The Whitgift Centre is a slowly decaying, little-visited shell of its former glories, having been left, under-maintained for a decade, waiting for a Westfield that never came
It took until August 2021, but finally, Croydon Council admitted – it was never going to happen.
A report to the council’s cabinet conceded that, after nine years, two planning applications, a public inquiry and massive CPO, the long-promised, £1.4billion Westfield and Hammerson redevelopment of the Whitgift Centre is dead. It is no more. It has passed on. Croydon Westfield has ceased to be. It’s pushing up the daisies. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker…
The supermall never got off the drawing board of developers and ‘regeneration practitioners’
Inside Croydon was among the first to identify some of the serious flaws with a scheme which was embraced by Tory and Labour politicians alike, having been foisted on the borough by a Conservative MP and Croydon’s biggest landowners, aided and abetted by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London. Yeah, Johnson, a man noted for having really bad judgement when it comes to public projects.
Seven years before the council ended its supermall delusions, economist and union official Andrew Fisher cited John Maynard Keynes as he wrote, “At a time of weak consumer demand, with retail sales shifting from the High Street to the internet, is a new shopping centre really the best Croydon can do?”
You see, it wasn’t as if the eventual collapse of the multi-billion, multi-national scheme wasn’t predictable.
Fisher wrote, “The real story here is privatisation and deregulation. Housing and transport policy are now subject to the whim of developers, no longer subject to democratic control to ensure the best interests of communities are prioritised. This has now become a secondary concern once the interests of under-taxed private investors have been sated.”
And once the profit was gone (if it was ever really there with the Croydon Westfield scheme), so was the developers and “regeneration practitioners” supermall wet dream.
And Inside Croydon has monitored the project’s (lack of) progress since 2012.
One of Westfield’s early “visualisations” of its scheme for Croydon. Funny how the roads are highlighted…
From the Mexican stand-off between rival developers Westfield and Hammerson to the intervention of Johnson, this redevelopment of the down-at-heel Whitgift Centre and its unification with Centrale had come with promises of it being a “game changer” for our town.
The original offer involved 2million square feet of new shop space, 600 homes and “destination” leisure facilities. It would make it the largest scheme of its kind in the country once completed, we were promised by the Barwells and Negrinis.
When first announced, it came with a 2017 target date for completion, promising 5,000 jobs (though without any details of what sort of jobs these might be, whether they are full-time posts, all in retail, or mainly replacing the low-skilled, low-paid jobs currently provided within the Whitgift Centre).
By the time “Hammersfield” was finally put out of its misery, after Brexit and covid shocks to the already critical high street retail sector, the government was predicting 8,000 job losses across Croydon due to the pandemic.
But then, such economic set-backs, with the supermall at its core, was always predictable.
By 2016, and not a single brick had been laid. And that was before the outcome of the EU Referendum.
As Inside Croydon was asking as early as 2016, “Will Hammersfield ever deliver, or could Croydon suffer the fate of Bradford, with developer blight for a decade or more? Is it a matter of the Emperor’s New Clothes?”
Or delve back into our archive for some of our earliest take on the project tat was doomed from the start:
- Hammerson and Westfield agree to work together in Croydon
- The council’s in a hole, and yet they still keep on digging
- Mary Portas, Westfield, Bradford and a £1bn hole in the ground
- Barwell, Brexit and Croydon’s troubled Westfield dream
- The MP, the charity, the £1bn scheme and a three-year closure
- Boris’s cunning plan: too high, too many, too central
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The whole thing was devised to fool the public and property boomers to build
Unwanted block upon block of high cost flats that will eventually become like all
The other blocks thrown up recently over priced under sized and bought by oligarchs
To clean up monies.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit about Westfield. What I would like to know now is, why croydon looking so bad, no good shops that use to be. Looks like a dead place . Such a shame I lived in croydon all my life. Never seen it so bad.
I wish people would stop being so negative. Croydon is a great place to shop. The new blocks of flats are great too.
You’re deluded…
Very, very deluded. I have lived in Croydon for over 20 years and it has never looked this bad. Realism is not negative. It costs money to build. As stated, the flats look lovely but affordable to who? Renters are priced out, buyers are priced out, so it is sold to those that have the cash….and this isn’t landlords as the rent wont cover the mortgage….foreign investors sounds familiar…
Have you examples of foreign investors buying in Croydon? The increase in values of the properties here might not be attractive enough.
There were a couple of examples, maybe a decade ago, of new blocks being marketed to buyers in the Far East, but we’ve not seen anything like that since the Westfield “dream” turned sour
I’m so confused why anyone would buy any of these flats with the state Croydon town centre is in… there is literally NOWHERE to eat or shop… Why so many flats in a place noone wants to live, it doesn’t make any sense
Well apart from the obvious falsehood about there being “literally NOWHERE…” caps lick off, “to eat or shop” (yes, it’s not great, but you have LITERALLY exaggerated), the reason there have been so many flats built is because land prices in Croydon remain much lower than much of London, providing developers with lower costs and juicier profits.
Ten Degrees, for example, is right opposite BoxPark, and up the road from Basil and Grape, Wagamama, Pizza Express. 10 mins walk to the places to eat in South Croydon. Fast food abounds. It’s 20 mins from central London, and 50 mins from Brighton. Easy to get to LGW, and to St Pancras for the Eurostar. Many cafes such as TMRW that also has hot-desking. Shopping on all High Streets is dipping, but an M&S, Next, concessions in Centrale, as well as Iceland and the the remaining Sainsbury’s. Fresh food shopping on Surrey Street, with independent butchers and fishmongers on Church Street. What elase could we offer you?
That’s the Estate agents view and all correct, But not everyone likes chicken shops but we all want clean,safe streets
We could do with West fields to bring Croydon back from scrap other wise no one is going to shop in Croydon we could do with me cafes also a b@m every body loves these shops also a wilko and a home bargain shop and more food shops and they could make our primary bigger and put a cafe in it like just like the one in Birmingham please consider in saving Croydon it’s nothing like I remember when I was growing up even Surrey Street Market has gone down hill
https://resources-unibail-rodamco.azurewebsites.net/01_URW-Homepage/2022_investor_day/Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield%20presents%20path%20to%202024%20and%20beyond.pdf – where does this leave the croydon blight/project ?!
Just as we’ve reported for the last four or five years, including this: https://insidecroydon.com/2022/10/30/westfields-boss-admits-covid-was-nail-in-coffin-for-croydon/
It’s a shame what’s happened, and continues to happen, to Croydon. Although little consolation the nearest thing we now have is Bromley’s shopping centre. It looks like, in a small scale, what Croydon used to look like a decade or so ago. It’s a longer bus ride but at least we have that option. I went into the Whitgift Centre earlier today and it was almost like a ghost town with around 10% of shops open and with hardly any shoppers. I saw more cleaners with ‘Wet Floor’ cones than shoppers
Sutton is quicker by bus.