A report in today's issue of "The Times"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...550818,00.html demonstrates
clearly how important convenient access to extensive rail services is in
stimulating investment in property development. The area concerned is
between Croydon's main rail stations, beside the hub of the modern
tram/light rail network. Unfortunately, the developers concerned are
unlikely to make a significant contribution to funding the public investment
in transport facilities that has made their operations so profitable...

Regards,

- Alan (in Brussels)

Is Croydon about to take a bite of the Big Apple?

By Giles Whittell

It's not Manhattan but developers are planning £2 billion skyscrapers


(...) Not for the first time, the great suburban node of office blocks that
is Croydon is being talked up as South London's new Manhattan. The reason is
a sudden frenzy of bidding from international developers to build
skyscrapers here. More skyscrapers.

To the pride of its boosters and the shame of many of its residents, this
tangle of concrete and tramlines on the edge of the A to Z pioneered the
vertical British brutalist architectural style in the 1960s.

The most famous result was Lunar House, a 20-storey slab on Wellesley Road
that is not the Empire State Building but does a passing imitation of Ellis
Island: huddled masses gather underneath it every morning to petition the
Home Office for visas.

Five developers want to spend £2 billion over ten years on a clutch of
gleaming high-rises - and even an ersatz Carnegie Hall - that will surely
have Donald Trump wondering why he never thought of Croydon.

Carnegie Hall, in fact, does not quite capture it. The 12,000-seat indoor
arena planned for a 12-acre site next to East Croydon station by the
Arrowcroft group will be more like Madison Square Garden on steroids. An
artist's impression has the arena as a gleaming UFO flanked by steel and
glass towers, one of them 35 storeys high.

There is a problem: a rival group owns most of the land and does not want to
sell. There is a similar awkwardness over Croydon's next-biggest project, to
expand the old Whitgift Shopping Centre (once the biggest in the country,
now merely the biggest in town) and make it the biggest in the country all
over again.

The council backs Minerva plc and its million sq ft plan for a shopping and
eating mecca called Park Place. But the Whitgift Foundation believes that
Park Place is not viable, and it is used to getting its way. It has owned
the freehold on much of central Croydon for 400 years. But, as Sinatra would
have hollered, if invited, Croydon's a helluva town. Its Rockefellers insist
that the can-do spirit that delivered the Wellesley Road underpass and the
Duppas Hill flyover will prevail.

"There'll be a snowball effect," Geoff Sparrow said. He is the investment
director of Howard Holdings, which is planning a £90 million menu of
developments for Croydon, including a 25-storey residential tower
constructed from "post-tension concrete slab clad in terracotta, steel,
aluminium and glass".

"All these developers wouldn't be committing to projects like this without
faith in the location," Mr Sparrow said. "And £2 billion in ten years is an
awful lot of faith."

SNIP rest of story