August 2011 Archives

Earlier this year we posted a blog on the pop-up shopping mall on Shoreditch High Street (details here)

Of course this is not a new idea, the same technique was used at Trinity Buoy Wharf around ten years ago for residential:

Apparently they're quite nice according to the Hairy Bikers (TV folk) who live there. In the two schemes above it's fairly obvious that they're made from shipping containers. However, this is not always the case.

Next time you visit Uxbridge town centre have a stroll down Oxford Road and have a look at the Travelodge there:

Here it is just after completion in October 2008. Doesn't look like anything special does it? But this Travelodge is different. Remove the facade and you'd find 88 shipping containers. Why? Because it's cheaper and faster to build than a normal building. A 100 room Travelodge hotel would normally cost £5 million and take 40 weeks to construct, this costs just £4.5 million and takes just 30 weeks.

And it appears that the idea's going global. So far we've had retail, resi and hotel uses but the latest offering is student housing, this time in the Philippines:

It's called Citihub Mandaluyong and is being developed by the Arcya Commercial Corporation in Manila, more details here.

If you thought the train journey from London to New York, featured in my last blog was a bit far fetched then take a look at this, from Building Design. They go with the story of 'Plans for £264 billion man-made Dutch mountain take shape'.

What is going on in the world? Are we not meant to be fearing a double-dip world wide recession???

I was reading a great article in the Economist the other day where it was comparing the crash in residential house prices and the peculiarities in each market. As you can see from the figure below the American market has suffered substantially more than the UK's.

So why has Britain's market been more resilient that that of the US? The economist answers:

A) American mortgages tend to be "non-recourse": when a loan terns sour, a lender can seize the property but has no rights over the borrower's other assets or income. So if house prices fall below the value of the mortgage, a householder can walk away from his debt. Many have done so: fire sales of seized homes have weighed heavily on prices. Fewer homes have been dumped onto the market in Britain, where borrowers cannot escape debt so easily. Fewer forced sellers in Britain were also in part due to unemployment rising less sharply.

B) America's housing boom was fuelled by subprime borrowers, more likely than others to struggle with mortgage payments.

C) Most British mortgages are at variable interest rates, or are fixed for only a few years, sharp cuts in rates in Britain eased the burden on debtors more than rate cuts did in America, where many mortgages are at fixed rates.

D) Total interest payments on household debt in Britain fell to 7% of disposable income at the end of last year, the lowest since 2003. Banks have been lenient, and repossessions have been far rarer than feared.

Then I came across a story from EGi News which stated average rents for prime central London houses are on track to reach £1,052 per week by December, an increase of £15 on current weekly rents of £1,037, according to property consultants Cluttons. Many tenants are unable to obtain mortgages and with house prices in central London set to accelerate, they have little choice but to continue to pay the rising rents, Cluttons commented.  

So what's the answer to rising London house prices? You could always commute...

World Architecture News has the story of 'London to New York rail journey on horizon', after the Kremlin gave the green light to a 65-mile tunnel linking Russia with North America.

Read the full Economist article here: 

In August 2007 we blogged about the exposed piles at Barratt's GWQ development in Brentford: 

Very neolithic. In August 2011 this is what that same view looks like: 

The Pint of Milk Test has seen many marketing suites over the years but nothing comes close to this one:

...and it's only temporary, it all comes down once the Kew Bridge development completes freeing up the space to create a public piazza. 

Looks as though someone was so inspired by our recent posting on Pod Living  that they nipped down to homebase, bought a garden shed and stuck it on the roof:

 Not clear enough? Here's a closer look: 

 Compact, panoramic views, well ventilated...

...but probably the strangest building your likely to see: 

Photo: Feliciano Guimarães

It lies somewhere in the Nas montanhas de Fafe range in northern Portugal. More details here. 

Pod flats for key workers are being bolted onto the roofs of a selection of council blocks in Hammersmith. The homes will be available for workers such as teachers and firefighters. There will be 44 pre-fabricated pods which will have heat pumped around the space, giving an estimated weekly energy bill of only £2.20.

