“Olympia has been a showcase for London to the world since 1886 when it was first built and I think what we’ve managed to do is redefine what a global showcase is because of the scale and calibre of our partners who’ve worked with us on co-authoring the new vision for Olympia, which is every one of our partners looks at Olympia as a flagship or a showcase for their business in theatre, in entertainment, in education.”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Lloyd Lee. Lloyd is the Managing Partner of YOO Capital, a privately held real estate investment company based in London. Born and raised in New York, Lloyd is a visionary with an unwavering dedication to uncovering the hidden gems of real estate. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Fine Arts and History of Architecture and soon joined the world of private investment via Starwood Capital Europe in the late nineties, not before completing his Masters in Real Estate and Finance at Cornell University. With over 25 years’ experience at the top level. Lloyd’s enduring love for the thrill of discovery and transformation has seen him involved in £12 billion worth of real estate acquisitions, public and private corporate opportunities and asset management turnarounds across the UK, EU, US and emerging markets. Lloyd has been a value investor in real estate on behalf of major institutional public and private investors since 1998. He is the key point person for restructuring at YOO Capital’s most ambitious project to date the redevelopment of London’s iconic Olympia. So now we’re going to hear from Lloyd Lee about his vision for Olympia and the other exciting projects YOO Capital are leading on. Lloyd, good morning, great to speak to you today.
Lloyd Lee
Thank you for having us. Great to be here.
Susan Freeman
So, I think our listeners will detect from the accent that you are, you are a New Yorker. So, perhaps we should start with what is that brought you to London and how long have you been here?
Lloyd Lee
It’s very interesting. I’ve been here for 22 years and it all started in the February of 2021 I want to say, when I think our chairman at the time, Barry Sternlicht, looked around the room in the IC and said, “Who’s got capacity?” and generally my approach to life is always raise your hand, find the capacity later, just raise your hand and I ended up on a plane to London and at the time I was with Jeff Dishner, one of the senior partners of the firm, I think he’s now Global Head of Acquisitions and I went out with Jeff and I cut my teeth in the international markets for the first time ever and they were both kind enough to say, “We think you should spend more time, get packing” and I went back and forth between New York and London for about twelve to eighteen months, literally every other week, five days in London, five days in New York and then back again and then in 2023 they gave me the opportunity to open the office for Starwood Capital Group, which I did and then in 2010, Sean Hitchcock and I set up YOO Capital together as a partnership, we’d been talking about it for a number of years and in fact I think it was Barry who kindly introduced the two of us back in 2000 when I moved here, 2002 when I moved here, and the rest as they say is history.
Susan Freeman
So, when you and John got together and you dreamed up YOO Capital, what was the vision? What did you plan to do?
Lloyd Lee
I think that John and I wanted to mix our own skills and our own vision of what we thought real estate could and should be doing, particularly in the UK, particularly in London and make it an institutional and investable strategy. Oftentimes, what you see is things that are investible and institutional are not always ones that combine daring and vision and there’s nothing wrong with that. Equally, I think those who are aspiring to be daring and to bring audacious vision are not always investible and that’s okay too. Trying to do both was just our way, it’s not right, it’s not wrong, it’s just what we wanted to do, it’s what we aspired to do back in 2010 and that’s, that’s us.
Susan Freeman
And that’s great. So, you were looking for I suppose hidden gems, sort of buildings or areas that could be transformed, I mean was Olympia the first?
