Elephant trap

The great Elephant & Castle regeneration circus is set to go down in planning history as one of the most problematic urban renewal schemes in the country. It is a sorry saga of rows between the council and the developer, delayed decision-making, complaints from residents who claim their concerns have been ignored and squandered funds – so far £33m of public and private cash has either been swallowed up in the project or is earmarked for the area (see "Where the money came from…", right). Far from the model of urban renewal it was expected to be, the £1.5bn redevelopment has lurched from one disaster to the next.

So, what went wrong – and can it be fixed?

To untangle the web means going back to 1999, when Southwark council unveiled its grand and beguiling vision for what is still the biggest regeneration scheme in the country. The council wanted to sweep away the "nasty, pink monstrosity" that is the infamous shopping centre at the heart of the area and replace it with a grand plaza, complete with shops, trendy bars and restaurants. There would be a glittering new railway station and a tramline would run through the middle, whisking residents and visitors to and from the centre of London. Elephant & Castle would become a destination, rather than a place to pass through – the quicker the better – en route to central London.

Most importantly, there would be thousands of new mixed-tenure homes to replace the glowering grey blocks that have characterised the Elephant since it was built in the 1960s and 1970s. The scheme also had one of the largest grants ever made under the Single Regeneration Budget – £25m.

To date, the council has spent £7m of the SRB funds largely on administrative exercises, such as consultation papers, feasibility studies and setting up the Elephant Links Partnership Board to oversee the project for the council.

A further £8m of SRB money is set to be spent in a similar vein, and the remaining £10m is for when construction actually starts.

According to the council's own figures, this £25m would be enough to pay for 250 new social housing units. That's enough to rehouse only a fraction of the Heygate estate's tenants, but at least it would have been a start.

After announcing its intention to revamp the area, the next step for Southwark was to invite bids for the redevelopment. A number of attractive proposals were put forward by various developers (see illustrations, page 18), but none have yet seen the light of day. Each of the bids is said to have cost at least £1m, and the council spent a similar amount just managing the process.

In July 2000, the council chose a package put forward by Southwark Land Regeneration, which incorporated a Lord Foster-designed masterplan and a soaring residential tower by Malaysian architect Ken Yeang. SLR had successfully beaten off bids by the London & Amsterdam/Countryside consortium and housebuilder St George. But the council terminated the agreement with SLR in April this year. It is also thought the consortium sank a further £5m into developing its plans for Elephant & Castle over the past two years – all money now down the drain.

Housing consultant Brian Queen says that Elephant & Castle reminds him more of another famously inept London project. "At the end of the day, you're going to get another Wembley, except that Wembley will look like world-record pace compared with Elephant & Castle," he laughs. Queen should know – he was closely involved in developing SLR's doomed proposal for Elephant & Castle. He says the bidding process for the £1.5bn contract ran for an arduous 15 months.

Communication breakdown
When SLR – a special purpose vehicle backed by developers Frogmore Estates and Godfrey Bradman – was announced as the winner, instead of there being a series of meetings with councillors eager to give their electorate new homes, nothing happened. This was due, says Queen, to lack of communication between the council and SLR.

"The problem in Elephant & Castle is that virtually nothing happened after SLR won the contract," says Queen. "The council didn't have its act together once the award had been made. A situation arose where there was no dialogue with the winning developer for three to four months. The very first thing you should do after a competition is consult with the developer about what needs addressing. This was all problematic and very frustrating."

The council did eventually talk to its development partner, but it had already lost valuable time. The relationship between the two was dogged by indecision over how the crucial housing element would be delivered.

Queen adds: "There seemed to be an issue about whether the developer could make any money from social housing – something they manage to do elsewhere all the time."

The negotiations ended in farce when the council's deal with SLR collapsed. The official reason was that the pair were unable to agree commercial terms – in other words, both wanted too big a slice of the profits pie.

But Chris Horn, project manager for the council's Elephant Links says in defence: "When we began work with SLR we all wanted it to work. Social housing wasn't a decisive problem, but it was a problem at the end. They wanted to provide social housing as part of a commercial development, which we liked. But it turned out the cross-subsidisation proposals would have required primary legislation [to make them feasible]."

You’re going to get another Wembley, except that Wembley will look like

world-record pace Brian Queen, housing consultant

Community stressed
Then there was another problem: in the course of getting the project up and running, Elephant Links got entangled in a nasty feud with the community forum it had set up to ensure that the views of residents were taken into account. Accusations of blackmail and threats of legal action were exchanged before the council finally stopped the forum's £32,000 quarterly SRB grant.

The council has since decided its communications strategy needs rethinking and has moved to talk with the individual estates involved rather than one overall body.

All of this means that, at present, Southwark council is pretty much back where it started – looking for partners to help it redevelop the area. There are two differences though: it is three years down the line and the council has spent £7m with no new housing to show for it.

So what lessons have been learned and what does the future hold? The future, based on the evidence so far, looks bleak.

The latest concern is where the homes for the decanted residents of the Heygate estate will be built. The council says it has identified a number of "feeder" sites around the area that it thinks would be suitable. It has even conducted feasibility studies into their potential for use as housing sites, but is awaiting results of a survey of tenants' housing needs to determine which homes go where.

This plan seems straightforward enough, but there are snags. An architect familiar with the scheme says: "A significant proportion of the feeder sites are amenity sites, whose development wouldn't be anything like straightforward. It all seems to be fraught with problems and is a very peculiar approach which needs sorting."

The council thinks this won't be a problem and that the available amenity sites, some of which are green space, will remain the same once the development is completed.

What tenants want
Heygate tenants' representative Doreen Gee is not so sure: "As far as we're concerned, we want to see green space where we are. Those people who have greenery around their homes elsewhere are facing having it used as feeder sites for displaced Heygate tenants."

But she admits the situation is difficult. "We're going to win some and lose some and [other estates] are going to win some and lose some. We need to sit down and talk it through. [The council] has to deal with the Heygate first to get the space to do what they want to do.

"I'm not happy about this, but the only way the people on the Heygate are going to get new homes and stay around Elephant & Castle is to build on surrounding amenity land."

The council admits that the only way forward is to use a consortium of housing associations to build, own and manage any new housing for Heygate residents. To most observers, this would appear to have all the ingredients of a transfer, yet Elephant Links project manager Chris Horn denies this is the case. "It's not a transfer position. Where the tenants go is an issue for individual households. They are not being treated 'en bloc'. At the moment there is a choice for people to remain where they are or to move to new homes."

But he admits that for the council to acquiesce to tenants' wishes and house them in new-build council homes would be "bloody expensive".

So in reality tenants cannot have their cake and eat it, even though other Southwark residents recently voted massively against stock transfer on the Aylesbury estate (HT 10 January, page 6) and are now to have their homes refurbished with a £46m investment of public funds (HT 15 August, page 9).

Horn clearly doesn't see this as the way forward for the Elephant. "We want to assure tenants that with registered social landlords they can get what they want in terms of rent, influence and security of tenure," he says.

"To have some RSLs characterised as Johnny-Come-Latelys is untrue; for many people they are the only alternative. We have to give people the information to reach a conclusion. It would be terrible if people were to miss out on this opportunity because of an [anti-transfer] ideology that is flawed anyway."

But Horn is defensive of the way the project has been handled to date: "I don't know of any scheme anywhere on this sort of scale that has moved as far as this one has. To go from there being no proposals to where we are now is quite an achievement."