What developers Redrow call the “Morello Quarter”, their development at East Croydon which will have separate entrances for social housing and private residents
1pm UPDATE: Seems that the nice people at the Redrow marketing department may have had second thoughts about their soft-focus soft-porn for their over-priced London flats.
Their two minutes of carefully crafted advertisement video appears to have vanished from the interweb. Of course, this may be something as innocent as “technical issues”. Or it might be because someone has decided that maybe, just maybe, it is just a touch too tacky, even for property developers.
It had all happened within a couple of hours of Inside Croydon posting this article drawing attention to the somewhat pretentious piece of real estate salesmanship, featuring a sub-James Bond character with Beckhamesque facial hair and a horribly outdated mobile phone.
Fortunately for our loyal reader, however, the Torygraph had also noticed Redrow’s nauseating property porn, and they secured a version of it before it could be wiped from the interweb, so you can see it by clicking here (presumably until Redrow’s legal department stick their oar in).
Our report originally began thus…
Disappointed property-hunters now find this message where the Redrow property porn video was once to be found
Workmen have been seen this morning on Menta’s Cherry Orchard Road, where they are building hundreds of yuppie flats – £400,000 for a three-bedroom apartment in a block that backs on to the railway tracks at East Croydon.
It might just be that the developers have coughed up the unpaid Community Investment Levy (yep, £360,000 – or less than the price of a single apartment in the three-block development) which saw Croydon Council slap a warning order to halt work on the site before Christmas.
It would appear from their marketing video that Redrow is “selling a lifestyle” here – “If it was easy… it wouldn’t feel as good” – although we don’t believe that having someone waiting for you, laid out on silk sheets in the apartment is included in the price. But who knows, the concierges may be able to assist.
Nor do we think it is possible for the “Morello Quarter” to offer views from its apartment’s balconies quite as seen here…
Anyone else feeling nauseous at this property porn?
Note to Redrow’s marketing department: Make sure you get a proper upgrade from your 1990s non-smart Nokia next time your phone contract’s up for renewal.
- Council orders halt to work on Menta site over unpaid levy
- Londoners being priced out of London by social cleansing
- Council backs developers to allow Croham flat conversions
Coming to Croydon
- Purley and Coulsdon debating society: Philp v Benn, Jan 5
- David Lean Cinema, Mr Turner, Jan 8
- David Lean Cinema, Leviathan, Jan 13
- Norwood Society talk: Penge, the making of a suburb, Jan 15
- David Lean Cinema, The 78 Project Movie, Jan 15
- David Lean Cinema, Hannah Arendt, Jan 20
- David Lean Cinema, The Imitation Game, Jan 22
- South Croydon business breakfast, Jan 24
- David Lean Cinema, Night Will Fall, Jan 27 (Holocaust Memorial Day)
- David Lean Cinema, Kon-Tiki, Jan 29
- Soul Symphony Community Choir taster session, Feb 3
- Norwood Society talk: Crystal Palace and Dulwich, Feb 19
- Norwood Society talk: Charlies Dickens in Norwood, Mar 19
- Norwood Society: Balloons and airships at Crystal Palace, Apr 16
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Will the road’s name be expanded to Morello Cherry Orchard Road?
note to the writer, they stated ‘over the years’, the nokia phone was part of the past. focus daniel sun
By your reckoning, “our hero” must have got his Nokia phone when he was about six years old. He didn’t get that from Toys R Us on the Purley Way.
Loved the retro phone, I still have one and would use it if It could talk to my car; great pretentious wicker chair, I’m sure I saw it in a 70’s porn video, the flats must be very high because you could see the gherkin from the window.
Your left wing bitterness to privately sold flats its appalling. Or as you call “yuppie flats”.
You do realise people buying these places pay stamp duty, all sorts of VAT to solicitors, surveyors etc, VAT to shops when buying furnishings and then pay their own council tax.