Lloyd Lee
It wasn’t actually. I think when we look in the mirror and try to explain to ourselves before anyone else, who we are and what we do. What we used to say, it’s evolved but it’s the same thing, what we used to say fifteen years ago is, “We’re looking for that twist” and the reason is because everything that we look at, we try to look at through that lens of the twist, what are going to do here that someone else missed? Why are we looking at this? And in our own works fifteen years later, if you’re looking to take a class B building and make it a class A building, we will literally say there probably are better people than we who do that and if you’d like us to introduce you to them, we’re more than happy to do that, there are people genuinely who are better at that than we, particularly at scale. However, if you’re looking at something that’s messy, maybe that’s toxic, maybe that came from the banks, maybe that needs to be completely rethought from the ground up, where you’re doing things that people perhaps had not thought of before, that’s where we roll our sleeves up and get straight to work and we love that stuff and I think what we’ve found in the wider community is that people are starting to recognise that about us now and send us the really messy ones, the ones that we’re like I don’t know what to do with this, it’s been sitting there for five, ten, fifteen years, a whole generation, never moved, never changed, those who’ve tried have failed and people kind of run out of steam, “What do you guys think?” and we love that question, genuinely and it’s, it’s where we think the hidden gems lie, the places that people had forgotten, the places that people perhaps have never treated properly or correctly and as a result have never succeeded the way that they could and those are the gems now that, that you know, it’s still a twist but I think we’ve become far more articulate about that twist and how we look at it and where the fundamental roots of the twist come from.
Susan Freeman
And is anything too messy or too toxic?
Lloyd Lee
When I see it, I’ll let you know. So far I would say, particularly in London because let’s face it, we are in London, there are some fundamentals you don’t have to worry about in London, stiff government, you know, the law actually rules, it’s a liquid, investible market, people understand it, there’s lots of things that are not messy about the UK markets which are in the emerging markets and elsewhere around the world you don’t have to worry about. So within the context of that, we have not seen anything yet where we have not thoroughly enjoyed trying to figure out the puzzle and that’s a big part of what we do is try and put the pieces of the puzzle together in a new way people hadn’t seen before and bring together another element that we have evolved in our thinking on which is that in order for us to create these interesting tapestries, these interesting stories to these new places, these new spaces, we’ve recognised that we needed to bring in partners, operating partners, occupational partners, people who understood their own businesses better than we ever would in hospitality, in entertainment, in education, in life sciences and now I think the firm has something on the order of two dozen really good and great operating partners from around the world and that has been a genuine blessing and again, an evolution of our business where those partnerships have continued to grow, we’re adding new ones as we go now in film and television and I think by being able to bring those partners to bear, where they bring global perspective and in many cases global power, has been very, very beneficial to all of our investments because they are the best at what they do in life sciences, in film and television and live entertainment and theatre and education and the arts, and as a result of that we’ve been able to create some extraordinary vision because they co-authored it with us.
Susan Freeman
Tell me about how you partner with the local authorities that you deal with and Opportunity London.
Lloyd Lee
So, I would say that in the same way that we speak voluminously about our operating partners, we categorically consider communities to be every bit the equal partner in the co-authoring of our visions. So today we have partnerships with Camden, with Hammersmith, we’re talking to other local authorities about their own assets and their own people and their own communities and all of that of course is wrapped up into the greater community of London. We’ve had a very, very strong relationship with Opportunity London which of course is an important arm of the Mayor’s office and their entire initiative, which we champion, is to basically bring global attention, particularly global financial and investment attention, to London as a gateway city, probably THE gateway city in the world and so as a result what has been happening is that we are working with Opportunity London and Jace and his team particularly, on bringing global attention from foreign, direct investors from all over the world on what is good and great about investing into London. We’re very, very proud and very grateful to the support that Opportunity London have shown YOO Capital in all of our investments. I think if you add up everything that we are responsible for drawing out over the next years, it constitutes almost 50 acres of central London land. It’s a big, big legacy that I think will be and London as a community wish to treat very carefully and leave responsibly behind for future generations.
Susan Freeman
And these partnerships are just so important aren’t they.
Lloyd Lee
They really are.
Susan Freeman
We’re going to talk through some of the projects. Just before we do, just to sort of understand how you finance because you buy these assets. How do you fund them?
Lloyd Lee
So, YOO Capital is a private partnership, we do raise capital from the institutional markets, we’re very fortunate to be supported by over two dozen investors from around the world, we have investors from Australia, from Asia, from North America, from the UK and from the continent and actually most recently we’ve raised capital from South America for the first time as well as from the Middle East and as a result of that we have private institutional capital that we manage, we always invest as a partnership alongside our investors, quite significantly, and that provides that very, very important alignment of interest between ourselves and our people and our investors to do the right thing and we are constantly in the marketplace looking for new opportunities to invest and we are also constantly in the market continuing to raise more capital.
