Going straight?
Estates Gazette
17/11/2007
Ahead of the pack Urban Splash is not going mainstream. On the contrary, the rest of the property industry is catching up. David Quinn reports.
Urban Splash has never been a classic property company. Renowned for unusual conversions andcutting-edge architecture – and setup by a man who made his name selling posters to students in Manchester’s Affleck’s Palace – the company appears outside the norm.
But Urban Splash is colliding with the mainstream. Not because of an abandonment of its principles, but because the rest of the property industry is beginning to catch up.
“I never think of Urban Splash as a maverick company,” says co-founder, chairman and erstwhile poster retailer Tom Bloxham, glugging on a Diet Coke in his minimalist Castlefield office. “The world is conspiring to come towards us. Big commercial developers are looking at what we’re doing. We’re not a maverick at the edge. We’re the direction the property industry is travelling in.”
The point is illustrated by the answer Bloxham gives when asked what characterises Urban Splash as a company. Ten years ago, his reply – “good design and architecture, a mix of uses and tenures, regeneration” – might have sounded a little left field. Today, it doesn’t.
Deputy chief executive Nick Johnson adds that “punk culture” has influenced Urban Splash’s work. “We encourage people to use their own personality to influence the decisions they make,” he says.
The environmental agenda is also a key concern, but Johnson says he has no time for “gling” – meaning “green bling”. He reasons that, if you can see a green feature such as a wind turbine on a building “it isn’t doing anything”, and professes a preference for the “unsexy stuff”, such as combined heat and power systems.
Sizeable premium
The growth of the Urban Splash brand is such that Johnson readily admits the developer can charge a sizeable premium for its product – up to 15% at Chips, its 142-unit residential scheme in New Islington, Manchester, designed by Will Alsop.
It is difficult to imagine any developer other than Urban Splash delivering a scheme called Chips, which is so named because it looks like three chips lying on their side. Bloxham, however, rejects the idea that the company has become overly associated with outlandish developments during its 14-year history.
“You can’t define a typical Urban Splash scheme,” he says. “We get sent opportunities for Victorian-mill conversions, and people say, ‘This would be ideal for Urban Splash’. But there would have to be something really special about it for us to do something like that today.”
Instead, the developer has recently turned its attention to unloved concrete tower blocks, the product of outdated “cities in the sky” slum-clearance programmes of the 1960s.
How can Urban Splash create demand for this type of living accommodation when history seems to show that nobody wants it?
Bloxham believes a re-evaluation of such buildings is necessary.
“The reason these things failed is because of a lack of maintenance and poor management, rather than intrinsic problems with the buildings themselves,” he says.
Bloxham also believes it is “incredibly wasteful to knock down a building”, and would rather use what is there.
This preference for recycling was followed at Chimney Pot Park in Salford where, instead of demolishing the terraced houses on the site, Urban Splash elected to turn them “upside-down” by creating anopen-plan living space on the first floor, backing on to a raised outdoor space.
Despite its ingenuity, the English Partnerships-backed scheme is arguably Urban Splash’s only brush with bad publicity, after complaints from locals that they could not afford the £99,500 finished product.
“The issue revolved around a statement about homes for £50,000, which was made five years ago and got into the press,” says Johnson. “The market has obviously moved on since then. If we were to sell at that price, it would have required much more public funding.”
Grant funding
Within the property industry, those who do not know much about the company all say one thing: that, as in Salford, Urban Splash has a mastery of the process needed to secure grant funding. Bloxham says that while this could be true of some of its schemes, many others required no contribution from the public purse.
“In Manchester, there’s no public funding needed anymore in the city centre. All our recent schemes in Liverpool are happening without funding, whereas 15 years ago, when no one else was doing anything in the Ropewalks area, it was needed,” he says.
As the mainstream collides with Urban Splash’s way of thinking, some have ventured to suggest the company could make a compelling purchase for one of the giants of the industry. But Bloxham, who owns 70.9% of Urban Splash, shrugs the idea off.
“I love doing what I do – taking blighted, ugly sites and creating objects of beauty,” he says. “If I did sell out, I’d probably put all my money into property, so there wouldn’t be much point.”
For now, Bloxham’s empire looks set to keep on growing. The rest of the property industry may be on Urban Splash’s tail, but he is keen to keep ahead of the pack.
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Splashing across the Mersey
Urban Splash is undertaking 12 projects in Liverpool from its offices on Fleet Street in the city centre.
Its biggest scheme in the city is the Great George Street development, where 700 homes are planned in what Bill Maynard, head of the firm’s Liverpool office, describes as “five big phases”.
It is a far cry from Urban Splash’s beginnings in the city. Maynard, a former Liverpool council planner, confesses that he “laughed” when Urban Splash founder Tom Bloxham purchased the Palace complex on Slater Street with proposals to turn it into “the Covent Garden of the north”.
But when Bloxham linked up with Urban Splash’s other co-founder, Jonathan Falkingham, to purchase several more buildings in the Concert Square area, Maynard became convinced of the growth potential and came on board.
The company is working up £60m plans for the conversion of the Littlewoods building off Edge Lane into 250 flats, a hotel and commercial space.
It was also recently selected to transform the disused ABC cinema on Lime Street into a hotel and restaurant.
“Lime Street is an interesting part of town,” says Maynard. “The local authority and English Partnerships are keen to see something happen because it’s the gateway intothe city.”
Other schemes in Liverpool include the Matchworks office scheme in Speke and the conversion of St Peter’s Church on Duke Street into the footballers’ wives-favoured Alma de Cuba bar.
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New Islington: ‘Poundbury on acid’
Perhaps Urban Splash’s most significant scheme, and the one that has defined its ethos, is New Islington in east Manchester, where the company was selected as lead developer in 2000.
New Islington is designed to be mixed-use, sustainable and architecturally innovative. Once completed, it will include 1,700 homes, retail and leisure facilities, 1m sq ft of public open space and a raft of community facilities, including a school.
The company’s deputy chief executive Nick Johnson describes New Islington as “tradition with a twist”, and emphasises its credentials as a sustainable community.
“The constituent parts are parks, canals, a surgery, a primary school, a row of shops – there’s nothing new in that,” he says.
Perhaps surprisingly, Johnson compares Islington with the Prince Charles-backed and critically panned Poundbury development in Dorset.
“It’s Poundbury on acid,” he says, half-jokingly. “The essence of a sustainable community is the same the world over. We all have human needs that need to be satisfied. But we give it a devilish twist. We add a bit of adventure.”
Tags: liverpool, manchester, new islington, salford, sustainability, urban splash
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