The £3.5bn Silvertown Quays scheme, one of London’s most important regeneration projects, lies vacant. A decade of delayed, failed, and often fantastical proposals on 62 acres of Greater London Authority-owned land in east London has culminated in practically nothing.
Nothing tangible yet, at least, in spite of a lot of energy having been expended: there’s the £12m asbestos clean-up; a pricey 7.2m sq ft planning consent; failed proposals to build an aquarium under an earlier scheme; a cancelled music festival; amorphous plans to develop “brand pavilions”, and earlier this year, the prospect of a 3,000-home modular housing factory.
With Sir Stuart Lipton – and his unrivalled experience of delivering challenging projects – alongside First Base in the driving seat, it has every chance of success despite well-placed sources at City Hall suggesting the patience is wearing thin. But as Lipton himself says: “ I think this is a ground-breaking project. The GLA is impatient and I’m impatient.”
Talks with private fund LJ Partners to stump up £700m for the first phase are understood to have broken down at the start of the year. But now with exclusive negotiations taking place with a new party, the GLA is hoping for progress before the end of the year. EG visited the site to find out more.
As a starting point, getting to and from Silvertown is not exactly straightforward. An Emirates cable car from North Greenwich touches down, before a hired car drives five minutes towards a gated entrance surrounded by hoardings.
The site itself is a dustbowl surrounding a large basin of water and dominated by the huge Millennium Mills, an impressive warehouse planned for restoration in the scheme’s first phase. The rest of the site is cleared, although there is still decontamination work to do.
New pedestrian bridge
On the opposite side to the cable car, there’s the Docklands Light Railway, and soon, Crossrail, linking in to central London. The developers are committed to building a new pedestrian bridge as part of this first phase for access.
The other important factor is Silvertown’s proximity to neighbouring City Airport, which could be interpreted in two ways: as a big selling point in terms of connectivity, or as an extremely loud disturbance that happens every five minutes.
Standing on the rooftop of Millennium Mills, earmarked for high-end al fresco eateries, First Base development director Barry Jessup speaks over the noise to describe how potential occupiers have compared the plane noise to DC10, a club in Ibiza named after a flight path.
It’s one leap of the imagination that a development funder would have to take. But there are others. A far deeper challenge is the way that the scheme is phased – the 1.8m sq ft first slice is front-loaded with commercial, specifically those brand pavilions that so puzzled onlookers when the consortium was selected in 2012.
In the past five years, Jessup says, more than 150 businesses (“from some of the largest in the world, to some of the smallest”) have visited the site to try to understand the concept, in which 50 bespoke pavilions are designed for brands seeking new ways of interacting with their customers.
The mixed-use concept, drawing inspiration from the nearby Siemens Crystal, was picked ahead of more residential-focused proposals from Berkeley, working with the Wellcome Trust, and Delancey’s DV4 fund.
Jessup says: “This is a genuine piece of urban space – music venues, workspaces and bars/restaurants, to create a sustainable community. It’s a new piece of city.”
The GLA’s initial insistence that the scheme deliver significant amounts of commercial and leisure space has undoubtedly dogged development there over the years – even before the Slivertown Partnership became involved.
A senior City Hall source said: “It’s been derelict for a long time. It’s not straightforward to fund. There’s quite a lot of front-ended commercial.
“The mayor has inherited a contractual development partnership. You don’t just rip that up, and the Royal Docks needs diversity of uses.
“If I didn’t think it was fundable, we might be having a different conversation. You get to a point where milestones loom. We’re talking about needing to see real activity fairly soon now.”
History repeating itself?
Might history be repeating itself at Silvertown? In the five years running up to the current consortium’s selection, the scheme was subject to an even more unusual proposal. David Taylor’s English Partnerships was picked by former mayor Ken Livingstone to deliver an aquarium in the first phase.
It was the unviable nature of that scheme, envisaged in the run up to the financial crash, that led to HBOS pulling the plug on a £60m loan secured against it in 2010. Landowner the London Development Agency tore up the agreement.
There have been further calamities along the way: a 2012 proposal for a concept called London’s Pleasure Gardens failed to get off the ground, and a large-scale music festival there was cancelled.
Since planning permission was granted to the current consortium in August last year, they have been trying to keep the site as alive as possible. They want to create the UK’s first “e-sports” (computer gaming) hub there; planning has been granted for Silvertown Studios – a shipping container artist incubator – and plans have been announced for a new modular housing factory in partnership with Aecom.
They also entered into a three-way partnership with MacQuarie Capital to get the scheme through planning.
Sir Stuart Lipton says: “It’s taken a long time to get planning on the project, and it doesn’t make life easy. We did have another funder, and there was someone who wanted to buy the company, but my turf has always been difficult projects.
“I’ve never liked silent partners. We’ve spent a lot. We’re not selling.”
The stakes are high, though. Another of the scheme’s hurdles is the general weakening of the London residential market for new-builds. It has turned off several housebuilders already, which have been discreetly contacted by the GLA to explore the possibility of a new tendering process.
Jessup insists the scheme will go ahead as planned. “We got consent last August, and have spent a lot of money – £12m on removing asbestos – the biggest asbestos contract of its kind,” he says.
“Funding is in place. We’ll start on site next year. Phase one needs to be substantial, we need to create critical mass very early. It’s important we have Millennium Mills at the heart of this.”
Last piece of the jigsaw
He continues: “I don’t think this is a hard sell for investors and I don’t see Silvertown as pioneering – it’s very much the last piece of the jigsaw.”
And the surrounding developments have certainly been successful, according to east London residential consultant Charlie Hart, partner at Knight Frank, who says the neighbouring Ballymore scheme, Royal Wharf, has enjoyed a near-unprecedented sales rates.
That said, while Silvertown may well be a last piece of the jigsaw, some jigsaws also have missing pieces.
It is hard not to be enthused by the sheer boldness of the Liptons’ vision, particularly the restoration of Millennium Mills. But with a housing crisis on, and public land under pressure to deliver more units, the GLA will be hoping the new funding talks –understood to be still active with an investor from the geopolitical west, rather than the east – succeed in proving the concept once and for all.
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