Susan Freeman
So, let’s turn to some of the projects. So, let’s start with Olympia. It’s, I think the largest regeneration project in Europe and I know you’ve talked about £1.3 billion worth of investment into the area, so I think it would be really interesting for our listeners to hear what Olympia is going to be and you know what they can expect when it opens.
Lloyd Lee
Sure. So, Olympia is definitely something we’re very passionate about, we’re passionate about everything we do. Olympia is special because of its scale and because the inflexion point in our own business that it represents, we definitely added a couple of zeros on the end of, of the work that we’re doing and in many respects we’re very proud of that because of the disciplines that we brought to bear in Olympia in 2017 have continued to evolve and grow but they’re still there, it kind of sort of if you will, proved the model, the work that we were doing, the way we were approaching it, the twists that I described earlier that we were buying could be applied to investments of more significant scale. So the background really is again very YOO Capital, we acquire Olympia from a public company, literally we shook hands on the deal ninety days after Brexit, you know, when other people were putting their pencils down and trying to kind of grasp what was happening, we grasped opportunity, we made the contracyclical play that buying an extraordinary piece of real estate in central London, surrounded by partly a leafy green, west London suburb but also surrounded by some of the biggest names in consumer, music, entertainment in the area and now sciences, there was something to be done and particularly what we saw in Olympia was, an iconic series of magnificent exhibition halls, the first one being the Grand Hall built in 1886 but because the business had never had the kind of holistic, strategy investment into it, it had always been kind of the second class citizen to Earls Court, it always seemed to lack the right vision, the right direction, the right drive and in the end when we bought it right after Brexit, it was and still is a wonderful gem but at the time, it was literally closed to the public six months out of the year. You’re sitting on almost fourteen acres of beautiful central London real estate, beautiful exhibition halls and yet you’re closed to the public six months out of the year and intuitively, we just were convinced that was wrong. Equally, if you looked at the estate when we bought it back in 2016/17, it was about a million square feet and only 462,000 square feet of it actually served the exhibition business, the rest of it was either under utilised or in many cases completely empty and that for us was just another signal that there’s something people have missed and fast-forward whatever it is, five/six years, times flies when you’re having fun, we have successfully brought on board many of the biggest names in live entertainment and education, the arts, the BRIT, AEG, and theatre, Trafalgar Entertainment Group and hospitality, Hyatt and CitizenM and some of the biggest names in restaurants from around the world, Los Angeles, from New York, London and elsewhere and effectively brought them together alongside the exhibition business and now we’re bringing forward not 1 million square feet but 2.25 million square feet of a new cultural destination, live entertainment, hospitality, 4000 seats of restaurants and suddenly we have moved from 225 shows a year to 700 shows a year, where suddenly we will be open 365 days a year from morning until night with live entertainment, shows, theatre, jazz club, restaurants, offices, a school for the arts, and of course the original exhibitions and the idea really is that Olympia has been a showcase for London to the world since 1886 when it was first built and I think what we’ve managed to do is redefine what a global showcase is because of the scale and calibre of our partners who’ve worked with us on co-authoring the new vision for Olympia, which is every one of our partners looks at Olympia as, as a flagship or a showcase for their business in theatre and entertainment, in education and as a result, everything at Olympia is becoming a showcase for lots of experiences and that for us is particularly exciting and so as a result, I think what we’re finding even in consumer electronics, travel and leisure, hospitality, food, people are approaching us saying, “Can I do something with Olympia? Can I partner with Olympia? I want to showcase my business, my brands, my people, here in central London with you all” and that for us has been an exciting journey and we are now less than twelve months away from, from the opening so it’s getting very, very exciting.
Susan Freeman
That’s relatively soon isn’t it? So, you’ve taken something that was closed to the public, as you say six month a year, and now it’s somewhere that the public will be able to come into and actually enjoy these, these facilities.
