Anticipate a planning application later this year from Irvine Sellar for a spectacular skyscraper adjacent Paddington station, designed by Shard architect Renzo Piano. It will be more than 200 metres high. There will be flats at the top, a hotel in the middle and offices and shops at the bottom, according to reports.
A Singaporean joint venture controlled by hotel billionaire Ong Beng Seng paid £111m for the 1.1-acre site last October. In November masterplanner Sir Terry Farrell looked at the planning possibilities. News of Renzo Piano’s appointment came last month.
Reports that Sellar is planning a scheme of 750,000 sq ft have been around for two years. The site has consent for an eight-storey building of 250,000 sq ft.
When I interviewed Piano in July 2008 he made a remark that didn’t get into print. “I am not interested in building single-use towers. These buildings have no life,” he said. Add that to the foregoing facts and you get Shard 2.0 – if not by shape, by concept; if not by height, by ambition. Three hundred metres feels crazy for Paddington. My guess is that about 200 metres would be a more sane strategy.
The added half-million feet has to come from somewhere. Surrounding land? Possibly. But upwards rather than sideways feels more likely.
Why? Look at the cast list: the developer and architect that built the Shard, plus the equity for the £600m project comes from a 70-year old who already controls 11 glitzy hotels, containing 2,886 bedrooms.
This will be no dull development play.
Lidl’s 191-shop strategy
Is Lidl planning to develop 1.5m to 4.8m sq ft in 191 shops across the greater London area alone? Sounds an awful lot. But an advert in last week’s Estates Gazette lists the exact spots where the retailer seeks plots suitable for 8,000 sq ft to 25,000 sq ft outlets. Tesco or Sainsbury would trumpet such a huge requirement. But not shy Lidl. Even so, it can’t surely mean to develop all 191 shops?
Yes. “I can confirm that we have a requirement for a Lidl store at all 191 sites,” said spokeswoman Laura Hamlin. Crikey.
An expensive decanter
Rebuilding the Palace of Westminster by decanting parliament into temporary space will take six years and cost £3.5bn, says Deliotte.
Anyone else gasp at the number? The sooner a full breakdown of this budget is published the better. Was the consultant put under pressure by parliamentarians to gold-plate the estimate?
If so, who can blame them for doing just that. Look at what happened last time. The palace got built only after decades of bickering when the old one burned down in 1836. The original estimate was £707,104, the timetable six to seven years. The work took 31 years and cost £2.4m, about £201m in today’s money, if you misuse the RPI index to make a comparison.
Resi starts: a political con
Want a hollow laugh? Read the National Audit Office’s 45-page critique, published last month, of a government promise made in March 2011 to “release enough public land to build as many as 100,000 new, much-needed, homes by 2015”. The target was reached – by simple figure fiddling, says the NAO. Around 25,000 units were “borrowed” from promises already made.
The NAO scolds politicians for not monitoring how many of the homes were built. “Hardly any so far” is, of course, the answer. The promise from then housing minister Grant Shapps did not include a timetable. The wording encourages the gullible to think the pledge includes construction. But the promise is to supply only land, not homes. Builders build to the beat of the economic drum, not when a politician whistles.
This highly misleading form of words is used often by governments to fool the public into thinking they are doing something about the perennial housing crisis. Last autumn George Osborne announced a £5bn sale of public land by 2020. He was duly hailed for his promise to build 150,000 homes in five years. Will the government do what the NAO asks and track the number of homes built? No. That would spoil a useful political con trick.
