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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