Lloyd Lee
That’s exactly right and I think, I think the accessibility, the openness of any kind of real estate is important. It doesn’t mean that you could just walk into someone else’s office and just say hey, can I borrow your desk, but in all seriousness it does mean that London being such an important city in the world, it has to be welcoming and open and so a place like Olympia being closed to the public six months out of the year, we genuinely thought even back in 2016, was a massively lost opportunity and fast-forward to today, you know we’ll be feeding probably 10,000 to 50,000 people a day at Olympia and a lot of those people are not coming to exhibition shows, they’re coming to entertainment, they’re coming for school, they’re coming to work, they’re coming for tourism, for travel, to see cultural events and that for us is genuinely exciting but it’s also important as a message that London is open and accessible.
Susan Freeman
And I think you’ve mentioned that the, I mean there’s a busy road in front of Olympia and I remember this when we were trying to get MIPIM UK going some years ago at Olympia and, you know, you came in off a busy road, there wasn’t anywhere to eat, I think there was a Pizza Express and that was it, so I think you’re completely changing that aren’t you.
Lloyd Lee
That’s right, we’ve significantly increased the financial commitments that we made to the Olympia Station to increase capacity some 400%, we’ve created I think a thousand cycles, there’s probably 55 bus lines that come by Olympia so the transport accessibility, the whole network has increased to meet the demands and I think if we need more then we will increase it yet again, the capacity is certainly there and I think that in creating that openness and that accessibility, you’re absolutely right, I think it will change how and why people come to Olympia. It used to be that you came once because you had a ticket to go to a specific event. We want people to think of Olympia all the time and come by for a drink, come by for breakfast, come by to walk the dog in the weekends, bring the family, come for work and we think genuinely, people will.
Susan Freeman
And I read that Thomas Heatherwick is involved in the design, I think the Sky Garden, is that right?
Lloyd Lee
That is exactly right. So Thomas is a genuinely gifted icon of kind of the UK creative industries, his kind of co-author in architecture, Trevor Morriss of SPPARC Architecture, are the two firms, the two studios that have been collaborating Olympia for the last five or six years brilliantly. We’re very, very proud to be working with both of them and as a result I think when you look at Olympia and we take people around Olympia probably three to four times a week now. We take groups; we take individuals, companies, brands, celebrities, artists, leaders from around the world. There are delegations that fly in from parts of the world as a result of the government’s initiatives to drive foreign direct investment and actually, Olympia is on the map when they come and they bring them down to Olympia. So we have lots of people see it and I think that one of the things that people have consistently remarked upon is how beautifully the two studios wove the new architecture and the new design into the original listed buildings and architecture in a way that is both sensitive and respectful to the original architecture but to my mind, I think they’ve created their own new architecture, their new statement for the future generations to come and we’re very proud of that work.
Susan Freeman
I can’t wait to see it and I am a Thomas Heatherwick fan, he’s been a guest on the podcast so…
Lloyd Lee
Wonderful.
Susan Freeman
…it sounds great. So, just turning to another exciting project, the Camden Film Quarter.
Lloyd Lee
Yes.
Susan Freeman
So, you’re, you’re also working on creating this new film quarter in Camden which you know is another really exciting mixed use scheme and it looks as if you’re going to be converting a sort of unloved industrial area into something you know pretty amazing so, can you tell our listeners what you’re planning there.
