October 2010 Archives

Westfield has added more tenants to the roster at Stratford City.

For those readers here who are going to be regular visitors and who look like to eat it appears the developer has been busy signing up restaurants - a number of which will be new to Stratford which is a bit starved of decent places to eat - if you will pardon the pun.

The battle to build the UK's first "large" casino in the Olympic Borough of Newham is heating up I can reveal.

Leisure groups Genting Malaysia and Apollo Resorts & Leisure have joined forces to bid to build the casino as the first phase of a 68-acre mixed-use scheme at the Silvertown Quays in east London - a site that has had a chequered history to say the least.

There was a funny little story on the front page of the Daily Telegraph today that had "let's leak some good news from government to the official mouthpiece for heaven's sake" written all over it.
None of it all really adds up. Firstly, the Olympics bit.

Here's some good news for Stratford town centre, the area most likely to be fearful of the impact of the new development taking place on the Olympics Park.

Plans have been submitted for a joint education building for the University of East London and Birkbeck University of London on the 11.7-acre Stratford Island site.

The site in the centre of Stratford town centre was put out to tender in spring 2008 for a £1bn regeneration scheme that would have also included a mixed-use extension of Stratford's shopping centre. Then owner LandSec and Westfield, the developer of the nearby Stratford City shopping mall, both expressed an interest.

In the midst of all the savage cuts from government this afternoon one area's vast budget has remained ringfenced.

The Spending Review "maintains the public sector funding package for the 2012 Olympic Games at £9.3bn, supporting delivery of a safe and successful Games".

Let's face it most of the money has been spent and this government really can't pull out now. Here's what the Spending Review says:

There is plenty going on as ever around the Olympics developments this week.

Tonight Andrew Altman and Hackney mayor Jules Pipe are over in Shoreditch meeting specially invited guests from the creative industries to discuss the opportunity at the media centre - I am hoping to get down there, work permitting.

The London Development Agency has contacted me in response to what it terms an "alarmist" London Assembly report published earlier this week which suggests that plans to abolish the regeneration agency by March 2012 would leave £387m of outstanding Olympic Park debt that could have "major implications" for funding programmes across the capital.

The LDA said the following: "The overall deal to transfer the Olympic park represents good business for the LDA, as it will bring us a net benefit of around £875m - through sales, the dropping of commitments and savings on finance costs.

"The question raised by the Assembly about the outstanding debt is largely irrelevant. As a body statute, our assets and liabilities fall to the Government or another body to which these are assigned under statute. So if we are folded into the GLA, that's where the debt - and our assets - will go."

The London Assembly has drawn attention to one of the elephants currently stuck in the Olympics room.

 It estimates in a nrew report which you can read here - EMBARGOED Part 1 - Olympic Park transfer and continuing liabilities without foreword.pdf  - that plans to abolish the London Development Agency by March 2012 will leave £387m of outstanding Olympic Park debt that could have "major implications" for funding programmes across the capital.

I will put a call into the LDA and mayor's office this morning to see how concerned they are about this, but it's good that the Assembly is bringing the matter to the forefront of talks around the mayor's various agency functions.

The London Assembly's Olympic Park transfer and continuing liabilities report, published this morning, warns that the LDA's unresolved Olympic financial commitments have implications for mayoral funding for economic development as well as plans to fold the LDA's functions into the

Just to confirm that Savills has been appointed by the Olympic Delivery Authority to market the 1,439 flats that will become private homes for sale or rent after the 2012 Olympics, as well as a further potential 2,500 homes on adjoining development land.

The media's response to the Olympic Park Legacy Company's vision for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park - as we shall now know it - has been overwhelmingly positive.
I don't want to crow, but I would point out that you would already know much of what has been written in the past 24 hours about the amount and style of housing, how it will be operated and marketed, if you had been reading this blog for the past four months, but I won't.

It was interesting to see so many luminaries from the development and design community - Grainger's Andrew Cunningham, Argent's Roger Madelin and Bob Allies to name but a few - at today's unveiling of the Olympic Park legacy masterplan.

There is clearly no shortage of private sector interest in the opportunity.

Anyway here are another couple of snippets that are doing the rounds.

Here are a few things I picked up at this morning's unveiling of the 20-year masterplan for the Olympic Park post Games.

Firstly, the Labour Party and its involvement has effectively been written out of the pages of history by the new government.

For Tessa Jowell, Ken Livingstone, Tony Blair, David Beckham and such like read Trotsky after Stalin came into power.

The government has confirmed plans to transfer the Olympic Park Legacy Company into a Mayoral Development Corporation controlled by Boris Johnson.

Speaking at the unveiling of the OPLC's 20-year vision for the 500-acre Olympics site in Stratford, east London at the BT Tower in the West End this morning Bob Neill, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said that there will be provision in the Decentralisation and Localism Bill in December for the creation of a Mayoral Development Corporation.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company has unveiled its much-anticipated vision for the 500-acre Olympic Park - which as I have tipped previously on this blog will be known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park - in east London, replacing swathes of planned high-rise flats with low-rise housing targeted at families.
I will update on what I learnt at the press briefing in a minute but here is a look at what is being proposed first.

A number of significant developments again at the Olympics site.

Westfield has gained consent from Newham for its second hotel at Stratford City - an proposed 11-storey, 180,000 sq ft HKR Architects-designed building featuring 188 Holiday Inn bedrooms and 162 serviced apartments run under the Staybridge Suites brand. The hotel will be built above a retail building on the Southern Boulevard.

Newham has also recommended for approval the 42-storey hotel and flats building proposed by Manhattan Loft Corporation and London & Continental Railways on the Stratford City site.

Just got back from a really interesting meeting with Elliot Lipton of First Base, the company that alongside Southern Housing and East Thames Group is to manage and sell the 1379 affordable houses at the Olympic Village post Games.
First Base was set up in the early part of this decade to follow the central premise that it could build and deliver affordable housing for investors in a more efficient and therefore better value way than public sector landowners can.

The Olympic Delivery Authority has officially gone to market with the private housing and development land it owns at the Olympics Village.

It is a lot of housing so the ODA's timing is interesting. It must be feeling confident that the problems it had with Lend Lease and securing value for money from the private sector have passed.