The EG Interview: Richard Upton is headed back to the front line

Richard Upton doesn’t talk about ESG, about CSR, about social value or any of the words we hear trickle off the tongues of so many real estate marketeers. To use his word, he thinks most of it is “bullshit”. For Upton, what matters is belonging and actually being bothered about what you do. Focus on that and the rest just happens. It has been 12 months since U+I, the developer run by Upton, was bought by listed REIT Landsec. The acquisition effectively saved U+I, a creative developer that had too little resources to deliver what it wanted. With Landsec’s balance sheet, that should change. Upton – along with many of the U+I team – moved across to Landsec as part of the deal, but has been working in a consultative role, giving (officially) three days a month to the group. For him, the change has been the gift of time back. Time to get back to what really makes him tick. And he has been filling it well. This week he launched a new brand – called Are You? – which will allow him to get back to the front line of placemaking. When EG sits down with Upton, he is fresh back from a small project in France where he has been “smashing up an old building and making places with a bunch of misfits” that have “more tattoos than tools in their toolbox”. He has been in his happy place, with a poet and a sculptor – a bunch of creatives – trying to make something beautiful. To him, that is what development, regeneration and placemaking are about. Spiritual regeneration Outside of co-founding Mount Anvil, creating Cathedral Group and spinning that into U+I with Development Securities, Upton has always had some personal passion projects. These allow him to bring his love of heritage, history and art together to make places better. And with the “huge privilege” of having more time to think now he is freed up from the corporate life of being a chief executive, he is getting back to the front line of purposeful regeneration with a handful of projects that he hopes will inspire others to do more. “I want to make something better. I want to create a spatial environment which engages people and makes a difference,” says Upton. “The dictionary definition of regenerate is to make something better physically and spiritually. And I think the most compelling part of that is spiritually. “The physical bit is pretty straightforward. If you have brilliant people around you can do it. But the spirit – how I feel in a place – is really important. And, with the benefit of perspective, that obviously drives me more than I expected.” That spiritual enhancement Upton talks about is belonging. For him, a place is only really a place when it feels like a place we belong – where all of us belong. That is what he wants the wider development community to understand. When you talk to him about the projects he is undertaking under his new Are You? brand (you will get the clever pun if you think about it for a bit) it does not sound like it should be that difficult. Different maybe, but not so difficult. “We need to build a road from the greedy to the worthy,” says Upton. “You need to show how one monetises, in a free market, the benefit of great places. You need to show that at a very simple level, it’s a value add.” He uses U+I’s Circus Street project in Brighton as a prime example. Here were a couple of semi-derelict sites, costing the council £500,000 a year. They have now been transformed into a mixed-use development that delivers £44m of net economic value a year. He has his own project ongoing in the East Sussex city too. Moulescoomb Place, a site he had agreed – not contractually but via a handshake – to buy while chief executive of U+I. The circa £140m project proved too small for Landsec but Upton says an agreement is an agreement whether it has been through the lawyers or not, so he took the project on personally. Plans by Studio Egret West to restore the Grade II listed manor house Tithe Barn, replace the existing student halls on the site and create a “sustainable, lively and more accessible place which brings benefit to the local community and wider city” will be submitted before the end of the year, with an anticipation of work on site beginning in H1 2023. What Upton loves most about taking on the project is his ability to get out of the boardroom and back to walking the streets, having tea with the locals, listening and learning. “In the past 10 or 15 years I haven’t done that,” he says. “I’ve done it a bit but I grew £2bn in Cathedral to £11bn of GDV in U+I, which is all very purposeful, but also very intense. The team got bigger and the shareholders got more disparate and serious. “I got distant from seeing the front line of people’s issues and seeing how I might listen to that and craft something with a team that responds to that.” Upton says he likes being on the front line and “listening to real issues”. Moulescoomb Place needs a lot of love. The area suffers with high levels of deprivation. Upton has seen and listened and has promised people that he will make it a place where they belong (he has already changed the “Keep off the grass” signs on the listed lawns to “Play on the grass”). “It should be an exemplar project that finishes a collection of exemplar projects in Brighton,” says Upton. “We will almost certainly deliver all the public amenity and a sculpture park, and there will be another pub, a restaurant and a social club. “I will probably put a team in to operate those so I can manage the promises we are making in content and programming with some integrity. If I lease it to A N Other, they might change, their shareholders might change and all those promises I made might not be delivered. Sometimes you have to stay in for a long enough period of time for those seeds to grow strong.” Being in it long enough for seeds to grow is definitely what Upton has been doing in the quiet East Sussex village of Ticehurst, where the second of his three personal projects provides some lessons for other thoughtful developers. Village life Some 16 years ago, Upton found himself the owner of a run-down 16th century pub in the village. Plans had gone in to turn The Bell into a couple of houses – a development that Upton just could not