Lloyd Lee
Sure. So again, we came earlier in this discussion from the concept of a twist, from the concept of people not having looked to perhaps the correct lens at an asset that had been forgotten. You called them ‘the hidden gems’, it’s a term we like. Even Camden, Camden is such a special place, it’s filled with some of the most amazing, creative people in all of London and the neighbourhood just has its own unique vibe and you come along the high street, you make maybe the wrong turn and the next thing you know you’re on 30 acres, 30 acres in central London of the logistics and warehouses and on the one hand we all need logistics and warehouses, that’s how deliveries and shipping and goods and contain… that’s how the world works but 30 acres in central London? And when you look more carefully, some of those businesses have been closed for years or are winding down and then you look at it and realise, come on, we’re London, we can do better than this, we can work harder than this, we can make this work harder, we just have to do it and it had been like that, as we understand, more or less since World War II but certainly it had been in slight decline for probably the last ten/fifteen years and so we came along and we made a proposal to Camden that we will do better but we will do better hand in glove, hand in hand with the community of Camden and that is actually where we took our inspiration, which is what can we do with big high beam warehouses and barbed wire fencing that’s going to work harder for London and for London’s people and what we realised is, high beam warehouses and sound stages look awfully alike, it’s just that people work in them. The number of jobs you can create, the amount of foreign direct investment you could attract, the amount of educational opportunities you could create and then around it, the kind of neighbourhood you can build for Camden to create affordable housing, and I don’t mean expensive housing that’s a little less, I mean genuinely social housing, was an extraordinary opportunity and we were very grateful that Camden embraced that about a year ago and we’ve moved forward over the last twelve months, meeting the public, listening to local residents, listening to stakeholders, also listening to the film and television industry and fast-forward to now, we are imminently going to be filing all the paperwork for the masterplan vision for Camden Film Quarter and the target is to submit the detailed planning application at the end of this year for sound stages, restaurants, two schools in film and television, a work space to attract small to medium-sized businesses in the film and television industries to come to Camden to do their best work next to the sound stages and we also believe that this should be open to the public so we will be creating a form of sort of studio tour or studio exhibition to give people the ability to come in, possibly work and see what the film industry in all about from a tourist attraction standpoint but equally from an educational standpoint which is we believe that we can create exhibitions, archives, facilities for people to understand the history of film in the UK and in the London place where we think that we have such history at London, we’ve got to be able to tell it and particularly the creative industries in Camden, what a great place to do it. So, we will be filing those plans at the end of this year.
Susan Freeman
So I, I mean I know Camden well and I’m trying to place where, you know, it’s quite a big site 30 acres, I mean where, where is it?
Lloyd Lee
It is. If you come to Kentish Town High Street, come out of the Tube and you cross the street, you will turn into a road known as Regis Road and as soon as you start down Regis Road, most people will probably turn around and realise I must have gone the wrong direction, this is definitely not the High Street anymore and all you see are trucks and vans, trucks and vans, barbed wire fencing, more fencing, fencing, trucks and vans all the way down the road, all the way to the far end. There’s roofing companies, car repair companies, a cold food storage and that’s, that’s it and what happens is, you know, when you get down Regis Road, you realise that there are some train lines that run across part of the site, if you were to go across you’re into effectively a construction yard site for another ten or fifteen acres and it just continues to stretch on and on and on and we think this entire area has enormous potential for Camden.
Susan Freeman
I will go and explore now.
Lloyd Lee
You should.
Susan Freeman
And have a look but it’s a very, so it’s a very central site and on the housing, I think you’re partnering with Places for People?
Lloyd Lee
We are. We’ve made some commitments, we’ve made commitments to Camden that we will create a genuine community, a film quarter where people can come to work, we are going to be contributing two schools in film and television, we have committed to 50% affordable housing and now, as you said, we’re in partnership with Places for People, I think they are the largest housing authority in the country and we’re very proud to be working with them on this important element of Camden Film Quarter where real people can come to live and raise a family. We also are working with most of the major kind of organisations in film and television, again looking at archival opportunities, library opportunities, exhibition opportunities in the film and television industry. Naturally, we’re creating sound stages which create jobs and job opportunities and I think the whole mix will create a new neighbourhood in the middle of Kentish Town and we’re very excited about that.
Susan Freeman
I was just thinking how did you find this opportunity?
Lloyd Lee
So, it’s interesting. We’re always looking, Number One. Number Two, we try to keep that YOO Capital lens on when we look at the world because this has been hiding in plain sight, as I said, since World War II and certainly for the last ten or fifteen years. I think the key is, you have to have that lens to try to find I wouldn’t say the meaning of it all, that seems a bit poetic, but I genuinely think that when we look at London and the UK and places and these hidden gems, we genuinely dig deep to find an original story that we can tell with great partners on the site and we know from doing research because we read voraciously all the time, Bank of England, interest rates, report, job growth, we knew that film and television studios and sound stages in the UK are undersupplied, there’s excessive demand for them. People love filming in London, the tax credits are very powerful, the Government has again confirmed and reconfirmed that they will continue to stand by those credits and if anything, in certain areas like animation, they’ve actually increased the amount of tax credit so, it not only is a financial support system for the creative industries in film television, the talent pool here is extraordinary and as a result there’s just a lot of demand for it and I think in knowing that, we realised that this was a great opportunity to deliver something that had never done, been done before, which is film and television studios in the middle of central London.
