The shock news that Westfield will not have its new redevelopment plans ready until 2025 and that the scheme may not be completed for 15 years means that the Town Centre will continue to be run down for years. Details can be seen in Evening Standard 23 October and Inside Croydon 18 and 20 October.
The Croydon Trade Union Council pointed out the risks involved in relying on property development as a motor for regeneration in its commentary What Kind of Economy Do We Need in Croydon? in August 2014. (https://seancreighton1947.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/croydons-growth-plan-ctuc-working-party-assessment/)
There has been a long history of this naïve reliance as discussed in the review Let’s Go to Croydon by Jonathan Mades in the London Review of Books in April of John Grindrod’s book iconicon: a journey around the landmark buildings of contemporary britain published in March.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/jonathan-meades/let-s-go-to-croydon
The last a paragraph reads:
‘Croydon possesses one of London’s more abject properties: its centre is a near permanent building site. Building is a glutton for energy. The proposition that there is an option not to build is as incomprehensible to the Croydon mind as it is hostile to the developer mind. Doing nothing smacks of negligence, idleness and an absence of the showy dynamism de rigueur in a place so hip and apparently ‘edgy’ that the National Trust has, late in the day, organised tours called Edge City: bring your own knives. Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer but the unaffordability of housing in East London. Let’s go to Croydon! For want of anywhere else. This is by no means the first wave of migration to cause Croydon to be treated as a laboratory. The splendid Will Alsop was, according to Grindrod, ‘the king of back-of-an-envelope architecture’, which is wrongheaded. Prone to exaggeration, Alsop called Croydon ‘the English version of Manhattan’. His brief in the 1990s was to turn it into a city to match Westminster and the Square Mile. For the council’s executive director that naturally meant cranes. It did not, apparently, matter what was built so long as the skyline was crosshatched with cranes – just like the cities that Alsop sought to emulate. A subsequent ‘placemaking team’ attempted the same. It was bound to fail given that such teams are committees composed of blinkered members of ‘the community’. They are not the way to devise successors to Bournville and Bata. There was also the problem of the snobbery excited by Croydon. Its own councillors despise it, welcome the likelihood of its demolition because the next version is sure to be better: Croydon is a ‘brand’ forever susceptible to rebrands and rebrands. It is perfectible until it is decided that it is not. Developers are happy to dismiss it: ‘We don’t use our best teams for Croydon … you get our C team or D team.’ That, from on high, is another authentic, unashamed voice of the market. A shrug that confirms the worthlessness of the little people who get what they deserve, if they’re lucky. The message of the buildings is simple: this is your cage – now know your place.’
The Croydon Comeback – 3 Years On
Back in April 2021 Bare PR published its report The Croydon Comeback based on talking to the Council, Boxpark, Hammerson, several local cultural organisations, and a small number of individuals about the future post pandemic. The themes it highlighted were:
- Change must be driven by the people.
- Inclusion that encompasses ‘hidden’ audiences.
- Not a cookie cutter town centre.
- Connectivity between Croydon’s spaces.
- Creativity is the language of community.
- From grey to green.
One of the most interesting quotes was from Boxpark’s Head of Development Matthew Mcmillan. “The best recoveries will be secured through fine grained, piecemeal and collaborative effort rather than through big bang major developments. Individual multi-billion-pound development projects are not agile enough to respond to the fast-moving changes in society.”
BARE PR also carried out work for the Croydon Airport Trust.
Has the optimism that flows through the paper been realised or pushed off track by the financial crisis, and the continued uncertainty over the Westfield and St George’s developments?
Looking Back To the Whitgift CPO Inquiry 2015
It is worth noting that in her evidence justifying the making of the CPO to enlarge the Whitgift development area, Jo Negrini, the then Executive Director of Development and Environment, and later Chief Executive, argued:
‘It is clear from my discussions with a number of developers considering investing in Croydon that there are other schemes which would be likely to come forward as result of the confirmation of the CPO.’
It would be interesting to know what developers’ schemes actually went ahead?
She stated that the Whitgift was projected to generate up to 5,000 additional part-time and full-time jobs in the Town Centre and 330 indirect jobs, excluding the building phase jobs.
How many have actually been created and how many lost?
She stated that the Council was ‘delivering a £50.8 million programme of regeneration schemes’ in the Croydon Opportunity area.
How many of these reached successful conclusion and what were they? Was all the money spent and if not how much is left unspent?
She stated ‘LBC estimates that the public sector support need to drive change, amounts to around £1.1bn. LBC has already raised nearly a third of this amount through its own sources and TfL investment. This leaves a funding gap of £805 million’
What was the LBC and TfL money allocated for, and was it spent?
What is the current estimated funding need projection and gap?
Future Economic Policy
A new approach is needed to future economic policy.
Although eleven years old my general thoughts on this can be read at:
https://historyandsocialaction.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-local-economic-strategy-for-croydon.html
and many of the Croydon TUC’s suggestions in 2014 are relevant.
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