May 2009 Archives

Highly interesting tour this morning of the Greenwich Peninsula site in South East London with Quintain's Nick Shattock and Lend Lease's Dan Labbad.

Labbad is clearly getting to know the Jubilee Line theses days as two of his key sites - Greenwich and the Olympic Village are a couple of stops apart. Shattock and Labbad were both on good form about Greenwich, which hands the keys over to TfL for the first offices in mid-June.

Both reckon Greenwich will be the place to go outside of Stratford to enjoy the Olympics party and they are already talking about spectacular events around the Peninsula public square and park. Labbad was pretty upbeat about progress on the village too - highly confident that everything will be built and ready in time for the Games.

Interesting chat with the LDA this week about the ongoing process of compensating businesses that have been relocated to make way for the Olympics site.

There has been some fairly hysterical stuff written in the past about "Mugabe-style" land grabs and so forth which takes little account of the enormous amount of effort that has gone in to finding decent solutions. But still it is clear that the LDA has a way to go before it can draw a line under the land assembly programme.

In this Saturday's EG I focus on KPMG's current audit of the entire process.

The latest update is this: of the 193 businesses that were moved 72 are still in negotiation about final compensation. The LDA says it secured more than 95% of the 4,750 jobs that comprised by spending two years working with each individual businesses.

So, as EGi News has exclusively revealed today, the chief executive of the 2012 Olympics Delivery Vehicle does not come from these shores.

Philadelphia's deputy mayor for planning Andrew Altman will be officially unveiled by the London Development Agency later today.

Altman has on the face of it an impressive CV - he is the first person to combine the roles of Philadelphia's Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and Director of Commerce.

Previous to that he was planning director for Washington DC.

But there are already eyebrows being raised at why the government could not find someone born and raised on British planning and development intricacies to do the job.

One senior regeneration expert told me: "For the average UK property person getting their head around the project is a six-month job, so one has to wonder how long it will take Altman to get up to speed."

And of course the ODA's fractious relationship with its own first chairman, US-born Jack Lemley, has not fostered confidence in transatlantic tie-ups on the project.

It will be interesting to follow how the industry reacts to the news.

Interesting chat with Peter Miller, the chief operating officer of Westfield in the UK, this week.
He is extremely passionate about various methods for bringing forward development and regeneration in the UK and that was the basis of much of the conversation.
Miller provided a detail hypothecation of how much revenue TIFs would bring in for Treasury at a typical Westfield regional centre - read all about it in EG this week!
But with regards to Stratford and the shopping centre Miller was in very upbeat mood.
He says early negotiations to land tenants are going exceptionally well.
"There is nothing else being built in east London and there are retailers still doing well who need to grow," was the general line.

Interesting story in Contract Journal today, not least because it highlights perfectly the never-ending headache the Olympic Village is causing government.

It appears that construction sources to the magazine are questioning whether the 2,800 flats will complete in time for the 2012 Games as building work on five of the 11 accommodation blocks has yet to start, and contract awards are not due until the summer on the towers.

CJ quotes an unsourced residential expert saying: "It is a very tight timetable and not something that has really been done in this country before.

"You are talking about building nearly 3,000 units in just over two years, which is unprecedented in the market."

One has to have some sympathy with the ODA on this one I think.

The government last week finally sorted out its financing arrangement for the project and rubberstamped Lend Lease's role as project manager in the wake of an collapse in private financing that is far more unprecedented than anything they are trying to do building wise.

Moreover despite the uncertainty that had been surrounding the negotiations a quick visit to the site does reveal sizeable buildings springing out of the ground - and it is still only May 2009.

The response from most of my colleagues in the media to the decision to reject Lend Lease's terms for an injection of private equity has been in the main fairly negative, focusing on the tax payer burden in particular.

This piece in The Independent was a small piece of genius though I think.

Quite clearly the village is an oven-ready "second-home" solution for all those poor MPs whose expense accounts are being ripped to shreds just now.

Stranger things have certainly happened.

Right then, I am finally getting my head around what it all means on another momentous day for the development of the Olympics village.