Susan Freeman
And what’s the timeframe on this?
Lloyd Lee
So, if we actually are able to successfully submit the detailed plans at the end of this year, it might slip to first quarter of next year but the target is end of this year, we would aim to commence delivery end of next year.
Susan Freeman
That’s great. So, just turning to, to another interesting site, Shepherd’s Bush Market which I know has proved a challenge to previous owners, you are looking to improve, I mean, I assume Shepherd’s Bush Market is in Shepherd's Bush and it’s been there for many years, there are some market traders in place and you are looking to improve and retain the character of the market but how do you take the traders along with you because they presumably are happy with things the way they are and they don’t want to see change?
Lloyd Lee
So, it’s an interesting on. The beginning of our relationship with Shepherd’s Bush Market shares many of the characteristics of how we bought Olympia right after Brexit, how we came up with the vision for Camden Film Quarter which is an industrial estate that’s been kind of limping along for the last fifteen, twenty years in Camden. Shepherd’s Bush Market has had a very unfortunate history in the last ten, fifteen years and the reason is because there was a vision fifteen years ago that began as effectively, luxury housing. Luxury housing and actually forcibly CPOing, that’s Compulsory Purchase Order, where the Government uses its powers to effectively appropriate someone else’s land, pay them compensation and move them out. Not exactly a pretty narrative. And a result there was a lot of toxicity around it, a lot of locals did not like it and in the end they came to blows in the court and as a result of all of the bad blood, ten years went by and during that period of time almost no investment was made into the market, footfall fell precipitously, particularly exacerbated by Covid and in the end the financial backers of that vision basically just hit the end of the road and said “We’re out, someone needs to just take this on” and it wasn’t a matter of price, it was simply “look, I just don’t want it anymore, it’s become toxic for our business, it’s not going to happen, it’s been ten years, someone please take it” and once again, we raised our hand and we said we’ll take a look and what we realised if you go all the way back before ten years, you’re absolutely right, there is an immense history there of market traders who’ve been there since the late 1800s. Some of them got there start right after World War I where the Government effectively gave arches and spaces in the market to veterans who’d served their country and this allowed them to basically build a future for their family by creating businesses and the history of the market has evolved where generations of market traders have passed down their businesses, some of our market traders are third or fourth generation, while we have new immigrants who’ve come into this country for the very first time and set up shop and so you have a really growing and eclectic mix of market traders, many of them from all over the world and I think that historical visions for the market never celebrated that. If anything, they just wanted, I don’t know, a Starbucks and there’s nothing wrong with Starbucks, many of us go to Starbucks, I go to Starbucks every once in a while, but that doesn’t make it right that everything should be Starbucks, particularly when you have a hidden gem to celebrate. And so the first thing we did was we actually looked at the market and the market traders as the asset, as the kind of hidden gem but you had to basically go sit with each market trader one at a time to understand their families and their businesses and work on a new storyline, to invest into the market with them in a way that celebrated the eclectic nature of the market but equally recognise that after ten years of underinvestment, it looked like it had fallen on hard times. It wasn’t the way it looked twenty, thirty, forty years ago and so we needed to find our generation’s version of what a celebrated new market looks like in connection and in collaboration with the market traders. So that was Step One. Step Two was what were we going to do with all the luxury house thing that had been consented? And we realised well that’s just not a narrative we’re going to back. However, being located at the southern end of the White City Innovation District, we knocked on John Anderson’s door, he is the Chief Investment Officer of Imperial College London, I actually sit on a board with John on economic recovery in west London and I asked him, I asked him what he thought and he said, “Imperial is going to be here for a very, very long time. We will stretch out into centuries, that’s who we are and the idea that our footprint echoes into the future is important to us. We are here to basically deliver education, life sciences, research and innovation and we want our footprint to continue to grow across this part of London” and so the idea that you’re actually already inside the White City Innovation District means that you are a logical partner for that growth strategy and so we began rewriting all of the density of the housing into life sciences and so, fast-forward to today, we now have consent to build a sciences building, we’re doing so in collaboration and in partnership with Imperial, it will be the largest life science incubator in the country, we’re very proud of that. And the only vestige of what we kept from the original toxic plans was the fact that because the original plans were developing luxury housing, there was a legal mandate to deliver 19 affordable homes and what we said to the council is, even though life sciences has no such mandate, we think that the affordable homes element is important, we’re going to double it and in fact we have done, we’ve done 40 units and so all of it, 100% of it will be affordable housing, it will be effectively given to the council as part of this entire new vision for Shepherd’s Bush Market and that we think is an important contribution that we’re bringing forward as part of the whole vision, so it’s life sciences, it’s affordable housing and it is bringing forward with the market traders, led by the SBMTA, the Shepherd’s Bush Market Traders Association, a new vision and a new lease of life for the market.
