EXCLUSIVE: ‘”Rome wasn’t built in a day”, but it never took this long’. More broken promises from the Paris-based developers as their housing scheme for the town centre is delayed again. By STEVEN DOWNES
Planning blight: it could be another 10 years more before Westfield complete their long-promised redevelopment
Their planning application was supposed to be submitted to Croydon Council before the end of 2024.
Then the town centre developers, Westfield, put back the timing of their latest planning application to November of this year, 2025.
And now, according to multiple sources in and around the Town Hall, URW, the Paris-based multibillion multinational which has, in one form or another, been promising to regenerate Croydon since 2012, won’t even be submitting its latest planning application until the middle of 2026.
That further delay is just the latest blow for any prospect of reviving and revitalising the town centre.
Westfield originally promised to deliver a £1billion mixed-use development of renewed shopping mall and flats in central Croydon by 2017.
Their latest delay exposes how their other activities – such as cleaning up the frontage of Allders and opening six “kiosks” – as the sop that it truly is, intended to distract from the lack of any substantive progress with the project.
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield are merely stringing along “partners”, such as the freeholders, the Whitgift Foundation and the council, with unkept promises and illusions of some kind of future prosperity.
Under pressure: despite years of grovelling around Westfield, they won’t be delivering for Tory Mayor Jason Perry
This latest delay will be a hammerblow to the dwindling re-election prospects of Jason Perry, Croydon’s part-time Mayor and full-time cheerleader for big business and property developers. In 2022, Perry made a manifesto promise to “work with Westfield… to get the town centre regeneration back on track”.
It now appears to be yet another area in which Mayor Perry has failed.
Now, there won’t even be a new planning application submitted before the local elections are held in May next year.
In 2022, Perry foolishly pinned his hopes on Westfield when he said that, “Inward investment and new shops and businesses will bring an uplift in business rates that will feed into the council for the provision of better services.”
As the cabinet member responsible for regeneration in 2012 when Westfield were first invited into Croydon, Perry really ought to have known better.
The reality is that Westfield have regarded Perry with the same contempt with which they dismissed as irrelevancies his predecessors as council leaders, Hamida Ali, Tony Newman and Mike Fisher. The only thing that matters for Westfield is Westfield’s bottom line.
Businesses based in and around the decaying Whitgift Centre have been advised that no development work or demolition will begin before 2028. Now, even that target date must be regarded as optimistic.
There’s been no public pronouncements about their plans from URW for almost eight months, since Perry’s Tory majority planning committee made the strategic error of believing the developer’s blandishments and waving through something called a “Masterplan Framework”.
Flats, flats and more flats: Westfield’s latest scheme could include high-rise blocks with 3,000 ‘units’
This was an agreement between the local authority and the developers which effectively handed over much control to Westfield. Even this was almost two years later than had originally been promised.
Westfield’s “Masterplan Framework” was lacking in detail deliberately, because the developers said that they needed to be “flexible”.
The one detail that it did reveal was that they will, eventually, be looking to build 3,000 flats, mostly in tower blocks overlooking Wellesley Road or on the site where the Whitgift Centre stands today.
That is five times more flats than had been allowed for in Westfield’s initial planning application, submitted in 2014.
Some opposition councillors on the planning committee criticised the outline plans for potentially turning Croydon into a “dormitory town”, and for a lack of detail, the absence of any evidence that Westfield might create any worthwhile new jobs, and due to the absence of any promise of public infrastructure.
One of the councillors on the planning committee, who sat through the perfunctory presentation and waded through the pages of brightly-coloured, computer-generated sketches, called it “underwhelming”.
That “Masterplan Framework” was supposed to be the start of what Westfield called its “year-long programme of engagement” with the residents and businesses.
Late delivery: Mayor Perry (left; blue suit) has been left to talk-up the openijg of six niche kiosks as some kind of triumph for his administration
But even that seemed to fizzle out pretty quickly. The Croydon Urban Room, using a couple of vacant retail units in the increasingly empty Whitgift Centre to display a few cardboard models, has been closed for some time.
With the retail and hospitality sectors continuing to tank, post-covid, Westfield are moving ever more into the housing business, as they have demonstrated with add-on developments at their London supermalls in Stratford and Shepherds Bush.
Last week’s announcement from housing minister Steve Reed that he will be reducing from 35% to 20% the requirement for “affordable” housing in new developments in London will have been music to Westfield’s corporate ears.
But Inside Croydon’s sources say that Westfield’s latest delays are not connected in any way to wanting to get a reduction in affordable housing, which was a factor which scuppered their second scheme.
And it’s not as if the warning signs have not been there for Perry and the other Croydon cheerleaders for Westfield. In July this year, Property Week magazine reported that URW’s own investor report said that the Croydon site is “being considered for ‘co-development or future disposal’.” Another shopping mall scheme, more ambitious, in Hamburg, had suffered cost overruns and needed to be paid for somehow.
Cue panicked back-pedalling from Westfield and their apologists.
Even if the delayed planning application is finally revealed next year, approval could then take most of another 12 months. Westfield have had their plans approved twice before, but they never actually built anything.
Those “meanwhile use” kiosks going in on the ground floor of the old, neglected Allders building, after Westfield’s builders took more than a year to deliver, might have to stick around for a good while yet.
No end in sight: this was what Westfield call ‘The North End Quarter’ yesterday, after almost 14 years of broken promises, delays and blight from the developers
In one of the documents URW released around the time that their Masterplan Framework was nodded through by the council’s gullible planners, they said: “The Framework also responds to urgent local housing need through the creation of new homes across a range of different tenures encompassing market sale, build-to-rent, student, co-living, and supported housing, designed to cater to varied demographics and cultivate a multi-generational community…”.