The homes are being developed by Du Cane Housing Association and fitted to the 70's-built council estate on Du Cane Road, oppostie Hammersmith & New Queen Charlotte's Hospital.

The pods will be available to let, with one beds priced at £794 per month and two beds at £961 per month.  

Click here for full story in The Evening Standard. 

images by Ducane Housing Association

or at least initial bootcamp bit is at the Selsdon Park hotel in Croydon, to find where the final 16's house is, click here.

Zoopla, the property portal, has introduced a new mapping website that shows the UK's property "hotspots" as defined by expensive areas showing up as red areas (hot) through to cheaper more affordable locations showing as blue areas (cool).

Click here for the map 

A place where Londoners bury their dead, a place that Richard Elliott calls home.

Photograph: SMC/SMC

 

The story of the houses (there are three of them) in Highgate cemetery goes back to the 60's when the cemetery flogged off bits of its land to shore up finances. Elliot, a property developer, bought two of the buildings in the late 90's and after 10 years produced the structure above.

Now if you think living in a cemetery would give you the wobbles consider this little incident which occurred during the build.

All through his life Elliot had been searching for the grave of his great-great-great-grandfather which he believed was in Scotland. One day, he was out in the garden deciding where to put a bench. After much deliberation he thought he'd found the perfect spot and began preparing the ground by removing the undergrowth. As he did so a rather grand grave began to reveal itself, a grave with one name on the tomb stone "Gordon". Now Elliot must have thought this a strange coincidence, after all his middle name was also Gordon. As he cleared more of the foliage things were to get even stranger, as he says himself:

 

"I was stunned. I was immediately in tears. The odds against it happening ..."

 

Elliot's middle name was Gordon, after his great-great-great-grandfather Gordon. The same Gordon whose grave Elliot had just uncovered. Spooky.

 

The Guardian has the full story here.  

  

 

These are the legacy of the Irish boom and bust. There's an interesting article about them in tomorrows Estates Gazette, page 48 if you're interested. The situation is complicated but the facts are simple:

• 3,000 ghost towns - half built and empty.
• 43,000 residential units in total.
• 5 times more residential stock than the country needs.

An interesting animation is now available online, showing in great detail the pending construction of a scheme in Canning Town.

Webcams and time-delayed videos showing construction progress are already proving popular on developers websites across London, so maybe this will be something for the future.

Click here to view the animation

     image by Local Dialogue

There is something odd about Crystal Palace Park, something that I can't quite put my finger on.

It could be the giant head:

Or the headless statue:

 Or the skateboard ramp:

Or the Dino-Park:

Or the omnipresent tower:

But the oddest thing is the roundabout just outside the caravan park to the north of the park:

...location finally revealed!

It's Elstree Studios in Borehamwood opposite McDonald's...but then you probably knew that since that's where it's been for a while.

...cable car exhibition now on at the NLA building in Store Street. Here's a new render of what we can expect:

In the wake of last week's riots, looting and wanton destruction by a minority here's how the not so silent majority has responded:

The Rebuild Reeves campaign to get the Croydon furniture retailer back in business.

The Keeping Aaron Cutting campaign to get 89-year-old Tottenham barber Aaron Biber back in business.

The Save Siva's Shop campaign to help Siva Kandiah reopen his Hackney convenience store.

The Let's Do Something nice for Ashraf campaign for Ashraf Haziq the Malaysian student who was robbed as he lay bleeding in the street.

The Riot Rebuild campaign.

The Riot Cleanup campaign.

The above is just a small selection of the many campaigns that have started, not just in London but across the country.

What and where. Substantial property industry related prizes await.

Following on with student housing and the astronomical fees some of the private developers are charging I thought I would do a quick comparison on Zoopla to see what they could afford if they pooled their resources together.

