by Mike Parry and Ian Scott
Business parks continue to grow and evolve, offering an attractive alternative to the increasingly congested town centres. Their development can be seen as a microcosm of the post-war trend of decentralisation away from the urban areas generally and city centres in particular. The growth of service-based industries has also contributed to the demand for new, flexible, high-quality business space.
While “B1” has now replaced “hi-tech” as the property industry’s favourite term to misuse, “business park” has fared little better — as a glance through some elements of the property press will indicate all too clearly. Our 1986 Business Parks Report provided an analysis of the different terminology in use, and the definition of “business park” used then, suitably altered to reflect the impact of the 1987 Use Classes Order, is still apt:
Thus a “business park” is a large area of land, a minimum of 50 acres today, developed to provide a high-quality environment in attractive surroundings with a low density of buildings suitable for a wide range of activities, including manufacturing, assembly, customer support, research and other office and commercially based functions.
The key words to the idea of a business park are “high-quality environment” and “wide range of activities”. Thus a business park has several advantages for an occupier. There is scope for expansion, flexibility of use of buildings, opportunities for synergy with other occupiers, and the prospect of agreeable conditions for existing staff and the recruitment of additional employees.
Masterplanning
The overall effect of the business park — its atmosphere, which is so difficult to tie down in physical terms — is vital to success. The constituent parts — the buildings, landscaping, parking facilities and occupiers — combine to project the image of the park, and this image must be such that it will attract new occupants and retain existing tenants. For each different use, business parks are striving to provide new and improved working environments that are both congenial and stimulating, and are attempting to create a sense of community for the completed development.
Detailed research carried out in the early stages of planning can assist in the preparation of an overall masterplan, which will give cohesion and unity to the finished development. However, here, too, there must be room for flexibility, especially if the site will be developed in phases over several years.
If plots are sold, or let on building leases, the overall planner must provide sufficient guidance for occupiers who are individually constructing their own units, so that the resultant buildings accord with the whole scheme, and are of a uniformly high standard.
This need for harmony within the park has to be achieved while still providing an individual identity for each building (or group of buildings with the same occupier) and can best be achieved by defined structural landscaping in the earliest stages of development.
Obviously the masterplan needs to be reviewed regularly as business parks are still evolving, but the developer needs clear ideas, formulated in the masterplan, to assess accurately the feasibility of the scheme and then to obtain the necessary funding.
The masterplan should allocate and quantify the various uses which are going to be accommodated on the development. These will range from overall site density to the relative proportions of B1 office, multi-purpose and industrial space, the access and internal road layouts, the size and distribution of services, hotel and amenity sites, parking standards, landscaping requirements and a host of other details.
The masterplan should also offer considerable scope to vary the allocation of building sizes, types and tenure. A well-defined masterplan will produce prime sites (with few, if any, “secondary” plots) upon which individual architects can express themselves in competition with the surrounding buildings, yet still be constrained within the overall design of the park.
Facilities
It is not enough to offer a superb landscape and first-class office facilities: businesses are run by people, and people have special individual needs. As well as buildings for occupation, therefore, a business park should provide common facilities, ranging from business services to leisure pursuits.
At the Solent Business Park, for example, the Solent Centre has been designed to meet these needs and become the focal point of the park. Arranged around an elegant piazza overlooking the main lake, the centre contains retail units offering park employees a wide range of facilities. In addition, it will also house the permanent marketing and management teams which serve the park, thus becoming the hub of community activity.
Similarly, at Capability Green, Luton Hoo. “The Centre” has been designed to provide facilities for all occupiers, with central business services, management offices and conference facilities, enabling smaller companies to build a firm foundation for future expansion. The Centre at Capability Green is complemented — perhaps uniquely among UK business parks — by the more traditional facilities of the Luton Hoo Estate, where the main house can accommodate formal and informal functions for up to 300 guests.
In America, unlike Europe, the development of hotel and conference facilities has been a catalyst for business park development. The need to provide improved amenities has meant that hotels are now actively encouraged on business parks as providers of both business and recreational facilities, despite the lower land values which hotel operators are able to offer compared with other users.
Business parks are now taking leisure far more seriously, and are planning facilities such as gyms, golf courses and restaurants. The provision of retail and banking services is also seen as increasingly important for the convenience of park-based staff, who find access to city-centre facilities difficult. The common use of these business and leisure facilities also provides occasions when different tenants meet, and thus opportunities for mutual trade and co-operation are provided.
Landscape and buildings
Mere lip service is all too often paid to landscaping a site and, as developers have discovered, skimping on landscaping will soon be found out. Like the market researcher, the landscape designer should be brought in at an early stage, rather than at the eleventh hour, when he will be highly constrained by what has already been planned or even built.
