The entrance to Blackfriars Investments’ Belsize Park offices in north London is easy to miss. A ramp that gives on to a raised, tarmacked parking area is semi-obscured by a van that is delivering goods to a mechanic’s workshop. A faltering enquiry is met with grins of recognition from the two mechanics who point to a unpromising blank blue door on the opposite side of the car park.
Stepping into the bright suite of offices brings to mind a scene from Alice Through The Looking Glass. Thankfully, these offices are full size and inhabited by full-sized people. One in particular is larger than life. The electrifying presence of Malory Clifford, the developer behind Blackfriars Investments, soon dispels any doubts about the calibre of this operation. “Oh, the bunker,” says the tall, lean Clifford, referring to the well-concealed offices. With a flash of his piercing blue eyes and a flourish of his cigarette-holder, he explains the choice of office: “Well, while we may be thought of as off-the-wall for doing these flamboyant buildings with Will [Alsop], we’re not so crazy that we will pay the rent we would want to charge people for our buildings. We chose the offices because of the off-street parking.”
Blackfriars hit the headlines last year when its Alsop-designed conversion of Victoria House in Holborn, which was running neck and neck with Foster and Partners’ “fencing mask” in the competition to house the mayor of London, was blasted out of the water by an unorthodox intervention from Sir Jocelyn Stevens, then chairman of English Heritage. Clifford hints that Sir Jocelyn may have been pressured by a higher authority. “You don’t just get up in the morning and do that. Downing Street or someone must have said to him that the South Bank was a more suitable location.”
Blackfriars has since sold Victoria House for a huge profit to a German firm that plans to turn it into a permanent furniture exhibition cum emporium. “If the government had accepted our offer – which included a share in any increase in the yield and rents of the half of the building it was not going to occupy – it would have made £10-15m by now.”
Meanwhile, Blackfriars has stayed loyal to Alsop. It has intrigued by unveiling a series of flamboyant, colourful, Alsop-designed office buildings, and impressed by winning planning permission for two of them last month – Southpoint, next to Southwark Tube station, and Puddle Dock, next to Blackfriars Station.
Deeply tanned and expensively dressed, Clifford has the air of an international playboy tax-exiled somewhere with lots of sun and boutiques. But his earthy, north London tones and down-to-earth demeanour soften this impression. “I’ve commuted between London and the Bahamas for the past 20 years. It’s not for tax purposes – my wife is Bahamian. Now I spend quite a lot of time in Miami. My daughters are in school there and I’ve just set up an office there.”
In the bunker, he surrounds himself with photos of his children, an effigy of Elvis in the cream-and-gold lamé jumpsuit, an antique globe and a wooden model of an earlier project – a conversion of a grade I-listed building near Chancery Lane. Next door is a pool table. “This is where we mainly work and discuss deals,” says Clifford, gesturing to the pool table with a grin.
The thrift and sharp thinking evident in his choice of offices are no doubt key to Clifford’s entrepreneurial success. His varied career is characterised by creative opportunism. At 18, he started his own landscape gardening company, Instant Gardens. While turfing the grounds of a private estate belonging to Sir John Laing, a friend of his late father, he offered to fill in for a paving and brickwork contractor that had not shown up and was promptly commissioned to build 10 garages. Seeing there was more money to be made in construction, he set up his own company, Malory Building, before starting to develop residential property. When the Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1973, sending the property market into a slump, he went to Aberdeen, where a boom in North Sea oil exploitation had started. He bought land and built all the housing for Shell and BP employees and Americans coming in from Texas until the late 1970s, when he returned to London.
The 1987-88 property crash almost wiped him out, but he was saved by a garden centre he had bought in Highgate. He pooled resources with other developers to buy five more and was back in the landscaping business as chairman of Capital Gardens. Since the market recovery in the early 1990s, he has developed large commercial property on his own and in joint ventures with the likes of Frogmore Estates, General Accident and Allied London Property.
We have never bought anything which hasn’t got a rail or Tube station within spitting distance
The Allied London joint venture is an investment vehicle called M25 Orbital, which buys and converts large office properties within the M25. “M25 Orbital gives us the stability and income to allow us to do the more entrepreneurial, riskier developments like Southpoint and Puddle Dock,” says Clifford. All of his companies are single-purpose vehicles, he adds, and Blackfriars Investments is just “an umbrella to give people something to identify the projects we are doing in Southwark”.
Right now, everyone at Blackfriars is buzzing with excitement about Southpoint and Puddle Dock. They may all drive to work and would not sacrifice their parking spaces for the world, but Blackfriars is politically on-message about integrating development with transport hubs. “We have never bought anything which hasn’t got a rail or Tube station literally within spitting distance. Transport links will become even more important because there will come a day no doubt when you have to pay £2m to take your car into London. You may be flying about in little jets by then but the transport hubs will still be in the same places.”
People have wondered, I venture, why this canny operator is prepared to develop Will Alsop’s bold, colourful, ultra-modern offices – his first in the UK? “It’s not wacky. Choosing Will is very conservative if you look at it through the thin end of the telescope,” is Clifford’s reply. “Will had just built Peckham library which everybody loved, so we had an architect who is in vogue in Southwark’s mind. Southwark is pushing through regeneration schemes, and the government was looking for increased density on transport nodes.”
Stuart Bailey, a director of Blackfriars, interjects: “Southpoint is a very clever artifice. The bright colours and unusual tumbling, geometrical shapes capture the essence of Will, while underneath it’s a boring, highly usable office building with huge average floorplates of 2600 m2. Pringle Brandon, which works specifically for major corporate tenants, is doing the space planning and interior architecture.”
Of Puddle Dock, which Bailey describes as “the most complex site in London, restricted in every direction by St Paul’s sight lines,” Clifford says: “It’s a building which looks extraordinary on the outside, with six facades, including a perforated steel ‘stingray’ underbelly where it crosses Upper Thames Street. But it’s a peach on the inside because it’s got three, 5400 m2 floorplates – the biggest in central London.”
And what of the green, 100-storey tower, proposed in January for a site at Elephant & Castle and described as “three lava lamps on top of each other”? A serious scheme or a publicity stunt? “It was totally serious and Southwark was in favour of it,” says Clifford. “Each barrel was 10 storeys high and had different uses. It was an interesting idea and I am sure in the future one will look at it again.”
Another reason for Blackfriars’ confidence in “nailing our colours to Will’s mast”, as Clifford puts it, is no doubt the guidance of its new non-executive chairman: Lord St John of Fawsley, former chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission. Clifford hit it off with Lord St John after he sprang to the developer’s defence in the mayor’s headquarters competition, issuing an eloquent and withering attack on Sir Jocelyn and the government’s indiscretions. “Now we have his assistance on design and controversial buildings. After chairing the commission for 15 years, he has a pretty good head on him about what’s good and what’s bad,” says Clifford. “He has a great ability to handle a serious situation with humour and panache. He’s also our cultural attaché to the Vatican,
so we’ve cleaned ourselves up spiritually,” he jokes.
