Quintain has vision of Wembley

The massive regeneration of Wembley has taken another step forward with Quintain getting planning permission for the 157,930 sq.metres (1.7 million sq.ft.) Wembley City North West scheme.

It will be built around the new civic centre with 1,300 homes, a new shopping street with 30 units and a department store together with the upgrade of the Olympic Way, the pedestrian route into the stadium.

The £500 million development will be built in tandem with the existing plan for a mixed use scheme of 594,560 sq.metres (6.4 million sq.ft.) surrounding the sports stadium. An interesting point about the planning permission for the North West sector is that Quintain is required to provide only 15% of the housing for social tenants.

Adrian Wyatt, Chief Executive of Quintain, believes Wembley will benefit from the strong growth of the London economy over the next 15 years at a faster pace than other major cities in the world, said PwC.

Evidence of this growth is apparently provided by the take up figure for offices in London over the past few years, which was over 510,950 sq.metres (5.5 million sq.ft.) in the first six months.

Wyatt sees Wembley as another nodal point for London with a travelling time of only 10 minutes to Marylebone. He is not alone in his bullish view of Wembley because St Modwen is engaged in a £90 million development around the central railway station and high street for 12,542 sq.metres (135,000 sq.ft.) of retailing, together with offices, an 86 bedroom hotel and 24 flats.

The sheer scale of the development in Wembley will probably carry the area forward, as it is likely to do in Stratford with the vast new Westfield Shopping Centre, which has just opened, and the Olympic sports facilities. Apart from the opening of the shopping centre, this scheme has moved forward with Jones Lang LaSalle and BNP Paribas Real Estate being appointed by Lend Lease and London & Continental Railways to market the 371,600 sq.metres (4 million sq.ft.) International Quarter Stratford City campus. Construction of the £1.3 billion scheme on 500 acres will start in 2013 and is expected to benefit from the publicity generated by the Olympic Games.

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Third time lucky

Councillors in Watford will be hoping that it is third time lucky for the redevelopment of the town centre. They had been faced by the second choice developer, London & Regional, pulling out of the project because apparently it wants “to concentrate on the core business.” They had taken over from Capital Shopping Centres for the 37,160 sq.metres (400,000 sq.ft.) Charter Place scheme.

Now the baton has passed to Henry Boot Developments as the council’s joint venture partner. This has been a real problem for many towns throughout the UK as the decline in the economy hit home and developers pulled out of shopping centre schemes. The one comforting piece of information at the moment is that the increase in the number of empty units in shopping centres has, according to the latest surveys, halted although still leaving some centres with athird of the shops empty.

Canadians to the rescue

A Canadian company has stepped in to develop the £300 million Caltongate scheme and provide a boost to the market in Scotland’s capital city.

Prism Developments is discussing taking it over from Deloitte, the Administrator, and the Bank of Scotland. The site is located in the Old Town and was the subject of a mixed use scheme by Mountgrange.

The plan was for offices of 17,187 sq.metres (185,000 sq.ft.), 200 flats and a Sofitel Hotel which encountered considerable local opposition. Prism is not the first developer interested in the scheme because Deloitte has talked to a number of companies including Allied London and British Land.

One major scheme which is going ahead in the Old Town is the £45 million development on the Royal Mile of a hotel and mixed use project in the Castlehill area by the Chris Stewart Group.The hotel will be operated by Motel One which has 32 hotels in Germany and one in Austria and will be housed in the former buildings of Edinburgh City Council Development Department on Market Street.

In addition there will be residential space including self catering apartments, six offices totalling 5,574 sq.metres (60,000 sq.ft.) and two restaurants. The site stretches from Market Street towards Advocates Close and will take three years to complete. Chris Stewart said: “Although this site was challenging for us due to its sensitive nature and historic context, we were sure it could provide Motel One with everything they were looking for. I hope that Market Street is the first of many projects which we do with Motel One.”

As far as the office market is concerned, the first quarter saw a fall from the level of September- December 2010. Even so, it was a healthy 13,935 sq.metres

(150,000 sq.ft.) in 39 deals.