On a recent phone call, Chris Boulton had to politely ask the two people on the other end of the line to stop crying. It was either that or let the tears start rolling himself. As chief executive of Greenham Trust, Boulton is in the unusual position of almost simultaneously making money and giving it away.
“I have the privilege of phoning people after a board meeting to tell them their funding application has been successful,” says the chartered surveyor. In this case, it was a health-based charity.
“I’ve been doing this for nine years and it is wonderful to hear people’s delight, but this was the first time the emotion boiled over in a such a way. It was just amazing to get that response,” Boulton says.
Older readers will remember him as the former Lambert Smith Hampton chief executive who attempted a management buyout in 2004. He went on to join Yoo, John Hitchcox’s property and design business, but later found himself on the wrong side of a widely publicised unfair dismissal case brought by architect Julie Humphryes. But that was then.
Creating the trust
Boulton joined Greenham Trust as chief executive in 2014. One step removed from the corporate world, the keen cyclist and art fan gives out a strong sense that he has found his rightful home at the charity – and he wants to spread the word about its model for using property to drive philanthropy.
The trust owns and manages Greenham Business Park, now a highly polished, well-presented asset which occupies a 150-acre slice of the former RAF base at Greenham Common in Newbury, Berkshire.
Steeped in history, this is where General Eisenhower visited troops ahead of D-Day and where the Americans kept guided nuclear missiles during the Cold War, famously prompting the setting up of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which remained for almost 20 years.
The trust was created in 1997 by Sir Peter Michael, the British engineer and founder of radio company Classic FM, with the objective of supporting local charities and organisations in West Berkshire and North Hampshire.
Michael, still a trustee at 85, saw the potential to redevelop part of the former RAF base to do this. Greenham Trust paid £7m for the site, which sits between the M4 and A34 and two major railway lines.
It handed back 750 acres to Newbury District Council to be returned to common land, which surrounds the business park on three sides. The missile shelter complex of grassy humps is a scheduled monument outside the trust’s ownership.
The business park now comprises 690,000 sq ft of largely industrial, mixed-use space and is home to more than 165 businesses, including food manufacturer Yorkshire Provender, IT company ROC Technologies, a Jaguar car retailer and bike shop the Bike Whisperer. It also boasts its own 1,200 sq ft arts venue and café, the Base.
Rental income has enabled the trust to give away more than £75m to support more than 5,000 local good causes over a 25-year period. The trust gave away £3.5m in 2020, a record £5m in 2021 and just under £3m last year.
Beneficiaries have ranged from a scout group that needed funding for a new building to contributing to the new West Berkshire Community Hospital, where services will include renal dialysis and chemotherapy. And, says Boulton, it is ambitious to increase its social impact.
Finance and development
In 2019, the charity raised £25m in an inaugural private placement with Abrdn to help fund the development of five commercial properties on the site and repay existing bank loans.
The last part of that phase is the 33,000 sq ft Altitude warehouse and office building. Due to complete in October, this is the park’s first speculative development.
“We’ve had four parties interested in it. The market is very active now, and we have just made a conscious decision not to jump too quickly into structuring something,” Boulton says. One of its agents has even suggested putting the quoting rent up from the current £12 per sq ft.
Boulton has his eye on bringing an immersive art exhibition to the open-plan building in the interim – along the same lines of the Hockney show at Lightroom, King’s Cross, and Frameless at Marble Arch.
Meanwhile, he is ready to lead the charity into phase two of development at the park and will go to the market this summer for finance. The trust will be looking for more than £20m again but will need to take a different approach.
“We will probably have to put in place some sort of short-term revolving facility with a view to regearing it at some point, because interest rates are nowhere near as advantageous as they were back in 2018/19,” he says.
“We currently have just over 200,000 sq ft of prelet or design and build opportunity here. We’ve got some existing occupiers that want to expand, and we have a good track record of keeping occupiers here as they grow,” he says.
The 200,000 sq ft expansion could increase the trust’s charitable giving by £2m over a period of five years, Boulton says, which may prompt it to expand the geographic area where it distributes its surplus.
Planning at the park has been streamlined thanks to a local development order. This means planning issues have been dealt with upfront and a simplified and streamlined planning notification process taking just 21 days is in place across the park for the development of up to 1.6m sq ft.
“One of the biggest challenges we have here is that our vacancy rate is currently about 1.6% across the portfolio. And in my whole time here it’s never got anywhere near double digits,” Boulton says.
When existing occupiers cannot expand on the park, the trust sometimes makes strategic purchases to accommodate them elsewhere. This has helped boost its off-park portfolio to a quarter of the trust’s £106m asset value.
Pandemic response
For many of its occupiers, knowing that the rent they pay is being funnelled into good causes in the locality is a major draw. Key and long-term tenants also now have a say in some of the local projects the trust supports through a tenant distribution committee set up as part of the trust’s 25th anniversary last year. The committee has up to £100,000 per annum to allocate.
The application process is run through the trust’s Good Exchange online platform, which is now working with 23 other local funders to connect charities and charitable projects with those that have money to give. Crucially, this facilitates match funding and allows for public donations. “That really switches the public on because when they donate, they can see that every pound doubles,” Boulton says.
The trust showed how fleet of foot it could be during the pandemic, working with the local authority to create a community support hub.
“It became clear very quickly that the primary need was food, so we provided a unit for the West Berkshire Foodbank on very attractive terms,” Boulton says.
The trust also created a Covid-19 relief fund on the Good Exchange fundraising site, priming the pump with a couple of hundred thousand pounds in match funding.
“We ended up getting donations from the general public, some high-net-worth individuals and other charities – obviously attracted by the matching. We doubled that money in a matter of weeks,” Boulton says. “That started a transformational change in what we do on the charitable side.”
The trust went on to set up a laptop fund to provide computers for schoolchildren during lockdown and post-pandemic it has put cash forward to support refugees – first from Afghanistan and then from Ukraine – and to support those struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. The business park itself, with a heavy weighting towards food, emerged virtually unscathed from the pandemic, with only one occupier failing. Rental holidays were given but leases were also extended, enhancing asset value.
New models of philanthropy
Boulton, who himself is recovering from cancer treatment, is now driving another key step change in how the trust operates. Having experienced first hand how long it takes for a new hospital to be delivered, the trust is now working directly with a charity which supports the elderly to deliver new sites for dementia care.
“We’re moving upstream by adding a completely different charitable model where we’ll buy the site, build the building and lease the building to the charity for dementia care. That’s an investment of around £4m,” Boulton says. “That makes it happen more quickly and we’re here forever – we’re not going to sell the building.”
Despite its success, Greenham Trust’s asset management model seems little known – even in the charitable sector. Boulton hopes to change that with an idea he developed during the pandemic.
Together with property director Rupert Holtby and finance director Oonagh Dockley, he has set up consultancy RED-Phil, which stands for Real Estate Driven Philanthropy.
RED-Phil hopes to work with owners of surplus or underutilised assets such as local authorities, the MoD and educational establishments. Selling off parts of larger sites for residential development could still leave enough residual land to generate income for charitable causes, he says.
The aim is to share their expertise across development, investment, and management, all the way through to distribution of the surplus.
“We’re mindful that we have something unique here at Greenham,” Boulton says. “But there is an opportunity to take a more philanthropic view for local authorities and even the MoD.”
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