Now I know I can see that this is of great benefit to both Croydon and the national purse. Your daft world would have every new flat in Croydon occupied by people who don’t work, don’t pay rent, don’t pay council tax and take huge sums off the state to subsidise this lifestyle.
Luckily some of us live in the real world.
We should be applauding the people who put their hard earned cash in to buying their own home, not regularly bashing them as this site does.
Dear, dear. You really do need to read the website more carefully, or get someone to explain it to you.
We have never “bashed” private home owners. Our opposition is to multi-billionaire developers taking up prime sites, land-banking, and opting to build “apartments” aimed roundly at the buy-to-let investment markets in Russia, the Middle East and the Far East. This is what is widely described as “inappropriate development”, providing property that is way out of the reach of ordinary, hard-working London families at a time of a housing crisis.
The “luxury apartments” and penthouses – that’s how they are marketed by the speculators who develop them – often lie vacant, unused and making no general contribution to the community or local economy. As is reported elsewhere, the Cherry Orchard developer has failed to pay their agreed community levy. The “Island” developers – or one of them over the course of the past seven years of the blighted scheme driven by speculators’ greed – even had their £1million Section 106 payment refunded to them out of sympathy by the previous Croydon Tory administration.
But it’s a first, I suppose: a UKIP supporter arguing the case for the hard-pressed Russian, Qatari and Chinese buy-to-let investors.
I support common sense. I have no problem with anyone from anywhere in the world doing good for this country.
Indeed it is yourself that should re-read your article. It was you who moaned about yuppie buyers. I’m not sure Russian, Qatari and Chinese investors fall in to the category of yuppies!
Whoever buys these flats will still need to pay stamp duty and various other taxes. Indeed should they be buy-to-let investors then they will provide much needed rental accommodation for those that need it.
Your left wing bitterness and indeed vitriol knows no bounds.
Yes. Noticed you’d removed that silly little UKIP badge from your avatar. Given up on them already?
Shall we deal with some facts, here?
This website has never used the expression “yuppie buyers”. That is clearly the product of your fetid imagination. We have no idea whether the buyers for these property speculation schemes are yuppies, largely because most of the tower blocks (they’re always tower blocks) have yet to be built. But the developers are energetically marketing what we unapologetically describe as “yuppie apartments”. Because that’s what they are. No one has described them as affordable, family homes, which is what the crying need is for in Croydon and London as a whole. Because that is what they are not.
Not for the first time you have bigged up the purchasers’ potential “contribution” to the community through stamp duty and “various other taxes”. You never state what these mysterious other tax contributions might be. That’s probably because you don’t know. Since some of these properties elsewhere in London have been bought to launder money from Russia, while some Far Eastern purchaser get significant tax breaks domestically, such considerations will be factored into the cost of their purchase as a minimal financial inconvenience. None of it will provide homes for our NHS nurses, teachers, police or fire brigade officers who are being forced out of London because they can no longer afford to live here.
Few of the purchasers have any intention of ever bothering to rent out the properties, preferring to sit on their empty capital assets, and thus the developments provide a double-whammy against the housing demand in London.
Looks like your ignorance knows no bounds.
I loved the Redrow retro promotional video. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes Russian & Chinese investors think they are buying into cutting edge developments (due to over exposure to second rate TV movies) and the life style.
But, it didn’t resound with the East Croydon vibe!
Where was the cool jazz rising up from the Oval Tavern? The pseudo-film noir atmosphere when only half the street lights work? The thumping noise, angry voices and the glare of lights as opposing flows of traffic jam up against each other at the end of Cedar Rd every evening, through half closed eyes it could be Paris or Milan!
Please advise Redrow & partners that we of East Croydon are way more cool & sexy than any of their “so last year” actors.
You are of course correct no one will see the Gherkin etc from Morello Twr. But they will have unblocked views of the rising sun as it is not permitted to build any buildings above 3 floors in any other part of Addiscombe. Vistas of Bromley & beyond beckon!