The first 180 homes planned for inside the BBC’s former headquarters – a curving 1950s building in White City, London, familiar to generations of television watchers – have been snapped up, mainly by UK buyers.
The apartments were so popular that more were put up for sale than planned over the past two months. A further 270 homes will go on sale in April.
Prices start at £650,000 for a one-bedroom flat but they will not be ready to move into until the end of 2017.
Nearly half the planned 950 Television Centre homes will be inside the building, which when viewed from the air is shaped like a question mark. The central circular area, known as the “donut”, is listed and has featured in decades of BBC programmes. Also well-known to viewers are the “atomic dot” wall and the reception, popularly known as the stage door.
Five penthouses at the top of the building are on sale, priced at up to £7m. They will be next to a Soho House rooftop pool and bar, overlooking a public cafe-lined piazza the size of Trafalgar Square at the front of the building.
Two office towers and 38 townhouses, which are expected to be priced at £1.2m–£1.65m, as well as two affordable housing blocks, are also in the works. The 142 affordable homes will go on sale at 25% of the market value at a later stage.
The new owners of the 14-acre BBC campus, the London developer Stanhope, Japan’s Mitsui Fudosan and Canada’s Alberta Investment Management Corporation, were careful to market the apartments to UK buyers first – who bought about 150 – before going on an overseas tour to Hong Kong and Singapore.
There are mounting concerns that much of London’s prime property is being snapped up by overseas investors, with the “buy to leave” phenomenon turning swaths of west London into a ghost town at night.
The Television Centre revamp is part of a wider, £7bn construction frenzy at White City, where 5,000 new homes along with hundreds of offices and shops are being built. A further 24,000 new homes, along with a Crossrail-HS2 interchange station, are planned for Old Oak Common, north of the White City area.
Westfield is building a four-level John Lewis store at its shopping centre in White City alongside 1,500 new homes. Developer St James is building a similar number of homes and Imperial College is constructing a new White City campus.
Many of those looking for an affordable home, however, will be disappointed. As with elsewhere in London, only a small proportion of the new homes will be classed as affordable. Campaigners argue that the White City revamp will do little to mitigate the nationwide housing crisis, which will halve the number of young homeowners by 2020, according to the housing charity Shelter.
Analysis of recent official figures found that the typical UK home (£284,000) costs more than 10 times the annual average income of full-time workers (£27,000). Investment bank UBS has judged that house prices in London are the most overvalued of any major city in the world and are in “bubble-risk territory”.
Stanhope insists that its prices are still lower than in many other west London areas, such as Notting Hill. Affordable housing makes up 15% of the total at Television Centre. One housing campaigner said: “That’s actually quite a high number compared to other schemes.”
Shelter is calling for a return to the 50% affordable housing target for new developments in London, a goal that was in place until 2008. Its chief executive, Campbell Robb, says: “We have seen the rules watered down so that developers are let off the hook when it comes to building genuinely affordable homes.
“The mayor and the government need to work together and reinstate clear rules for developers on affordable house-building. If they don’t, ordinary Londoners face being priced out of the city altogether.”
Darren Johnson, who represents the Green party in the London assembly, would also like to see a return to the 50% target for affordable housing. “That target was never achieved, but it was an aim. The majority should be social rent. The numbers we are seeing in White City are clearly inadequate.”
The White City Residents’ Association has welcomed the arrival of new homes and 19,000 jobs, which are desperately needed. The 1930s White City Estate, home to about 5,000 people, is one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country.
The association’s chair, Harry Audley, says: “There’s an incredible pressure on housing in this area. When I moved here 18 years ago, houses were just about affordable in terms of renting and buying.”
Today, an annual income of at least £60,000 is needed to buy a home in the area, Audley says – while the average income is about half that. “Given that this is an area of low incomes … people generally think that’s a mockery.” Nearly a third of local residents earn less than £20,000.
But, Audley adds: “Some developers like Stanhope have made it clear that they are here for the long haul and want to contribute to the community. That doesn’t mean to say that they put in 50% affordable housing, but it does give us room for discussion.”
Stanhope and Mitsui Fudosan have also bought the BBC’s sprawling Media Village complex in White City and plan to turn it into a big office park, in the hope of luring creative companies from Soho with lower rents. At Television Centre, the BBC has leased a fifth of the site, including three of the original eight studios, dressing rooms and offices for its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Across the road, Imperial College is creating a 10-hectare (25-acre) technology and research campus that will straddle both sides of the A40. Westfield has embarked on a £1bn expansion of its shopping centre that is expected to turn it into Europe’s biggest mall. Westfield Shepherds Bush wants to snatch the title from Avia Park in Moscowand will have 2.6m sq ft of retail space.
Next door, Berkeley Group’s St James division will start building 1,465 homes on a former Marks Spencer warehouse site next summer, set around a four-acre public park. Here, 279 affordable homes will make up a fifth of the total, and the developer is paying £33.5m to the council to fund another 163 social rented homes.
Alicia Weston, a housing analyst at the New Economics Foundation thinktank, contrasts the fate of two neighbouring councils in a big city outside London. One of them struggles to get 10% affordable housing in new schemes, while the other routinely gets 30-40%. The first one does not have a clear decision-making process and officials give in quite easily to developers, she says, while the second one makes clear upfront that developers will not get planning permission if they don’t meet the affordable housing target. “It’s about who blinks first.”
But, she admits, things are trickier in the capital. “You have to do the best you can given that land prices are so ridiculously high.” But even in London some councils, such as Islington, are getting higher proportions of affordable housing than others, she notes.
Hammersmith and Fulham council says it has “made a valiant attempt to increase the amount of affordable housing in the current schemes. Each development is different and we look to maximise all opportunities to provide homes for local residents, not overseas investors.” It has renegotiated several property deals and secured more than £50m in extra funds that will be spent on 231 new affordable homes.