheme, Technique, it went beyond the three-storey extension made entirely from cross-laminated timber. “We spent quite a lot of time looking at brick manufacturers,” he says. “We came across an interesting company in Amsterdam that takes waste out of the landfill, crushes it and uses it to create these really pretty handmade bricks. They are 65% made up of landfill waste and that sounded like a much more interesting and socially conscious choice to us than standard brick so most of the building will be made from them. It will look really quite beautiful.”
General Projects is also working with the London Borough of Southwark to redevelop Walworth Town Hall, which has been left derelict since a fire in 2013, into a new community space. “A big chunk of the ground floor is being repurposed into a new community hub that we are giving back to the local people for free,” he says. “We’re working on an innovative new model whereby 15 or 20 local community groups will be given the space for a day, a week, a month to hold everything from local heritage festivals to painting classes for elderly people to theatre shows for younger children.
“I think for a lot of developers, the public consultation process around projects is a slightly infuriating and frustrating process to go through. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that we occasionally share those frustrations. But with Walworth we felt that striking the balance between making the project commercially viable and doing something positive for the local community was really important.
“The situation we are all currently in has forced us as a society to acknowledge our collective mortality. It has forced everyone to slow down and be more thoughtful about our neighbours and the communities we live in. Hopefully, this will be a catalyst for people, and the wider real estate sector, to care more for others as part of their daily lives.”
To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@egi.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @estatesgazette