let happen. That place had belonged, as a public house, for 500 years, and it needed to continue. So he bought it. Then he bought the bakery, which had closed, the bank and the butchers. As buildings closed, Upton rescued them. Not for vanity, he says – there is commercial benefit in the investment – but because, he says, he could and he could have a beneficial effect on a place. His being bothered, first about the importance of a local meeting place (the pub), and then about the village and its people, has meant this “very ordinary” village now delivers some £1.6m a year in secondary spend and social impact, according to specialist RealWorth. As trade comes into the village, with its highly rated pub now a popular venue for weddings and other events, Upton tries to ensure the locals do not get priced out. “I take a long-term view on the rental and a short-term view on the social impact,” he says, adding that they have recently introduced a local and loyal scheme, offering discounts to village residents. “It’s a bit like Robin Hood,” he says, with a wry smile. “We take from the brides and grooms and we give to Ken, who is 86, and who has four pints every single day.” Commercial decisions It would be easy to think Upton is just showing off a bit here, showcasing his philanthropy and charity. But peppered throughout the conversation, he keeps mentioning how commercial these decisions are too. That he can make profit as well as being purposeful. That doing the right thing can be business savvy too. Just a different kind of business savvy. Which brings us to project number three. A former ambulance station in Bexhill, an unloved East Sussex seaside town, which Upton believes has potential. “One of the first things to leverage opportunity and make things better is art and artists,” says Upton. “So I bought it [the ambulance station] and created a model for a collection of artists to be together.” Upton’s love for art is well known (see box), and he believes that art is the key to creating a place. He also understands that artists are generally not the greatest business people. Sometimes they need a little help, which is where he comes in. In this situation, Upton had a blacksmith friend, Ben. Ben was a great blacksmith but had zero commercial acumen and kept getting kicked out of his forge. Upton cut him a deal. “You find a place, I’ll buy it, we’ll create a self-financing model and you’ll get a free space.” The place was the ambulance station, which Upton bought without the benefit of planning. He took a punt, taking the view that a 5% return as opposed to the more typical 10-20% return for the level of risk associated would be enough. The site was turned into 12 units – Ben got his free but with responsibilities for the block – and as Upton reaches his 5% return, rents in the building fall. But, Upton points out again, this was not an altruistic move. The cheaper the rents, the more likely the scheme is to be full and the safer his 5% is. The only difference between him and others, perhaps, is that 5% is enough. Keeping promises Upton is aware that his desire to create place, add social value and do development differently is not entirely universal, so he always makes sure he has a good lawyer on hand to force the issue when needed. In many cases this good lawyer is Jennie Gubbins, a partner at Trowers & Hamlins. In Bexhill, Gubbins has created a clause in the lease which says any occupier of any of the 12 units has to do four hours of community service over a given period of time, and that failure to do so is an act of forfeiture of their lease. Upton used a similar measure when selling one of his personally owned hotels – Devonport House Hotel in Greenwich, SE10 – to the University of Greenwich back in 2018. As part of the sale, Upton wanted to have it written into the title that the university had to take proper care of the artwork and sculptures he had placed within the grounds of the hotel and that they remained accessible to the public in perpetuity.  The university refused. So – with Gubbins again – he licenced the art to the university with an agreement that if he came to visit and it was not accessible, well-lit or clean, the university would have to deliver them to anywhere he wanted within 100 miles of the university within 100 days. And all he had to do was send one letter. He has just sent a letter. He does all this because he can be bothered and he wants others to be bothered too. If they are not, then he wants to make sure he has teeth so that his promises – to create a sense of belonging, to make that place – are kept. For him, that means making the most of those three days (and more) a month at Landsec and using what he has built to make a difference. He says: “I’ll focus on the things where I have some authority or I have some raw materials or a role to disrupt. To intervene, to challenge the industry, to invest however I can. To make the maximum impact and make things better, because I get a big dividend out of making things better. “It is so much more powerful to be bothered, to have a purpose. And actually, you know what? I’ve done alright out of it. It really does create value that you can share. If you can be bothered.” The art and soul of a place As austerity bites and more and more local authorities around the UK are forced to cut back on public art, Richard Upton has launched a plan to loan more than a dozen of his own “monumental” art pieces to councils, public bodies and community projects in a bid to bring belonging to place. “In my experience, even with U + I, art is the first thing to be lost as things are tightening up. But it’s the first thing to be loved, it’s the first thing that starts the conversation,” says Upton. “It might be negative or positive, but it’s the first thing that starts to create deep connections and conversations with place.” To ensure those connections and conversations are not lost, Upton will be loaning major pieces of art out for as much as three years and will finance their installation and removal to make sure the barrier of cost is overcome.   To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews Main image and former ambulance station © 2022 Saltwick Media; Circus Street: U+I; EG Awards: Ed Telling