Development blight: Chinese property firm R&F’s stalled £500m scheme at St George’s Walk, including the Nestlé Tower, has been a drag on the town centre for six years
Mayoral candidate intends to discuss a Compulsory Purchase Order of Chinese-owned property with Prime Minister on his return from Beijing. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Labour’s candidate for Croydon Mayor, Rowenna Davis, says that if elected in May she will look to issue a Compulsory Purchase Order on the long-derelict building site opposite the Town Hall.
Such an audacious and ambitious purchase might cost between £150million and £200million of public money, but it could finally offer the prospect of ending a development stalemate that has blighted Croydon town centre for years, stretching back to the last century.
The St George’s Walk site, including the Nestlé Tower which appears in its glowing former glory as a channel ident on ITV most days, was bought by Chinese firm R&F Properties in 2017 for £60million.
They got planning permission for a £500million scheme that included 290 flats in one of Croydon’s landmark office blocks, and a further 800 homes on what they called “The Queen’s Quarter”, on the opposite side of Katharine Street from the Town Hall and Queen’s Gardens.
Work began on site in 2018, with half of St George’s Walk, its offices and retail area, demolished. The Nestlé Tower was almost entirely surrounded by scaffolding. But work came to a shuddering halt in 2020, initially because of covid, but never resumed, as Hong Kong-listed R&F Properties ran into worse financial problems, even, than Croydon Council.
Picture perfect: the ITV channel ident features the Nestlé Tower, but does not show the dereliction to the landmark building, which has been empty for 15 years
R&F’s debts were estimated at one point at £32billion, as the Chinese property sector took a covid hit.
The Beijing government stepped in, forcing R&F to sell off some of its speculative developments, including Vauxhall Square in London. But its Croydon properties, which also include the heritage building Segas House, remain on the distressed company’s books.
“Now all we can see is a hole where our heart should be,” Davis says in a social media video released today showing her taking a bus trip through Croydon’s derelict town centre.
“People first – not profit first,” Davis told Inside Croydon.
Davis, who has been a councillor for Waddon ward since 2022, believes that only the compulsory purchase of the site by the public sector will end part of a development log-jam which has blighted Croydon all this century.
Top deck: Labour councillor Rowenna Davis in her latest campaign video
The 5.5 acre St George’s Walk site is just a short walk from the vacant Allders building and the badly run-down Whitgift Centre. This part of Croydon’s retail centre has been in its own state of limbo for 15 years, caused by Australian-, now French-owned, developers.
St George’s Walk, originally a mix of office and retail that was built in the 1960s, has been at the centre of unfulfilled promises from developers for more than 20 years, when its owners were Minerva.
In the end, all Minerva managed to do was pocket a juicy £50million profit on the sale of the land to the Chinese.
Today, Davis told Inside Croydon: “Leaving buildings in the heart of our town derelict and abandoned for years is not a ‘neutral’ private decision by developers.
“It has real consequences for all of us. It deters investment, makes people feel unsafe and stops people coming into the town centre.
“Compulsory purchase orders are a last resort. But they should be an option.
“Councils need stronger CPO powers to be able to transfer the ownership of sites like these to developers who will actually bring new homes, jobs and workspaces to our town.
“Recent legislation means that land can be bought back on the basis of ‘existing use’ price, rather than an inflated value based on speculative future development. That is a good start.
“The council obviously doesn’t have the money to buy these sites, but we should be able to transfer the land to those who will get the job done.”
Chinese takeaway: there are hopes that improved relations with China after PM Starmer’s meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing could help resolve Croydon’s stalemate
And with her close contacts inside Downing Street, Davis suggests that she will be lobbying Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer once he returns from his trade mission to China.
“The council’s Conservative Mayor thinks a couple of publicly subsidised shops in the front of the old Allders building is enough for Croydon. It is progress, but our town needs so much more.
“We need a Mayor with the courage to go after the gaping holes in our community like the carcass of a Nestlé building I pass every day.
“I’m not afraid to do that. People first – not profit first.”
The local elections, including voting for an executive Mayor of Croydon, are on May 7.
