To King’s Cross on Monday. Handsome offices now grace the 67-acre development. But a giant unpatched wound runs along the eastern side of the graveled boulevard leading from the station up to the central square. That wound is the 1,000ft sliver of raw land on which Google very nearly began work a year ago on a 1m sq ft groundscraper. Boss Larry Page called a halt, demanding more “wow”.
Google currently lacks the style of Apple, the aggression of Amazon or the visibility of Facebook. So what would be a wow is this: turning the place into a brand embassy, a much bigger version of the ones Samsung and Nike are quietly considering down in Silvertown. Create a 1,000ft shop window. Add doors. Let the public partly inside. Let them see what you do besides avoid tax.
Page probably figured this out a year ago, perhaps after being wowed by Apple’s new mile-wide circular HQ in California. Let’s see, white smoke is not due for another year. Just two points of caution, Larry: the UK planning ?system is a bitch. And recall Professor Lawrence Peter’s “monumentalism” warning: the final stage in a company’s life is building monuments to itself.
A tale of development
Terry Gourvish must be commissioned this instant ?by Sir George Iacobescu to write the definitive history of Canary Wharf.
Unless, that is, Sir Stuart Lipton nips in first, engaging the director of the business history unit at the London School of Economics to lay bare the Broadgate story.
A view formed after skimming through Gourvish’s newly published 400-page history of Dolphin Square. A well-told tale by the author of The Official History of Britain and the Channel Tunnel, published in 2006.
Historical aside: in 1988 I was collecting the contemporaneous thoughts of Channel Tunnel boss John Reeve, with a view to publishing.
Fortunately (for me, if not for John) he was fired in 1989. I blush to think of how my efforts may have compared with those of a historian in Gourvish’s class. Dolphin Square: The History of a Unique Building rests on a rock of research. A quarter of the book is footnotes. Respect. One gripe: the text is over-stuffed with names of worthy inhabitants and over-padded with management minutiae, drawn from the minutes of the Dolphin Square Trust.
But fear not, this is no dry, academic tome. There is juice and spice. Some comes from recalling press coverage of the antics of less worthy inhabitants. Tenants included Bud Flanagan, Sid James, Barbara Windsor and spy John Vassall. A brothel was exposed in 1971. The oddest story, to this day, was the report in the Evening Standard in 2000 of William Hague and Sebastian Coe practising early morning judo in the gym. “Their heaving, sweaty torsos are not a pretty sight,” reported the Londoner’s Diary. No, and not a sight to imagine, even today.
For property folk, the interest lies in a development tale. The Grosvenor Estate put the freehold of the 7.5-acre Royal Army Clothing Depot up for sale in 1933. Not until Costain came along in 1935 did work begin on the 1,250 flats on the Thames Embankment, a short walk from the Palace of Westminster.
The trustees have opened all the financial files to Gourvish. The publicity blurb is right in saying (in the wrong words) “Dolphin Square breaks new ground in providing a detailed examination of property speculation.”
This tale is far from over, of course. In 2006 the long leasehold of the square, which runs out in 2034, was sold to Westbrook Partners. The US financiers have since been engaged in a battle to buy the freehold from Friends Provident, now Friends Life. The latest round of which was won by Westbrook in July, too late to be included in the book.
But as Gourvish predicted, “Whoever gains unfettered freehold will be in a position to introduce more radical changes. They may even be tempted to knock down the flats and redevelop the site.”
A temptation no doubt gingerly considered by Westbrook – and Friends Life.