Let's take Nido's Spitalfields scheme, on Middlesex Street. The most expensive shared apartment is £305 a week; for that you get an en suite room, with a shared kitchen and communal areas with 5 others. Each student would pay £1,322 a month; that's £7,930 Nido will be pocketing from the the shared flat combined over the same period and over the course of the year, the figure is £95,160.

It's also worth noting that the development consists of 35 storeys and 1,204 bed spaces. Those who aren't in the student residential sector and reading this; you're in the wrong game. See what Nido are charging students within this development, here. Single studios go for £345 per week.

And if any students residing in Nido are reading this, this is what you could afford. Let's start off with this; a 6-bed house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Hampstead Heath. Zoopla has the details.

Another 6-bed property not far away in Finchley is the same price. £1,800 a week (£7,821 per month). Zoopla again, has the details.

And finally a little bit further afield in Winchmore Hill, students in the Nido development could afford this, again 6 bedrooms. Zoopla has the details. This property is again £1,800 a week (£7,821pcm).

Although this is a blog mainly about new build flats and apartments, I thought I'd mention a slightly different kind of house which keeps coming up on the radar - God's house. Following on from Daniel's blog about the new build church in Hackney, I noticed that Doug Chapman, a surveyor who bought a 900 year old Norman church in Kent for £67,000 is now selling it for £1million after extensive refurbishments. This is it here:

If it's good views over London you're after, then head to Gypsy Hill, SE19...

Or down the road to Knights Hill, SE27... both in the southern reaches of Lambeth.

Being a resident from Brixton and a proud one at that, I unfortunately witnessed at first hand the damage caused by the riots on my way in to work on Monday morning. Tuesday night was on another level though, with Clapham, Peckham and Croydon bearing the brunt of mindless vandalism and criminality.

I was in Peckham yesterday site visiting and although part of Rye Lane was closed due to a couple of shops being the victim of arson, it was very much back to business as usual. And that is the same story for Brixton as well as other areas.

This site on Rye Lane, just up the road was ironically free from any troubles.

This is the real story though, which I believe has shone through over the past couple of days and is a more positive spin on the events that have unfolded. If there can be anything encouraging to grasp at, I believe communities directly affected have come closer, with people coming together, standing up for their communities and saying enough is enough. Volunteers have helped clean up their areas all over and whilst site visiting yesterday I came across this rather heart warming, impromptu stickering of post-it-notes in Peckham from local people, declaring why they love Peckham. Let's hope this sense of community sticks around.

 Stone laying service May 2010

As an asset class, student housing is fast becoming the developers favourite. With high demand and relativeley low supply, this one, as they say, is a no brainer. Latest off the production line (nearly) is New Roman House by Rocket Investments on East Road with 650+ units, topped out and due for completion next year. The Pint of Milk Test remembers when it was just a hole in the ground:

Now look at it:

We recently blogged about Mark Noad's redesign of the iconic Beck London tube map here. Now another variant has emerged, this time it's not the lines that are changed but the background:

More details here.

A few years back we blogged about a certain Mr Xin Yucai, from the Liaoning Province in China who'd come up with a fairly unique way of solving the housing shortage problem. Baisically it involved sewer pipes (clean) and angle grinders (industrial), read more about it here.

Now German outfit, Dasparkhotel, has come up with a new spin on the idea, hotels:

...they walk among us. Or at least they move about quite a bit. We've blogged about the phenomenon before (here and here), specifically the roving Berkeley suite which started life in Acton for the West 3 development but ended up ten miles north as the marketing suite for Stanmore Place. Now it seems that another one's on the loose, this time making it all the way from Surrey Quays to Catford. Specifically from Barratt's Maple Quays to the old Samas Roneo Site (also by Barratt). The location may have changed but the sign remains the same...for now:

And this is what it looked like at the original development a few years ago:

 This is good recycling but why don't they go one step further and keep the existing letters. Best anagram of Maple Quays and Canada Water may win a property industry related prize...