The government and the Olympic Delivery Authority have laid to rest any lingering doubts that Lend Lease might take an equity stake in the 2012 Olympic Village and finalised their funding arrangements for the project.

Here is pretty much the lowdown of exactly how the £1.075bn scheme will be funded.

Two principal questions will remain I guess. Will they be able to secure a better deal from the private sector when the market picks up then the £375m of equity and bank finance Lend Lease offered to provide?

And should another developer have been offered the chance earlier to take on the project when it became clear Lend Lease was unable to provide a debt package the government was happy with.

Today's EGi News Olympics exclusive focuses on Boris's response to the Olympic media centre designs.

It's been an open secret that the mayor and his GLA team are unhappy with the designs for the centre.

As with CABE, Hackney council and the East London Business Alliance and its collection of interested tenants, including ITV, the issue is the ability of the complex to become a major jobs creator post-Games.

The ODA, as we have revealed before, is understandably putting cost cutting at the top of its agenda while planning some revisions to the plans in response to the criticism, with a particular focus on the exterior design.

Today's intervention could force a real rethink though.

While CABE, Hackney and ELBA all have very individual reasons for wanting a state-of-the art, media complex to be built, the mayor is likely to be less sentimental about good design or Hackney's need to be the new Soho in the capital.

The GLA's response surely underlines the real danger that unless there is an urgent rethink it could become 2012's Millennium Dome.

Been at a fascinating breakfast meeting at Gerald Eve's West End offices this morning during which guest speaker Sir Simon Milton had a lot of interesting things to say, much of which will be appearing on EGi and in the magazine soon.
A couple of interesting Olympics-related stories emerged.
Firstly Sir Simon is convinced the stadium will be completed as much as 12 months before the Games and as such current plans are focusing as much as anything on what can be done with it in the run-up to the Games.
Secondly, a chief executive for the Olympics Legacy Special Purpose Vehicle has been appointed and announcement will be made very soon.
I have it on good authority that the person is not a UK national and that it is also not Jay Walder, the former Transport for London man who was in the running for the role.
I will obviously be keeping my ear to the ground to find out who it is, but if anybody else has found out feel free to post it here!

Following last week's vigorous criticism of the Olympic Delivery Authority and construction partner Carillion's detailed designs for the £355m media centre I'm hearing that substantial tinkering has begun.
A clue to what is happening appeared in the ODA's official response to the litany of abuse that has been heaped on the current designs by the likes of CABE, Hackney council and the East London Business Alliance.
While ODA backed its "innovative design" for delivering flexible and green employment space post-Games it also pointed out: "Work on the external appearance of the buildings is ongoing and we look forward to discussing this further with CABE and other partners."
We hear that what that actually entails is quite simple.
Allies & Morrison, which is behind the designs for the Main Press Centre, is being asked to redesign the outside of the entire complex, including the RPS Group-designed International Broadcast Centre.
Which all sounds like the ODA deciding that after RPS was brought in to cut costs and produce a warehouse, Allies & Morrison is being called on to go back to the project and sprinkle some design fairy dust on top.
It makes sense but one leading architectural figure privately said this week that it did little to get rid of the ongoing problem.
"Bad design always occurs when there is no client who intends to live in the space. And that is what is happening with the media centre."

Interesting Construction News piece today on the amount of money officially spent on construction of the Olympic Park sites so far and who is doing the work.

As always the figures are overwhelming - quoted figures from Glenigan show that the ODA had awarded just over £3bn worth of work by mid-March.

With the Olympics site being one of the few shows in town just now, however, it clearly does not bear thinking about what much of UK construction would be doing if it was not working on the project.

It would be interesting to find out how much money the ODA has been able to shave off of initially forecast construction costs thanks to the downturn.

Interesting to see our story about the Skylon and Festival Britain celebration proposals for the Olympics site filtering into other media now.

Nice picture in Building Design which is somewhat oddly showing the tower next to the Houses of Parliament.

The Standard's piece points out that the whole thing would tie in rather cutely with the Queen's diamond anniversary celebrations.