CROYDON IN CRISIS: Local MP and Fairfield ward councillors urge developers to make good on their long-standing promises to regenerate the town centre.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Hard hat: MP Sarah Jones says the people of Croydon have been waiting long enough for Westfield’s redevelopment
MP Sarah Jones today called on Westfield “to work at pace to deliver for Croydon”, following the property developers’ £31.5million purchase of the freehold of the Whitgift Centre.
Jones, a junior minister in the Labour government of Keir Starmer, won what was then the Croydon Central seat from Conservative Gavin Barwell in 2017. It had been Barwell, when a governor of the Whitgift Foundation and MP, who had introduced Westfield to Croydon in 2011, at the beginning of what has become a 15-year takeover of the town centre by the property firm, known now as URW.
And while Barwell attended Trinity School, Jones went to Old Palace, an independent schools run by the Whitgift Foundation, the erstwhile owners of the Whitgift Centre, who used its commercial rents to help fund bursaries for academically gifted local pupils. Jones’s mother had been Old Palace’s headteacher.
It was the 2023 decision of the Whitgift Foundation to close Old Palace, due to falling rolls but also declining income from commercial properties, which prompted the ultimate sale of the Whitgift Centre.
URW had been leaseholders of the Whitgift Centre until today’s purchase, and are therefore the MP’s landlords, as Jones has her constituency office hidden away on a third-floor executive suite in the largely vacated shopping mall, a location which some find easier to locate than others.
In a statement issued from that office, Jones told Inside Croydon: “The people of Croydon just want a town centre to be proud of. We have been promised one for over 10 years. I hope this sale will bring that development forward.”
No more excuses: Green Party councillor Paul Ainscough
Jones added that she welcomed the Foundation’s focus on their charitable aims. “The sale makes sense for them,” she said.
“Croydon needs to tell a new story, and the council should be bringing new investors to the table. Buying the freehold is a commitment by URW that I welcome – but I urge them to work at pace to deliver for Croydon.”
Paul Ainscough, one of the Green councillors for Fairfield ward who represent the area covered by the Whitgift Centre at the Town Hall, also aired scepticism based on Westfield/URW’s track record of broken promises and undelivered developments.
Ainscough told Inside Croydon: “The £31.5million Whitgift Centre freehold deal must not become another blank cheque for delay.
“Croydon has waited long enough. Any agreement with URW/Westfield must come with clear public guarantees: no hidden subsidy, no loss of local accountability, protection for existing traders and a firm timetable for delivery.
“This cannot simply be a private land-value exercise dressed up as regeneration. The scheme must deliver real benefits for Croydon, including local jobs, genuinely useful public space, support for independent businesses and a circular economy approach that reuses materials, cuts demolition waste, reduces carbon and keeps more economic value in the borough.”
Croydon BID, the bought-and-paid-for lobby group which includes representatives of URW among its directors, had yet to react to this morning’s news by the time of publication of this article.
But Inside Croydon readers had been having their say in our Comments section, and they have little confidence in URW, a multinational corporation with a turnover of £3.02billion and £1.08billion net profits.
“Now URW own the site, they can sell it,” Diana Pinnell observed. “If they get planning permission, it will be worth more. The Whitgift Foundation can sigh with relief, but the cursed Croydon town centre may deteriorate much further yet.
Another pipedream: one of the development CGIs produced during URW’s latest public consultation on the regeneration of Croydon town centre, which they held earlier this year
“Why don’t I trust URW? Because they have done nothing, for too long, and have lied to us throughout.”
Another reader, Derek Thrower, took a particularly pessimistic view. Calling the £31.5million “a bargain basement price”, Thrower commented that now URW “have got this bargain for doing nothing, why not hang around another decade to rip someone else off?
“Reckon there will be no guarantee clause to actually start doing any development as the blight will go on and on…”
For Bernard Winchester, “This is the saddest news I have heard about Croydon’s town centre since the riots.”
Winchester, too, sees the Whitgift Foundation’s sale price as a bargain for URW.
“As a charity, the Foundation has for centuries been a benign influence in the town, using its income and resources to help fund scholarships in its schools and accommodation for the elderly. It pains me to see it losing the heart of the town to a developer which has shown little sign of caring for our people or our interests.”
Twat in a hat: Jason Perry is a long-term apologist for Westfield
In 2011, when Barwell and Croydon Conservatives were opening the door and rolling out the red carpet to welcome Westfield into Croydon, the council cabinet member for planning and regeneration Jason Perry.
Now Mayor Perry, today he welcomed the sale to URW, as it “simplifies ownership of the site and helps to smooth the pathway for the redevelopment of the Whitgift site”.
That’s the redevelopment of the site which Westfield apologist Perry used to tell us would be completed by 2017.
Read more: Charity lost £2m last year over closure of Old Palace School
Read more: Figures show how exodus from Whitgift Centre is speeding up
Read more: ‘Permanently closed’: Whitgift Centre works mark end of days
Under The Flyover is premium content, usually exclusively available to paying subscribers who support Inside Croydon’s independent journalism, based in the heart of Croydon. - Click here to listen to the Under The Flyover interview with Whitgift Foundation CEO Roisha Hughes on our Patreon page now
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
Good progress. Finally.
Really? I missed the part where URW bothered to actually submit a proper, ambitious masterplan to planning complete with a timeline and targets. Nothing over the past couple of years has stopped them from doing that. The framework they submitted ages ago was a joke. It all looks like the not so invisible hand of Adam Smith & Co further tightening their 15 years of failure and destruction over Croydon Town Centre. Unless they submit an exciting, world class masterplan to drive Croydon forward into the 21st century, there’s no reason for anyone to think any differently.