At Capability Green, Cloustons, the landscape architects, have been selected to continue the tradition of care for the environment shown by Capability Brown, the landscape architect of the 4,000-acre Luton Hoo Estate. Strong planting forms set out in informal sweeps have been selected to herald the arrival at Capability Green, with a formal planting theme reflecting the architectural features of the Central Mall, which provides an attractive pedestrian promenade, furnished with walkways, fountains, gardens and lawns with sculpture adding to the overall atmosphere. The intention is to create a prestigious landscaped setting within which the business park will develop.
The scope for landscaping is determined by the density of site coverage by buildings. Financial pressures can drive up site densities but the maximum development density for business parks now at the design stage is approximately 17,500 sq ft to 18,000 sq ft per acre, if parking or landscaping standards are not to be compromised.
This density is likely to be further reduced, notwithstanding increasing land values, and the largest park in the UK, currently at the design stage — Rouse & Associates’ 650-acre Kings Hill at West Malling, Kent — will set new standards by providing buildings at an overall density of only 12,500 sq ft per acre. This is what the occupiers now want — and experience shows that they are prepared to pay for it.
Two-storey buildings are also currently the norm, but three-storey ones are becoming more common and there will be an increasing acceptance of four- or five-storey buildings (by occupants, if not by planners) particularly for headquarter office buildings in focal positions.
Current demand
The UK property market has experienced a period of sustained growth generated by strong user-demand coupled with renewed institutional support following the 1987 crash in the equity markets. Clearly the market is now slowing in comparison with the rapid growth of the recent past, but there is, nevertheless, reason to believe that the prospects for quality business parks are better than for most sectors of the property market, particularly when it is considered that such developments tend to attract the economy’s more dynamic companies.
While the movement out of town has been felt most strongly in provincial office centres around the western half of the M25 and the southern sector of the M1, it is interesting to note that a substantial number of City-based companies draw their workforce from the eastern counties. The completion of the M25 and the extension of the M11 into central London, coupled with the existing rail links and the Channel tunnel link, suggests that the scope for these companies to relocate in the direction of the workforce will widen considerably in the near future. East Anglia and Kent are therefore likely to prove an increasingly attractive location for business park developers, providing large proportions of office space.
This trend towards an office-based content for business parks is reflected in the changing occupier profile observed over the past five years. During the mid-1980s the typical business park occupier was a computer or electronics company.
Today, while these two types are still well represented, they have been joined by the traditionally town-centre financial services companies; for example, Barclays Bank at Capability Green, and Societe Generale, Colonial Mutual and ManuLife at Solent; and pharmaceutical companies, for example, Dow Chemicals and Glaxo at Stockley Park.
The European context
The factors which have led to the rise of the business park in America and the UK are no less prevalent in the rest of Europe. Although the scale of their adoption varies from country to country — and is nowhere so widespread as in the UK — the idea is taking hold and the numbers can only increase.
Major multinational companies have been attracted to these generally high-quality developments, conditioned by the facilities available to them in the UK and USA.
In the run-up to 1992 the European business park market will need to be assessed at two, or perhaps three, levels:
the local level,
the regional level,
the national/international level.
At local level, business parks will continue to syphon occupiers from town-centre locations by virtue of their attractive environment and low congestion.
At the regional level, larger parks will compete against each other to become the regional champion, offering substantial retail and leisure facilities for occupiers.
At the third level, it may be that occupiers will have to take strategic decisions regarding their location for access to the single market. This decision may be, for example, between Kings Hill at West Malling in Kent, Keiberg at Brussels Airport and Sofia Antipolis in southern France.
Conclusion
The recent changes in the nature of hi-tech property have been taking place at a rapid rate, as can be illustrated by the substantial differences evident in each new phase of certain phased business park developments, and indeed between parks built during the past few years.
It is likely that the rate of change will slow down over the next five years or so as the property market stabilises and adjusts to the new demands of tenant companies. However, the better new business parks to be built in the next few years will be likely to set even higher standards with which the existing parks will have to compete.
The trends that have made business parks popular ie the move out of cities, the demand for better working and living conditions and the need for adaptable workspace are unlikely to be reversed. Parks close to major cities will experience increasing demand from office users, particularly those able to move “back office” staff out of central locations.
As business parks have become more acceptable to investors they have grown in size, and UK site areas are typically between 50 and 150 developable acres with some very large parks, such as Kings Hill, of 650 acres gross. These larger parks are better able to support more extensive recreational and retail facilities and hence offer a more complete working environment.
The benefits to a location of a high-quality park will include the following: employment generation through expansion of existing businesses currently unable to find suitable accommodation; new employment opportunities created by companies relocating from other areas: “multiplier” effect of jobs created in hi-tech/service industries generating employment growth within traditional industries providing goods and services to the hi-tech sector; and the “filtering” effect of hi-tech companies relocating from traditional industrial estates to the business park thereby freeing buildings for industrial/ warehouse users.
These benefits, coupled with the low development densities and high-quality landscaping that are now generally accepted on such parks, indicate that in the future business park development may well be welcomed by planners as a positive contribution to currently limited green belt facilities, particularly where that land is of inferior quality.
