‘It was a disaster’: how Boris Johnson’s Docklands business center was turned into a ghost town Architecture

noBoris Johnson has been billed as an impressive “for Asian investors”: the £1.7bn complex of waterfront offices will be “London’s third largest business district” after the City and Canary Wharf. In the year As mayor of London in 2013, he promised an increasingly 24-hour-a-day “city in the city”, with Asian companies lured here on Beijing time by tax breaks and new life into East London’s long-delayed Royal Docks.

The area has been a ghost town for nearly a decade since Johnson signed a deal with Chinese developer ABP (Advanced Business Parks) to build his dockside nightmare. About one-tenth of the project has been realized: sprawling office blocks on a sea of ​​asphalt and wasteland with no tenants. Last week, after years of uncertainty and missed deadlines, the Greater London Authority finally kicked the developer out of the project, citing a lack of progress on the plans, leaving the future of the 14-hectare (35-acre) site up in the air.

Visiting the place today feels like walking through a computer-generated image of a correctional facility. It has the air of a dark, open-air prison of white-collar criminals sentenced to purgatory in a crowded business park. An endless array of identical windows stretches along both sides of Mandarin Street, the district’s central thoroughfare, with a continuous 200-meter-long gray brick facade. A row of twisted trees mark the desolate area, while a lone ranger glides back and forth in an electric golf buggy, stopping occasionally to sweep up an errant leaf, leaving the pavement spotless for the community’s virtual residents.

“There is not a single office tenant here,” he says. “Not one. They were trying to rent them, then the plague happened and – poor people! – we found ourselves a ghost town. Finally a job center opened here a few months ago, so at least now I have some company.”

The project In 2015, at a grand ceremony at the Mansion House between then Prime Minister David Cameron and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the deal was heralded as the dawn of a “golden era” in Sino-British relations. . Chinese money has been pouring into London in droves, with Thames-side towers offering a “new level of luxury”, five-star room service and en suite karaoke parlours. Some of those projects have stalled due to the collapse of China’s property market, along with BRICS and the pandemic. Construction work at the Royal Albert Dock halted in 2019.

ABP founder Xu Weiping told the Guardian in 2020: “I was a billionaire before, but more than that. The virus is just one reason. Brexit has reduced the value of many of my UK properties. Documents filed with Companies House in December last year showed that ABP made a loss of £13.2m in 2020, more than 10 times more than in 2019 and a loss of £14.5m.

Xu, who has struggled to attract Chinese tenants amid the pandemic, has made final plans to convert the 21 offices he has built so far into 2,000 self-contained, Covid-proof micropods. “In this cube, the man can do his work, but he can rest and relax,” he said. “Each cube is equipped with a multi-functional wall, coffee maker, mini-fridge and a day bed” designed to ensure the crew never leaves the 3m x 3m capsule.

My request to visit the brave new post-work future was sadly never granted, and the GLA served ABP with a final termination notice last summer. Its parent company, Dauphin Holdings, registered in the Isle of Man, has taken over the obligations of the agreement, but a further termination notice was presented to Dauphin in March of this year. ABP has now gone into liquidation following a series of demands from creditors.

Today the place has a Ballardian air. On a sunny weekday lunchtime, a tattered topless man is the sole inhabitant of the district’s central square, holding press conferences on the covered lawn and admiring the reflections in the empty plate-glass windows. After walking the length of the blocks, trying doors and pressing noises in search of life, I found another man sitting on the curb drinking coffee. An office worker at last?

“We’re filming a Marks and Spencer ad,” he tells me. “It is an ideal place because there are no people around. If we are careful with the shot, we can make it look like a normal place.

The horror, quality of a film composition comes from the way it is constructed. To save time, the development is completely designed in BIM (Building Information Modeling), so that the buildings can be made in the factory in modular units and quickly assembled on site. The flawless and computer-generated appearance of the brickwork is that these are not brick walls, but rather thin “slats” of brick attached to 9m x 4m concrete panels. during the day. Look closely and you’ll see seal joints like a matrix failure where the panels meet.

The Farrells, who were the main developer and architects of the buildings, aimed to create a “new dockyard typology” inspired by both the dockland warehouses and the Georgian portico. Which seems sensible enough. But the resulting space, designed on a diagrammatic scale and simply printed on a production line, a London street chimera, is lost in digital translation.

The failure of the project is not surprising to anyone who follows this difficult method from the beginning. Like the nearby empty cable car, the loss-making ArcelorMittal Orbit, the overheating Routemaster bus and the ailing Garden Bridge, the Royal Albert Dock plan bears all the hallmarks of Boris Johnson’s mayoralty: a futile project built on shaky foundations.

In the year When the deal was first announced in 2013, Johnson promised that London would be in an “unbeatable situation”, the plan was “backed by the Bank of China” and many tenants had already signed up – not only to rent but also to buy the buildings. A Channel 4 News investigation the following year, however, raised key concerns about ABP’s history and “spicy” dealings with those involved in the bidding process. ABP and its partners in China’s local government have been involved in forcibly evicting residents from their homes in a once-completed development in Beijing. Amateur video footage appeared to show riot groups taking possessions and demolishing a family’s home. Johnson told Channel 4 that he was not aware of this, but that ABP’s human rights record in China was “irrelevant to the bidding process”. ABP has vehemently denied any connection to the eviction, and said the event was over by the time the footage was shot.

The investigation also found that ABP shares a Beijing office with London & Partners, the London-based agency to attract foreign investment, which is a “stakeholder” in the procurement process. London & Partners confirmed it would share offices with ABP for a time, but said this was only for logistical reasons and had no role in deciding who won the Royal Albert Dock contract. ABP disputed any claims of impropriety, and said it went through a “rigorous and thorough” bidding process.

Meanwhile, the Chinese-born wife of a junior home secretary appears to have played a role in supporting the bid, while at the same time donating heavily to the Conservative Party, the report said. The program said property developer Xuelin Bates, who married Tory peer Lord (Michael) Bates in 2012, held talks with Xu Weiping in 2008 and took at least one trip to China paid for by a Chinese company. She also set up a London-based company called China ABP, but dissolved it before the dossier arrived, and has donated more than £206,000 to the Conservatives since 2010. Lady Bates said any donations she made were personal and that the ABP of London China had none. It has ties to a Chinese company, which has denied any knowledge or involvement in its activities.

“The whole thing has been a disaster,” said one cafe owner, who was looking forward to more foot traffic from the new offices. I don’t see anyone taking on the project for at least another decade. In the meantime, at least London has the perfect desert movie to shoot the next zombie office-worker apocalypse.