Develop Croydon held a presentation with a difference at MIPIM UK, inviting nine different speakers to offer their own perspective of the borough’s offering.
The session was title Croydon: Just a Minute – and here is what our speakers had to say in their minute (or in some cases, two!!)…
JAMES COLLIER – REGENERATION MANAGER, LONDON BOROUGH OF CROYDON
Welcome to the Develop Croydon session. I’m here sending apologies on behalf of our executive director of place Jo Negrini, who has been struck down by the perennial autumn flu bug.
I got the call at about 7 o clock last night to do this and I was in a pub at the time, it was a very busy pub and a very feint line, and to begin with I thought someone had asked me to host Just a Minute on Radio 4, I thought something untoward had happened to Nicholas Parsons.
Thankfully that hasn’t happened, but you’re probably asking what does Croydon In a Minute mean. Well we thought we’d change things up a bit, have a sort of Peta Kucha thing. The trouble with anyone from the local authority telling you how good the borough is, is that you think back to Mandy Rice-Baker, her quote: “Well he would say that wouldn’t he?”
So don’t take my word for it, we’ve got nine speakers from various different sectors, who are all operating in the borough in various ways. They each have a minute to tell you how wonderful Croydon is and the opportunities that are available in Croydon and some of the great work that is going on there.
From the council point of view, you may have heard us here last year talking about the opportunity. We’ve done a lot over the years in terms of masterplanning, infrastructure studies, all that sort of ‘top down’ big stuff.
We’re working with government now to get some money to release some of that potential. IWhat will come across today from our speakers is that there’s a lot of activity going on from the ‘bottom up’ now. We’ve got the residential, we’ve got the retail, we’ve got the commercial sectors in.
We’ve got tech, we’ve got the likes of Boxpark and the leisure and amenities so that kind of ‘bottom up’ and sort of finer placemaking activity is really underway now together with the masterplanning.
The council and the new administration are really pushing that sense of place in Croydon and working to change the perceptions. Over the next ten minutes you will hear more about how those perceptions are shifting.
Places like Wellesley Road, old-school Croydon, are the sort of issues we are trying to address, making it a more human landscape, making it more pedestrian and cycle friendly, so instead of coming through Croydon now succumbing to the large buildings, you are going to be able to walk around it and realise a much more benign environment.
A lot of our development partners are coming to Croydon on the basis of that – it’s a much more approachable place.
So if you’re passing through to Gatwick please get off at the station if you haven’t already – we need to talk to you all.
CRAIG MARKS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE MENTA
Menta is a regeneration company, and we’ve been involved in Croydon for at least 10 years.
We’ve been involved with the council in developing the masterplans, there are five masterplans, but we’ve been particularly involved with the East Croydon Masterplan where we’ve got 3million sq ft of consented development.
That’s between us, Schroders and Stanhope who have got consent for 1million sq ft of new offices and 600 homes. We’ve got consent for 800 homes and public realm and infrastructure improvements.
So we’ve been in Croydon a long, time getting the place into position where we’ve got to the stage where it is really happening and I want to talk about cranes.
We’ve got two on our site and there are currently eight cranes in existence on the East Croydon Masterplan, so I think this is a good time to launch the Croydon Crane Count.
The plan and projections are that we are going to have 25 to 30 cranes on site in operation in 2017/2018 in Croydon with the arrival of the Westfield development and the other key developments, other investors and developers come forward with.
Once the majority of them come down in 2020/2021 we will be left with a place which is a fabulous place to work, with new offices, a fabulous place to live, key infrastructure and leisure and retail facilities.
So I would invite you all to come and have a look at Croydon.
HANNAH STAUNTON – HEAD OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, GATWICK AIRPORT
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Croydon is only 15 minutes from Gatwick. Gatwick is already a fantastic airport. We’ve got 40million passengers going through this year, voting with their feet.
Looking at some our low-cost long haul routes, we will be flying £150 to New York City, we’ll be flying to over 200 destinations directly, 95 per cent of our passengers get through security in under five minutes.
All of this means that East Croydon – and Croydon as a city – is already one of the best connected cities in London and certainly in the world.
We know from working with Croydon for the last year to 18 months that Croydon has drive, and it has a real ambition about what it wants to do and where it wants to go. We have bought into that entirely.
We have been working very closely to ensure that we can support that and that they can support our ambition too.
So we see Croydon’s ambition and if the government does something very sensible at the end of the year and chooses to raise airport capacity where it will do the most good, both for Croydon and the people of London,
Croydon’s unstoppable rise to being the gateway to the world for London will be absolutely undeniable.
So we really do back everything that’s happening in Croydon at the moment.
NEIL KIERNAN – ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, ASSAEL ARCHITECTURE
I’m here to talk about the importance of public arts. Croydon is undergoing one of the most extensive regeneration programmes among the London boroughs at the moment.
Public art is so important because it is a mechanism for improving the environment and changing it so all these elements combined give a specific view about our connection with arts, than a gallery or a museum ever would.
So to enable this it has to be tactile, is has to make connections, be informative, be educational, evoke a sense of pride, a sense of ownership and create a sense of belonging.
Our vision is for St Michael’s Square, which is going to planning at the moment. Within this proposal we have public art elements connected within the building into the landscape, and also connected to St Michael’s Church.
What we do know is that there are only four pieces of artwork in Croydon on Wikipedia, which is really low, so we hope that in the next few years public art will be put at the top there in Croydon.
We should take also take talents from places like the RISEgallery and Croydon School of Arts. There’s people there like David Bowie, John Rocha; great people, artists, very important, have all come from there.