Susan Freeman
It sounds terrific and have you got all the traders on board because I saw there was a petition to the, to the Mayor by I think one of the traders who clearly isn’t happy?
Lloyd Lee
So the answer is I think 90%, nine zero, of all the market traders have signed terms for a new relationship with the market, which we’re very proud of. We’re also fully endorsed by the SBMTA, the Shepherd’s Bush Market Traders Association, and we’re very grateful for their hard work in coming up with this new vision for the market. This is a democracy, it’s not 100% all of the time but we genuinely think of the greater good and what is important and we believe that the vision for the market, best co-authored with the market traders and 90% of them is the right way forward because in the end we do need progress, the market traders need progress, they need more footfall and the only way to do it is, is action, we have to do it.
Susan Freeman
Well it sounds as if you are doing incredibly well because, you know, as you say, it has been stalled for many years and actually, you know being able to partner with Imperial College is, is a real plus isn’t it.
Lloyd Lee
Absolutely.
Susan Freeman
I’d also like to talk about something slightly different; the Saville Theatre which I think is in Shaftesbury Avenue and…
Lloyd Lee
It is.
Susan Freeman
…yeah. You acquired it in October 2021 and it’s, it’s a Grade II Listed theatre which you know has been there for many, many, many years but it’s a building that needs some TLC and I think you’ve got some interesting ideas of how to reinvigorate it.
Lloyd Lee
We do. I mean I think you’ll hear some common themes, you’re already hearing it. So, so this building, built in 1931 as a theatre, not a great theatre if I’m honest when it was first built, it was too crowded, it was like being on a ski slope in the mezzanine levels, I mean it was just people were jammed in. I don’t even think under Fire regs you’d get that many people in any more but it was what it was and in 1970 there was a proposal to basically rip out a lot of the theatre and it was actually done but it was so hotly contested by people who wanted to save the theatre that actually, if you look at the description in Historic England’s analysis of the building, it actually states that as a consequence of the protests to save this theatre, which were unsuccessful, Theatres Trust was founded by an Act of Parliament a couple of years later, so it was of that kind of calibre scale of disagreement about the future of London theatres and so it began its life in a different guise in 1970 as a cinema and what happened was all of the beautiful listed elements were removed, a series of black boxes were stuck in because of course it’s a cinema and building was kind of lost I think in many respects for the last fifty years. Then the idea came along, again a bit toxic, which was to take that out and to do something that frankly no one believed in and certainly the community of Camden didn’t believe in it and it also went to court, it also failed and we picked it up and we basically opened by saying we’re going to make a commitment to live performance once again in the theatre, we believe that hospitality, hotels, is important to London and we think it supports the nighttime economy and we think it creates jobs and we think it actually creates a very complementary experience in the West End, in Seven Dials, with hospitality, food and beverage, restaurants and theatre and we made that commitment back in 2021 and fast-forward to today, we have submitted our plans, the theatre will come back, we are designing it for the next fifty to a hundred years and the capacity will be able to accommodate any kind of theatre experience, whether it’s theatre in the round, thrust stages, prosceniums, or anything in-between. That was very important to be able to futureproof this theatre as much as possible in the design. We also wanted to have a real worldclass experience, not the way it was back in 1931 but better and then on top of that, we are committing to putting a hotel on top and as a result we think that in the spirit of creating new experiences for people to go out, for tourists coming into London to see theatre, to be entertained in a new way, we think it’s important and we’ve very proud to announce that the theatre will be the first permanent home for Cirque du Soleil in all of Europe and certainly their first permanent home in London, obviously they have their show at Royal Albert Hall they do for about 90 days a year, it’s a travelling show and this will be a permanent Cirque 365 days a year, we’re very, very proud of that and the hotel, we’re very proud to announce will be CitizenM, we’re one of the most beloved design-led hotels in the world and we’re very proud to be partnering with both Cirque and with CitizenM to bring forward this vision.
