Looks like the other shoe in Paddington is set to drop, albeit slowly. The semi-marooned Paddington Basin development lies across the canal from the vast and crumbling St Mary’s Hospital; which lies next door to Irvine Sellar’s Ice Cube; which lies right next door to Paddington Station. Three times since 1991 the NHS has put forward plans to redevelop the ancient hospital, which straggles over 10-12 acres of land fronting Praed Street. Those with an eye for the long-term might start looking for bargains, before Sellar buys up the street. Why?
Proposals for phase one of the £500m scheme were unveiled earlier this month. An eight-storey clinical block on Praed Street is to be built a couple of hundred yards up from Sellar’s Cube. Planning decisions on both are expected from Westminster Council by Christmas. Who is going to pay for the wards? Why Irvine, of course. The Imperial College NHS Trust rather hopes Sellar will buy some land between the Cube and its new block. “We are in discussions with the Sellar Group,” they say. Sellar isn’t saying anything yet. But the thought of the NHS besting him in a deal raises a smile.
Going Native
To the west London marketing suite for Holland Park Villas, 72 to-die-for apartments being built by Native Land next to said park. Purpose of visit? To look at the model with Native’s boss, Alasdair Nicholls. Then to lunch at the to-die-for Clarke’s restaurant on Kensington Church Street to glean information on what’s going on at the top end of his market.
First, what’s happening at Native Land? Half the Holland Park flats are sold, at an average price of £3,600 per sq ft. Work finishes next spring. If you fancy a 20m pool in the basement, sales have recently slowed. One a month now, if lucky. At Burlington Gate, in the West End, 37 out of the 42 units have sold for an average of £4,200 per sq ft. Completion is mid-2017.
What of the rest of the London market? JLL says it has all but collapsed (see below). Gossip at the JLL presentation had it that deluxe schemes in London are all struggling. Nicholls nodded, but said little. What he would say is this: “Those with fairly priced, correctly executed products are doing well.” Does that mean there is a lot of over-priced pool-free tat out there?” I asked, to no avail.
Trumpety-trump
Up there with Donald Trump’s hallucinatory belief that building a wall along the Mexican border will solve America’s immigration crisis, is a delusion among British politicians, sane and insane, that “Britain’s housing crisis” can be resolved by tearing down barriers to construction.
This week, chancellor Philip Hammond went so far as to put “solving the housing crisis” above cutting the deficit. Why? Like the Mexican wall, it plays to the crowd. No sane capitalist believes builders build on orders from the state. They build on orders from buyers. Orders are falling in London.
The figures are apocalyptic, even allowing for Brexit-warping. Starts were down by 58% between H2 2015 and H1 2016, according to JLL (see 24 September, p47). The number of new planning applications in Q2 2016 has “dropped like a stone”, down by 54% from the quarterly average over three years, says the agent.
Blond or blonde?
Look forward to Wednesday 9 November. Imagine Donald Trump has won the US presidency. Imagine the reaction of global markets. The wise will surely be delaying vital decisions, as they did pre-Brexit vote. Expect things to go quiet for a month. Don’t panic, unless blond trumps blonde.
Fish pie in Sky City
Update on progress of the world’s tallest building, Sky City in southern China. The 2,749 ft-tall prefab tower was to be built in 90 days, said Zhang Yue of Broad Group in 2012 – to scornful disbelief. Chairman Yue attended a Council for Tall Buildings conference in London in June 2013 and repeated his crazy promise, saying work was about to start. Well, the foundations got dug. They filled with water and are now being used as a fish farm.
