Barking and Dagenham’s council-owned regeneration company is rewriting the script for the east London borough’s built environment and economy – so it’s fitting that new film studios are among the blockbuster schemes now being brought forward.
By the end of this year, the 12-soundstage Eastbrook Studios should be open for business. The £300m scheme is being backed by Hackman Capital Partners, a US-based media real estate group, and will be London’s largest film and TV studio. The development not only underscores the changing make-up of the borough’s business community, but also the efforts of regeneration company Be First in forging public-private relationships to make that new vision reality.
“It’s about putting your money where your mouth is and investing in your own borough to see the benefits in terms of regeneration,” says David Harley, a former council manager who is now deputy development director at Be First. “And it’s about working with the private sector on different schemes to get things moving forward, with a strong political vision to see development happening.”
The studios are just one of a raft of so-called “transformation areas” being redeveloped across the borough. Others include the L&Q-backed Barking Riverside scheme; Dagenham Dock, soon to be home to the City of London’s three wholesale markets; and Peabody’s Dagenham Green development on the site of a former Ford factory.
“A lot of boroughs may only have one of those [transformation areas] if they’re lucky,” Harley says. “We have eight.”
Space odyssey
Choosing any of those eight plots over the others would be like a parent choosing a favourite, multi-million-pound-GDV child. Nonetheless, the glamour of the film studios means Eastbrook is firmly in the spotlight. The site was once a manufacturing base for pharmaceutical company Sanofi but since the company ceased operations there the buildings have been used for several film and TV projects, including becoming a fictional New York hospital in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. The borough council had set up a film unit to encourage the growth of the industry in the area – and as demand grew, so did the scale of its ambitions.
“The film unit were hearing the producers of film companies saying, ‘we’re running out of studios in London, we just can’t find the space’,” he says. “We hit on an idea: there’s loads of land here, should we move away from declining manufacturing sectors and head for growth sectors where there are real opportunities?”
It became a no-brainer once the council started to look at the scale of employment that tends to spring up for the local workforce around studios. But even as a feasibility study was under way, there was some scepticism that the borough could pull it off.
“There was a bit of sniffiness about east London – with all the filming in west London, would we really get things happening?” Harley says. “We did a bit of research that shows over recent years a lot of the film studio staff have tended to drift more to east London anyway and get priced out of west London. And with the fact that we had locational filming happening here, people suddenly thought, ‘actually, Dagenham is not as far out as we thought it was’.”
Hackman came on board in late 2020 – Be First had taken the project on after a previous backer walked away citing uncertainty after the UK’s Brexit vote. But 2020 itself was hardly a year of clarity and economic certainty. How did the council attract the right private-sector player to this kind of scheme? For Harley, it was a case of ensuring at least some of the heavy lifting had been done for the prospective partner.
“The leader of the council, Darren Rodwell, was really pro this vision and really shouting about it,” Harley says. “Then it was a question of what can we do as a forward-thinking regeneration agency to get this to happen? It was putting our money where our mouth was, assembling the sites.
“We knew that the private sector, particularly the international film market, was terrified of the UK planning system. You’d had all sorts of green belt issues elsewhere. So what we really needed to do to attract the private sector was get planning in place.”
And the team did just that, with the council and London mayor Sadiq Khan signing off proposals in the summer of 2020.
The relationship with Hackman is now flourishing. The investor has also taken on a River Road site in Barking, a former drinks distribution warehouse, and turned it into a six-soundstage, £50m sister facility to Eastbrook. “Eventually, Hackman will have 18 soundstages across Barking and Dagenham, six of which are now operational,” Harley says.
Pride and prejudice
As part of the partnership, Be First has received a £1m endowment from Hackman that can be put towards initiatives encouraging employment and community skills. That has led to the launch of Make It Here, an initiative to encourage young people in school and college to consider a career in film and TV. “It’s all about aspiration and about letting local young people know that to get jobs in the film studio they need to do X, Y and Z,” Harley says.
For Harley and the Be First team, that idea of changing the borough’s economy through private sector investment – and of creating opportunities for a new generation that past generations didn’t have – is the driver behind Eastbrook Studios and other schemes.
“Barking and Dagenham’s economy is a bit more like a Midlands industrial town. So we are very much focused on how do we modernise the economy,” Harley says. “Film and creative industries are a key point. And another big one is food, with the City of London and its wholesale markets. It’s all about physical development, but then what is the impact on the local economy and local people as well?”
Plans are under way for the three City markets of Smithfield, Billingsgate and New Spitalfields to be moved to Dagenham Dock, merging to become Europe’s largest wholesale market.
Barking town centre will be what Harley calls “the public face” of this new part of the local economy, with a food hub at which retail traders and small business can sell. Harley says the council and Be First’s approach to building a food-based segment of the economy has mirrored its approach to the film studios, and the council now has a food lead in the same way it set up a film-focused team several years ago. “It’s all about unlocking the opportunities for local people in the food sector,” Harley says. “It’s a huge employment generator.”
Harley’s bottom line when hunting for private-sector partners is a shared goal – he and the team want to bring in investors that are committed to the borough and its people. “It is about recognising our vision and our aspirations and signing up to that,” he adds. “Good businesses and the private sector should want to work with local residents and engage and be actively involved, maximise local employment and work with local groups – it all makes them good neighbours on the sites they are operating from.”
But a crucial test will be what these projects do for local people, especially whether or not they help to make them proud to live in – and stay in – the borough.
“One of the issues in Barking and Dagenham over the last few years is that it tends to be a slightly transient population,” Harley says. “People tend to move out when they get income. What we do with our placemaking agenda, providing new quality housing, new facilities, is all about making people feel proud of Barking and Dagenham and wanting to stay and seeing that positive regeneration effect. We are trying to raise pride.”
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