Copper bottomed

What do dudley zoo, edmonton town centre and the MG Rover plant in Longbridge have in common? Answer: they are all being regenerated by St Modwen.

The company is something of a regeneration behemoth, but you would never know it from meeting its chairman, former police constable and solicitor Anthony Glossop. “I would far rather under-promise and over-perform than over-promise and under-perform,” he says.

No one could accuse St Modwen of under-performing. In February, it posted record results for the 13th successive year with pre-tax profits of £46.3m for the year to the end of November 2005. It is managing 120 developments and is renewing some of the biggest brownfield sites in the UK. They include Longbridge (see ‘The St Modwen phenomenon’, overleaf), Llanwern, a former steelworks, and Avonmouth, which was a zinc smelter.

Last month, it won outline approval to develop a 37 ha village on the former Lister Petter engine works in Dursley. It will work with housebuilders on the residential element.

As well as brownfield, St Modwen specialises in town-centre mixed-use sites – the £100m Edmonton Green project in north London is one of the biggest schemes of its kind in the capital. Its heritage and leisure projects include the £100m scheme at Dudley, where the zoo and medieval castle will be incorporated into a new tourist attraction.

It is a formidable to-do list, yet little is known about how the business behind it operates. So Regenerate met up with Glossop, a 64-year-old who attributes his preference for plain-speaking to his background in the law, to find out.

Anthony Glossop Photography by Bohdan Cap

Q & A

What are the biggest challenges in town-centre mixed use?

To achieve mixed use and a quality of life for residents while making the scheme viable when you’ve got so many different builds, that’s a huge challenge. The problems are to do with making sure that one part doesn’t compromise the quality of others. If you look at 1960s shopping centres, you’ll find tower blocks, offices, perhaps a theatre – it’s all in there, but the detail was wrong. You had developments like the Barbican, but it was the architecture, the detail, that didn’t work. What’s different now, we hope, is that the detail’s right.

One of the advantages with mixed use is that a scheme taps into a range of markets

How difficult is it to meet the demands of the various users – residential, retail, leisure and commercial?

You have to almost sit down and think “I’m living here, I’m shopping here. I’m working here”. We ask if it’s safe, has it got good views, can people get to their cars, if someone’s bought a bed, how do they get it to their flat? Part of the problem in the 1950s and 1960s was that there was a lot of social engineering and some developments they just got wrong. Now we’re asking, “what would people like?” You confine yourself to what can work. You cannot put everything into a mixed-use development; you have to say, what can we do well? The occupier is king in a property – if the building doesn’t work for the occupier, it won’t work at all. E

Do you think you might turn to housebuilding yourself in the future?

In a town-centre scheme, we’re already taking the site assembly risk; we find ourselves taking the construction risk so there may come a time that the marketing risk is just another one to take. It’s a case of watch this space.

What about planning – how do you think we could best speed up the process?

Trust local authorities. If everything comes from the centre, then all it does in the long term is slow things down. The more you centralise control and rely on calling-in powers, the more you make everyone look over their shoulders. Downgrading local authorities and splitting responsibilities between lots of agencies slows things down. Places work best where a local authority asserts its power and works with other agencies but sees itself – and is seen – as if it were in charge of the place.

Which local authorities do that?

Manchester – it’s in charge of its destiny.

If it wants money from NWDA [North-west Development Agency], it asks NWDA. Too many local authorities have given up the ghost or got battered or brainwashed into thinking they need somebody else’s say so. Whenever new powers are handed out, they always seem to move away from local authorities. If you want planning resolved, you have to make the local authority pre-eminent and other agencies have to have supportive, facilitator roles.

Photography by Bohdan Cap

Too many local authorities have got brainwashed into thinking they need somebody else’s say so

You’ve been in brownfield regeneration for a long time. How competitive is the market now? Are there enough sites?

I think all the easy sites have been done. The difficulty is getting the more challenging sites handled properly. One thing about the property boom we’ve had is that a number of marginal schemes have been pushed into the viable category, so there’s not that much around.

Why concentrate on town centres and brownfield?

We’re good at masterplanning, analysing contamination and coming up with solutions that work. We have good skills about how to manage land and in town centres we’re good at working with local authorities and have a first-rate reputation for delivering what we promised. We quite enjoy the challenge of putting together a bit of this and a bit of that. One of the advantages with mixed use is that a scheme taps into a whole range of markets. You could say that nothing happens unless all the markets are in synch. Another way of looking at it is that if one market is a bit weak, the others can carry it through.

What’s the state of play at Longbridge?

We hope by the end of the year to have published a masterplan that both local authorities, Birmingham and Bromsgrove, will be able to base their area action plans on.

What do you think of using regeneration initiatives from other countries?

I think transposing anything is dangerous. I’m worried that people think regeneration is like a workbook where you can consult point “2a” or “17b” – but it’s not like that. Regeneration is a bottom-up strategy. The role in the centre is to encourage and promote but you cannot rescue a place from the outside. All the places I think have done well have done so after trials and tribulations, like Sheffield and Liverpool.

You used to be a policeman and a lawyer – what did you learn that helps you in the property industry?

Keep things simple – say things exactly as they are and treat people as you like to be treated; it’s the only way you get through. If you live by spin, you will die by spin. If someone asked me what St Modwen is, I’d say it’s a very straightforward operation.