It was interesting to go along to the launch of Phase One of Barratt's redevelopment of the St Andrews hospital site in East London last night.
The Bromley-by-Bow patch of land is massive, and it is always quite thrilling when you see a massive block like that rising out of the ground. The development is, of course, made up of flats not houses, and to be honest it looks very much how you might expect a Barratt development to look. It must also be said that most of the housing around it is also flats, so one might wonder what makes this one any different.
Barratt, of course, is displaying optimism, although one senior sales director admitted "We probably wouldn't have spent so much on the marketing suite in the boom years" to me, as swankily-dressed waiters offered me another glass of champagne and a plate of hors d'oeuvres.
Nonetheless, there might be something in their claim that the scheme is coming up at the right time for the market. Flats were selling at just under £200,000 last night, and considering the land is right next to a tube station, that doesn't seem unreasonable for trendy East London. The area needs a lot of TLC, of course, (the scheme proposes an on-site police station, of all things) and I have no doubt Barratt would have done quite a few things differently in an ideal world. The land belongs to the LDA, for example, which is insisting on 50% affordable housing. The building of the 27-storey tower block on the site has also been pushed back to an anon date, after the two other phases are built out and the market has picked up.
Nonetheless, Barratt has been talking some positive talk in the last few weeks about new models, and lateral thinking to keep the business running. And based on what Alastar Baird was saying last week, I think it is genuinely only a matter of time before we see a Barratt Student Homes model pop up on ourstreets.
