March 12, 2014
£56m office development planned for Salford’s regeneration area
Work is to start on a £56m Grade A office and car park development in Salford’s Greengate Embankment regeneration area. The joint venture partners behind the development are Carillion, Ask Real Estate and Tristan Capital Partners, with Carillion acting as the main contractor. Work on the site, which was part of the former Manchester Exchange railway station, will start in June, with delivery of the 172,640sq ft office and car park planned for spring 2016. Salford City Council has signed an eight-year pre-lease on the whole of the first office building and Q-Park has agreed a 35 year pre-lease for the 442 space car park. The site, which was acquired from Network Rail, also has planning permission for a second phase which comprises another Grade A office building providing 150,000 sq ft of space. More →
March 5, 2014
New data suggests that London no longer belongs to the UK, but the World
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, News, Property
Image: London Snap
One of the subjects touched on in the first episode of Evan Davis’s BBC documentary series about the economic distinctions between London and the rest of the UK Mind the Gap was the impact of investment by the global super-rich into London property. At one point he asked the Malaysian investor behind the £8 billion Battersea Power Station redevelopment whether he’d considered investing in other cities in the UK. The response was a straight no, but the accompanying glance said rather more. London is no longer a British city but one that belongs to the world, it said, so any comparison with Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh is meaningless. You might disagree with this point of view, but a raft of new data appears to make it very evident indeed that London is now shaped by global plutocrats in a way that cannot be mirrored in the rest of the UK.
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