Change is coming to the City – but let’s notget excited about a tacky shopping centre
One New Change sounds like an unambitious and probably tautologous political slogan, but it’s actually a postal address. New Change is a cut-through from Cheapside to Cannon Street, ‘Change’ in this context being an old version of Exchange, as in ‘on change, amongst the merchants’, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. In place of what used to be a Bank of England annexe, the postman will now find a £500 million retail complex, opened last week to a fanfare of claims that it represents a milestone both in economic recovery and in the transformation of the Square Mile from a citadel of finance to a destination for shopping and leisure (which is probably also a tautology these days).
So I rushed to see this allegedly iconic edifice designed by a prize-winning Frenchman, Jean Nouvel — a name that might have been invented for a balls-achingly avant-garde architect in a satirical play. I can wax lyrical about exciting contemporary architecture, but in my opinion that’s not what this is. It’s a dark, sleek, angular structure (hence its nickname, the ‘Stealth Bomber’) which pays scant respect to St Paul’s Cathedral across the road and, unlike more sympathetic developments in the vicinity — such as Paternoster Square, which Monsieur Nouvel would no doubt dismiss as pastiche — it does not have the feel of a place that has been built to last. So if you’re desperate to find a new branch of Accessorize, pop down to One New Change; but if you’re in search of a metaphor for an economy in transition, look elsewhere.
Tower of strength
Several other new developments have been hailed, more convincingly, as votes of confidence in the future of the City. They are (or will be) office towers with odd nicknames like British Land’s ‘Cheesegrater’ in Leadenhall Street and Land Securities’ ‘Walkie- Talkie’ in Fenchurch Street. But the one that caught my eye this week was the more prosaic Heron Tower in Bishopsgate, not least because it has already been topped out. Currently the tallest structure in the City, this is a development by Gerald Ronson’s Heron Corporation with backing from the sovereign wealth fund of Oman. Ronson, now 71, is the veteran property tycoon who did six months in Ford open prison for his role in the 1986 Guinness scandal but subsequently fought his way back to respectability, having never lost the support of key investors who felt he had been harshly judged.
What’s remarkable about his Bishopsgate scheme is not its design but the fact that after seven years of planning during an era when prospects looked so much rosier, work began on site in mid-2007 and has continued with only minor interruptions right through the financial crisis. Heron’s property portfolio has not been immune (it took a £54 million write-down in 2009) but the resilience of Gerald Ronson himself makes his tower a far more positive symbol for the post-crunch City than any tacky shopping mall.
Still boarded up
Scouring the London landscape for economic symbolism, I’ve also been taking a roll-call of historic properties that changed hands during the boom years only to be boarded up and left to decay. One such is the so-called Piccadilly Estate — the former Naval and Military Club, known as the ‘In and Out’, and its adjacent buildings — which has come back onto the market after the collapse of a £200 million sale by the current owners, who abandoned a plan to turn it into a six-star hotel with the help of a giant mortgage from that most imprudent of boomtime lenders, the Bank of Scotland. The clubhouse has been empty since 1999, and I wouldn’t bet on its gates being unchained before the middle of this decade.
Of all the landmark buildings abandoned by the receding tide, one of the saddest is the former Midland Bank headquarters in Poultry: the historian David Kynaston once described this Lutyens masterpiece as ‘conveying a sense of immeasurable authority and the deepest of deep pockets’. But it was sold for £72 million in 2006 to a former Russian minister, Vladimir Chernukhin, who was going to turn it into, yes, a six-star hotel, but whose pockets were evidently not as deep as they seemed. His development company went under in 2009, owing £55 million in mortgage-backed bonds, and little seems to have happened since. If you’re heading for a card-fuelled spree at One New Change, just up the road, I invite you to pause and contemplate the symbolism of the vandalised stonework either side of the great brass doors that led to Lutyens’s marbled banking hall: those crudely bricked-up holes must be where the cash machines used to be.
Money where his mouth is
I’m pleased to see Terry Smith, the pugnacious former chairman of stockbrokers Collins Stewart, launching a new equity fund which promises to do for the small investor what Ryanair does for the traveller — combining low costs (a flat 1 per cent fee, one third of the norm, and a £1,000 minimum stake) with a stream of invective from the man at the top. He started as he’ll no doubt go on, by describing the rest of the fund management industry as ‘broken’.
But then Smith has never lacked for confidence in his own opinions. I first came across him in 1986, when he jumped from being a planning manager at Barclays to being an equity analyst in its investment bank BZW (where I worked), multiplying his pay packet as he did so; he promptly wrote a ‘Sell’ note which began ‘Something wrong at Barclays’, causing apoplexy in the chairman’s suite. He’s been making waves ever since, and it will be fascinating to see whether he really can emulate Warren Buffett, as he intends, by picking and holding just a couple of dozen winning stocks in his fund. He has seeded it with £25 million of his own fortune and identified himself in its name, Fundsmith. So if it underperforms, he’ll have nowhere to hide.
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