Read more: Nestlé Tower’s fate could lie with Hong Kong liquidation case
Read more: Hong Kong finance crisis could hit £500m Nestlé Tower scheme
Read more: Davis’s big launch might have been good, if only I could hear it
Read more: Labour’s Davis tells minister Reed to fund Croydon fairly
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Would be nice to see the walk way again which was the artist & culture quarter with a enterprise business section and shops again with accommodation on top for sale or let.
lets hope for the future.
How anybody could vote for Labour after what they did to Croydon is beyond me. Do people really have memories that short?
How anyone could vote any shade of tory after what they’ve done to Croydon is beyond me. Do people really have memories that short? Has anyone seen any improvement since they took over?
Yes, you can keep on blaming Newman &Co all you like, and I won’t disagree; but that doesn’t leave this bunch off the hook either. Under Perry, CC has gone down the pan even further, our council tax gone higher whilst essential services got stripped further, social care practically inexistant by now.
I have no allegiances either, Perry has been an abject failure as well. His priority of “regeneration” has seen no progress since he took office, other than a “masterplan” from URW, which he said would be a planning application over a year ago… And has gone extremely quiet since.
The fact he raised council tax to ridiculous levels whilst failing to secure a debt write off is a disgrace, making us essentially pay for debt interest and reduced services.
I don’t think either Tory or Labour should be anywhere near the council, but I’m not sure what the answer is!
the whole St Georges Walk/ Nestle and SEGAS( a listed building) area is a disgrace.
They tried that in, about, 2004. It was an utter disaster
Yes, it also displays Rowenna’s ignorance. in all its glorious empty sloganizing vacuity
So do nothing? That area is a disaster and tory mayor has ignored it totally.
This is simple electioneering noise making. The only agency that can undertake the procedure of a CPO is the Council and it does not have the resources to carry out such an act. Things may change and new agencies created, but the State has long given up intervening directly to resolve such problems and as the disastrous blighting Westfield episode has shown only acts as a facilitator of private speculation to reduce their exposure to costs. Davis perhaps should think more carefully before electioneering on this because all it seems to do is tie her closer to the catastrophic Newman/Negrini Regime. Though she is right that something needs to be done.
We all know something needs to be done, but the real question is: WHO? Who can we trust with our finances, our social care, our SEN kids, our bins, and all these things that form this borough? From where I’m sitting, I can’t see much of an appealing choice, frankly. :/
She’s nuts.
Does she not remember Brick By Brick?
The Council’s broke – it can’t CPO anything.
CPO-ing a swathe of the town centre, to sell on to a ready and waiting developer, and Brick by Brick’s appallingly badly managed pipe dream of a project are two entirely different beasts, Catherine.
Indeed, if handled properly, there might even be a modest property dividend that could be used to reduce the council’s debt.
Doing nothing is not an option. Have you learned nothing from four years of part-time Perry?
Unless the 50+% reduction in government grant which was initiated by the coalition government 15 years ago, which has not been addressed by any government since, is reversed, every potential mayor can promise whatever they want, and when elected, deliver nothing because there is no money. This also applies to the candidates standing for election to the council.
The city centre decay that is the the St George’s Walk site was actually started by Labour back in the late 90s .
Their ambitions for yet a third shopping centre for the town, Park Place, to be built by Minerva, involved compulsory purchase orders and the eviction of long-standing businesses, e.g. Pasta San Giorgio.
The development was championed locally by councillor Adrian Dennis who got the planning application through the council in 2000. The Government Office for London waved the scheme on its merry way, thanks to the bungs that Minerva’s chairmen gave to the national Labour party, a fact revealed in the Cash for Peerage’s scandal.
It’s a blessing that Park Place was never built, otherwise we’d have another underused mall and car park in the town with no businesses to fill it.
If Croydon is to revitalise the town centre and reverse its decline, it needs to tackle the biggest cause: the retail parks along the Purley Way. They have sucked the commercial life out of North End and district centres, threaten their very survival and caused needless traffic congestion and pollution along a road meant to serve long-distance journeys, not local shoppers