Susan Freeman
That sounds amazing as well Lloyd. And what’s the timing on that? When will that open?
Lloyd Lee
So we are targeting resolution to grant this year, later this year and we would start construction sometime next year and probably about three years we’ll be getting ready to open.
Susan Freeman
And how many storeys will the building be to accommodate the hotel?
Lloyd Lee
So effectively the target is for the original building to have a hotel on top, which is slightly smaller than the original building on top, and it will allow CitizenM to have a viable number of hotel rooms, it’s about 200 keys, 200 hotel rooms, to operate efficiently and to provide the necessary hotel rooms to the London market and as you can imagine London is short on hotel rooms, it normally is, and today is no different and so it’s an important contribution we think to the wider economy to be able to do that.
Susan Freeman
It sounds brilliant. And so what other projects are you looking at? What sort of trends are we going to see in London going forward?
Lloyd Lee
I think in terms of trends, the trends that we see accelerating are trends that we have been focussing on for the last few years. We made a statement to investors, some of whom are with us at Olympia today, that major international gateway cities are going to be called upon to make their real estate assets work harder and by that I mean provide more services, open more hours to provide and cater to more people of different kinds. So it’s not just cinema for cinemagoers or offices for people to come to work every day, it needs to be that important mix so that literally seven days a week that place is providing spaces, services, places, things to do for all walks of life and we felt that being able to connect directly in work with your operating partners was going to be a very, very important part to that execution. It cannot be simply that we’re here to collect rent, it has to be that we roll up our sleeves for our operating partners and literally as we say, co-author the operational plans and the value proposition and in doing that and in staying close to our operating partners, we can basically bring to bear our own cohesive vision with different operating partners who normally would not talk to each other but now because there is a single ownership, for example at Olympia, all of our fifteen, almost growing now to twenty operating partners expect us to lead the way in terms of a cohesive one Olympia experience which will add value to those who come to Olympia but it also adds value to each of our operating partners because they’re part of a singular experience which we think is important across London and so I think what you’ll see whether it’s at Camden Film Quarter or in the life sciences or the Cirque and CitizenM building in Seven Dials, that operational element and the cohesive vision is going to be important and we are exploring that across other parts of the country, particularly in London, we’re looking in, in the Southbank area, we’re definitely looking in the City, we think that the City’s leadership has more recently in the last few years expressed a strong desire to bring an important cultural element to the City, a new dynamic, we champion that, we think that’s a great idea and we’d love to do something in the City out east, we are also looking further into Camden, we have a great relationship with Camden, we have a very good relationship with Hammersmith & Fulham and we’re continuing to look there, we’ve been invited to look in Westminster so we’re probably looking across most of London.
Susan Freeman
And are you, are you planning to stay with London at the moment or are you looking sort of across the country?
Lloyd Lee
We are looking across the country, we’ve looked at Edinburgh, we’ve looked at Oxford, we’ve looked in Cambridge, we’ve looked in a couple of other cities and it’s always trying to find the right twist and it’s also trying to find the hours in the day. I think time will tell over the next probably 12 to 24 months where we end up focussing time and resource but we have a lot on fortunately and we’re very excited about it.
Susan Freeman
Well it does sound very exciting and we will follow your progress with interest. Lloyd, thank you very much for your time today.
Lloyd Lee
Thank you very much.
Susan Freeman
Thank you so much Lloyd for taking us behind the scenes at Olympia, Camden Film Quarter, Shepherd’s Bush Market and the Saville Theatre. I’m looking forward to the opening of Olympia next year and to watching these other projects as they progress.
So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast coming very soon.
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