Work is poised to begin on the 3,281-foot (1 kilometre) Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as the construction contract has been awarded to the Saudi Bin Laden Group; the construction superpower owned by the family of late al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

This means the record for the tallest building in the world is set to be replaced yet again -shattering Dubai's Burj Khalifa's record by 568 feet.

The £736m construction contract is expected to take 5 years to build. For more on the story see here

This post is a little off-piste regarding the London residential market but please forgive me; I believe it's worth a mention. Coming from a geography background I have a bit of a geeky fascination with maps, I've no shame in that and this one is a beauty.

After going live a couple of months ago by designer Mark Noad, it's picked up quite a bit of press from the likes of Londonist, Yahoo and even Reuters. The original tube map designed by Harry Beck back in 1931 is still regarded as a design classic and so it should be, but this one displays stations closer to their actual locations and is more geographically correct.

The main difference between the original and Noad's design is that the tube lines are orientated at 30 and 60 degrees rather than 45. Some may find it more confusing, some not, but its design is said to make it easier to choose the right route from A to B, and highlight instances where walking from Charing Cross to Embankment is a lot quicker than getting the tube.

To view the full interactive map, go here. As well as that according to Noad, this is just the start; more layers are going to be added as well as an app produced for smart phones. Don't think it will replace Harry Beck's original classic any time soon though, Noad commented that: "This is not intended as a replacement to the official version, it is simply another way to look at it. We all think differently so you can decide which fits best with your way of thinking. For the first time there is a usable alternative."

A major new mixed use hotel and residential scheme has been given the green light by Newham Council for a scheme in Canning Town. Castelands Construction is the developer who is in fact from Ireland, but has recently expanded into the UK resi market.

The development is for two towers of 17 and 25 storeys to provide 170 purely private residential units and 200 hotel rooms. Instead of providing affordable housing the developer will pay a cash payment of over £6.5m towards off-site provision within the borough. They've also got round providing no on-site affordable by claiming as the site is really a glorified roundabout and being abutted on all sides by major roads, it would be unsuitable for families.

This is the site which fronts on to Tidal Basin Road with the Silvertown Way flyover passing just to the west. The Royal Docks, the new Siemens exhibition centre and Excel are a short distance to the east.

and here's the proposal...

...near St Paul's. Or at least that's what it looks like:

This is Gensler's design for the London River Park which won the top prize at the 2010 London Planning Awards for the Best Conceptual Project Award. And it looks like concept is being turned to reality. A planning application has been submitted to the City this week for the construction of the river walk between Blackfriars and the Tower of London. All this is being developed by Singaporean asset management outfit Venus Group.

The floating park will have gardens together with educational and exhibition spaces and should complete by 2012 to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee amongst other things. Here's a day time render:

Before I start, I'm certainly not going to join in on the student fees argument but I was reading the Times a few days ago and noticed that although the fees have increased, so have the undergrad intake by 4%. There has also been a large increase in planning apps and permission throughout London. There are over 5,000 units under construction and over 13,000 units either at application stage or with permission.  This also doesn't include CLS Holdings' Spring Mews scheme which will hold 406 student digs or Unite Groups' 563 unit student scheme in Camden. Furthermore, Anthony Green & Spencer are considering building 200 student digs outside the new Arsenal Stadium.

I was quite surprised by the large increase in planning apps, thinking that surely students would consider studying closer to home now they'll be forking out £9,000 for just the course. I also, very naively, assumed that the rent for digs would be reduced to increase numbers. I was wrong. Looking at Unite Group's Great Suffolk Street scheme, weekly rent is £269. Nido's Middlesex Street is £280pw. These rates are for 51 week leases - 43 week leases are more expensive.  That makes rent and course fees add up to £23,280pa - £69,840 for the three years, let alone living costs and a maybe the "occasional" drink or two. I'm not surprised they were like this:

However, when the course starts, they'll all be able to relax in a place like this, and with the amount they are paying, they should be too!