“Urgent”? Westfield don’t know the meaning of the word.
One Katharine Street source has been around the Town Hall since Westfield were unveiled as Croydon’s town centre developers in partnership with Hammerson in a special ceremony at the Fairfield Halls by Boris Johnson and Gavin Barwell (remember them?).
They responded to news of the latest delays with a shrug. “They used to say ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, which was fair enough. But it never took them this long,” they said.
URW, through their very well-paid public relations spokespeople, were invited to comment on the latest delay to their planning application, or to deny it.
They had not responded by our publication deadline.
Read more: Perry’s council endorses scheme for 3,000 flats in town centre
Read more: Westfield reveal consultation and more delays on ‘masterplan’
Read more: Perry allows Westfield to spend £6m ‘fine’ on own interests
Read more: Westfield boss says Croydon scheme could take 15 more years
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How can Piss-Poor put a positive spin on this news of yet more Westfield (or whatever they call themselves this week) delays, to try and revive his fading re-election hopes?
He can now probably see the local government gravy train leaving without him next May?!
Correction – it’s a gravy boat
Gravy down the drain more like, made out of plastic guttering.
‘Planning application for Westfield scheme…’ was the hopeful, enticing but truncated title on my IC email, til I opened it and dejectedly read the ‘stalled to mid-2026’ part.
Thanks for another detailed explanation answering the questions raised by the article immediately in the article eg. about the existence and number of previous unimplemented planning applications, the woolly oxymoron ‘Masterplan Framework’ and the coincidental Govt. watering down of London social housing proportions for proposals from 35% to 20%.
I read, here or elsewhere, that there are multi-million pound grants from the Mayor of London to subsidise housing developers in meeting these requirements and in turn meeting London Mayoral and Govt housing targets.
Would you please remind me / us of any and what Council role there was in compulsory purchasing property, or any other assistance to the owner / developer?
This is a flight of fancy, but has this all got so bad and inactive that there might be compulsory purchase powers and a will to take the Whitgift Centre out of property speculators’ hands and, with the necessary small works, reopen it as a… shopping centre, with all the economic, employment, public service etc benefits that would follow?
To argue against myself, no-one, neither Croydon, the Mayor of London nor the Govt is likely to have any money, only new debt, for such a compulsory purchase.
The authorities and politicians will continue to hold on in the hope that private ‘enterprise’ will eventually do something useful.
The stark reality is that the UK URW Westfield team are probably too busy rebranding their newly acquired Edinburgh shopping centre….coincidentally opening in 2026. Obviously Croydon ain’t a priority and obviously URW have free cash but won’t spend much on Croydon for deliberate reasons….
The build of this “Shopping Centre” is now stepping into the time frame of completion of such monuments as Gaudi’s La Sagrada Família Basilica in Barcelona. No matter your opinion of Gaudi’s design it would be an affront to compare it with the inevitable square box banality composed of high rise flats that will inevitably turn up in some far off decade. I only bring this up for Perry to note that he should watch out when he next turns up at the Allders Pop Ups to collect some more freebies is to avoid being run over by a Tram when he can’t see where he is going with the piled up goodies obscuring his view.
No surprise. Westfield always lie. They will continue to keep stalling like with Nottingham and Bradford. Meanwhile they have just gone behind Mayor Perry’s back and taken over St James’ Quarter in Edinburgh and will open in 2026. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Nobody wants yet more bloody shopping centres, our economy is already horribly dependent on people spending money they don’t have on shit they don’t need.
Make it something that improves lives instead of just endless chain tat shops selling plastic crap to mindless sheeple.
The scheme, such as it is, hasn’t been for a new shopping centre since URW dropped it from their “development pipeline” more than five years ago. The scheme, if it is ever brought forward, will be predominantly residential, with some retail and mixed use (though there are no specific details in the Masterplan).
Further delays to any proposals just means further decay on Croydon’s high street.
Yes but this makes the laughable assumption that anyone actually WANTS to live in Croydon
I want to live in Croydon but I would enjoy it far more with a good shopping centre. Look at any town or London suburb and it is based around shops and shopping centres, e.g. Wandsworth, Uxbridge, Bromley, Kingston (areas that I know well – I’m sure there are others).
Not “nobody”. Maybe I’m in a minority of one (I’m probably one of the “mindless sheeple”) but I absolutely would like to see Croydon with a leading shopping centre similar to Westfield at Stratford or White City. This would bring visitors with money to the town and it would bring money into the council’s coffers.
If the town centre doesn’t have a shopping centre, please suggest an alternative. A characterless concrete wasteland of low quality flats?
A shopping centre need not be entirely shops. It can also be restaurants and cinemas drawing in visitors from all around for a family experience.
Afraid you are going to be disappointed, Adrian…
Never let it be forgotten that these are the Scrooges who prevented Croydon Male Voice Choir from continuing with its Christmas charity sings at the centre. CMVC raised thousands for local charities but Westfield said “No more”.
Why are there no financial penalties on Westfield for failing to meet deadlines.
If the economy suffers a major world collapse as many predict this thing will never get built. I would be looking at middle east investment to bail it out. Truth be told Westfield dont want this project and would be glad to get rid of it.
There was. A £6m fine was enforced in 2023. Mayor Perry allowed Westfield to spend the money on Westfield, including the six kiosks in Allders.
https://insidecroydon.com/2024/09/24/perry-allows-westfield-to-spend-6m-fine-on-own-interests/