ROGER WADE – CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BOXPARK
Our role in Croydon is as a meanwhile partner for Croydon. What does that mean? We are going to build all these lovely buildings in Croydon, but how are we actually going to attract people into Croydon? Also for people who actually live in Croydon, our responsibility is to make that real: why do you want to come into Croydon?
I was asked the question ‘Why Croydon?’ I’ll come back to you ‘Why not Croydon?’
Two facts I’ve learnt: If Croydon was a city, it would be eighth largest city in Britain. It’s 15 minutes away from London Bridge, from Victoria, it’s 15 minutes away from Gatwick. East Croydon Station has got fantastic traffic.
The station has got 500,000 visitors every week, 80,000 people use the tram outside East Croydon Station. So really, it’s not why Croydon; it’s why not.
KATHARINE GLASS – DIRECTOR, WHITE LABEL CREATIVE
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I am vice-chair of Develop Croydon which is the public/private sector partnership that exists to promote Croydon pro-actively as a place to live, work and invest.
I’ve been asked just to tell you a little bit about some of the community activity that’s going on in Croydon. As Roger says, it’s not just about the buildings.
The buildings are obviously important, and the building is actually happening, but what about the people who live and work in Croydon or visit Croydon? What is their view of Croydon as they come into the town centre?
This year we’ve seen an incredible amount of festival activity, meanwhile use activity; Croydon even hosted the Pearl Izumi cycle tour through the town centre earlier on this year which was a first. That Tour normally goes through large cities, so why not Croydon? It may not be called a city but it’s certainly got all of the infrastructure which would make it a city – apart from a cathedral.
We also saw Croydon’s first beach installation, and some of you will have read about that in Time Out being recommended as one of the top ten places in London to go to see the beach. Who would have thought it in Croydon?
And we also showed Wimbledon for two weeks on a big screen on the land Stanhope and Schroder Ruskin Square site as well.
So an incredible amount of activity to encourage the place Croydon to grow and develop alongside the cranes and the buildings.
We also had our first rooftop cinema on top of the NCP car park at East Croydon, which was another very vibrant cultural activity.
Also we have RISEgallery. Go and have a look online, have a look at the Mural Project which is a vast amount of graffiti art which is now being showcased across a number of internationally-renowned artists that are now coming to change that face of Croydon.
JAMES COLLIER: We may not have a cathedral but I would like to clarify that Croydon does have what I believe is London’s only Minster.
MARTIN SKINNER – CHIEF EXECUTIVE, INSPIRED ASSET MANAGEMENT
We are looking to inspire a new solution to the housing crisis, starting in Croydon. We’re producing, nationally, half as many homes as we need and have been for a long time now.
Our solution is to make them affordable by design and solve that problem at the same time by making them smaller.
We design them more efficiently, we put in appropriate technology, and we can produce them in approximately half the size of the traditional one and two bed apartment but our consumer gets more for less in the process.
We also provide a service with it, including for example three sky gardens with electric barbecues, free private residents’ members clubs, amazing cycle storage, maintenance and hire solutions, smart locker systems, every resident gets a 1GB internet connection, so there’s a whole lifestyle that comes with these apartments.
We believe it’s a much more modern way to live. Our consumers don’t want the extra space anyway, they don’t want to have to clean it for a start!
So simple solutions to something that’s been a problem for quite a long time.
DEAN SMITH, DIRECTOR, WT PARTNERSHIP
We are project and cost managers for property construction working across public and private sectors. We’ve been established for over 60 years, but for the last 40 years we’ve been based in Croydon.
Croydon is our home, it’s our head office, and a third of our staff actually live and work in the Croydon borough.
We are totally dependent and wholly owned by our directors. Now that’s our point of differentation with our competitors, but what actually makes Croydon different?
You may not know this, but Croydon has more green spaces than most other London boroughs. More than Haringey, Waltham Forest, Hendon, Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea and Islington just to name a few. To coin a phrase not a lot of people know that.
Green spaces are important for creating a sense of well-being, they attract business and residents to an area and they complement the built environment.
Over recent years this has been recognised by the borough and we see that changing and evolving. It’s important to continue and to maintain and to promote green spaces in tangent with enhancing the built environment to secure continued growth and to create an environment and investment that brings further jobs, homes and vibrancy to the borough.
This, along with the excellent public transport links, is one of the ways that Croydon could and should continue to promote itself locally and internationally.
CAROLYN KENNEY – DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR AT HAMMERSON
I’m going to talk to you about something that was part of Croydon’s past but that is also very much part of Croydon’s future.
The Almshouses in Croydon are a Grade I Listed building that now sits surrounded by newer development and tower buildings.
They were built in 1596 by Archbishop John Whitgift who used to spend his summer vacations in Croydon, so maybe we’re missing a trick in terms of the holiday market, but he used to come here on his way from Lambeth to Canterbury and was struck by the plight of the poor and unprivileged people in the area.
He decided he would like to set up a hospital and a school with a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I. That charter is still on display in the audience chamber at the Almshouses.
So he had the foresight to think about charitable endeavours. The Foundation also owned the site adjacent which was the site of one of their school buildings, which then had the Whitgift Shopping Centre built on it in the 1960s.
That site now forms the basis of our proposals to redevelop the retail offer in Croydon, redeveloping the Whitgift and surrounding land to create a regional shopping destination.
So as you can see, the Whitgift Foundation was part of the history 400 years ago and they’re now our partners taking forward that retail scheme.
JAMES COLLIER
Hopefully you’ve had a flavour of what’s going on in Croydon across the different sectors – across transport, infrastructure and got a sense of going on and the opportunities.
So please explore for yourself. Come down and speak to us, speak to Develop Croydon or to any of our partners.