Developer Trevor Osborne is back! But this time he’s eschewing corporate landmarks and concentrating on urban renewal with a mixed use scheme in the Surrey town of Epsom.

The big-name commercial developers of the 1980s are well and truly back in business. This year, both Godfrey Bradman, ex of Rosehaugh, and Trevor Osborne, ex of Speyhawk, have reappeared on the development scene with major schemes. But while in the 1980s the name of their game was the creation of corporate landmarks for blue-chip companies, this time around there’s more to it. The developers are taking on challenges of urban renewal that both have housing at their heart.

Bradman, with his Southwark Land Regeneration team, has just won the bid to transform a huge tract of London’s Elephant and Castle, while Osborne is bringing the urban lifestyle to the leafier and far more genteel environs of Epsom, Surrey, with the Derby Centre. But while Bradman is rumoured to be bringing in residential expert Countryside to help him create south London’s answer to Canary Wharf, Osborne is doing the residential himself in Epsom with his Osborne Group.

And why not? If anyone should know about the kind of mixed urban communities Government guidance is exhorting developers to create, it is Trevor Osborne. As chairman of Berkeley Group’s St George division in the mid-1980s, he could be credited with starting the urban regeneration bandwagon rolling, as well as with writing its route map as founder and chairman of the Urban Villages Forum. For much of the last decade, Osborne has been largely working outside property development, but now he is back on the urban agenda.

“When I launched the Urban Villages Forum, the audience at the event looked at me as if I were bonkers,” he recalls. “Now, some of these ideas are feeding through. It’s a nonsense the way we’ve separated tenures and uses. What makes values is people’s appreciation of a place.”

Placemaking is Osborne’s priority with Epsom’s Derby Centre. The town centre site will have 37 apartments alongside a library, lifestyle centre, health club, retail and restaurants, and there will be two new public squares. Design of the centre by architect RMJM is “modern, but respectful,” according to Osborne. As for the apartments themselves, they are in Uppertown Square, over the top of the commercial space. Homes are two-bed, two-bathroom, with balconies or terraces, open-plan living space and a contemporary spec.

With the residential element of the scheme, Osborne says he is selling “the home as a framework for life”. The last six apartments sold on release day in May, at prices of between £149 000 and £157 000. Top price for penthouses was £310 000, and Osborne reckons the scheme has raised local residential values by up to 20%.

As a commercial developer, Osborne’s approach differs from that of a residential specialist, not least in the community-focused way in which he learns about locations. “I always take a taxi and ask the driver to tell me where people go most or least, and where’s the best and worst housing,” he says.

While the token restaurants incorporated into many residential schemes lie empty for lack of tenants, Osborne gets takers for the commercial space before a brick has been laid. The developer’s initial intention for the Derby Centre was to have around 30 000 sq ft of commercial space, but that changed when he interested Holmes Place in having a 33 000 sq ft health club. It was added to the mix, doubling the scheme’s size, to the benefit of apartment buyers, the broader community and the centre’s identity. “Thirty thousand square feet would not have been big enough to make a big public image,” says Osborne. “This will have a status in the town.”

Holmes Place’s interest also sparked the idea for another tenant. “Getting a doctor’s surgery on site seemed like an obvious move,” says Osborne. “The only thing missing is offices, which is ironic.”

Osborne is the first to admit that Epsom does not present the urban regeneration challenges of an area like Elephant and Castle. “Epsom didn’t need regeneration, it needed to be more up-to-date,” he says.

But there are plenty more challenges for Osborne. The developer is working with St George on the Whitefriars Estate office and residential redevelopment in the City of London. There are three projects in the pipeline with London loft development guru Harry Handelsman, under the Manhattan Osborne tag, one of which is west London’s Fulham Island. Bringing that site through has taken three years of negotiations, and the end result is a complex mixed scheme designed by architect Piers Gough incorporating 40 apartments. “Because mixed use is hard to do, it is going to get better,” says Osborne. If he has anything to do with it, it will.