Regenerating the Royal Docks: history in the making

LISTEN Fly into London City Airport and you cannot miss them – the abandoned flour mills of Silvertown, most recently immortalised for Marvel fans in the final showdown in Spiderman: Far From Home. For Bek Seeley, managing director for development at Lendlease Europe, the surrounding regeneration scheme at London’s Royal Docks is as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster. Lendlease’s Silvertown Partnership, a joint venture with Starwood Capital, has plans lodged for a £3.5bn scheme that will include some 6,000 homes as well as a redevelopment of those mills – known as the Millennium Mills – into a community centrepiece with more than 780,000 sq ft of work and creative space.     “Silvertown is, in our world, the opportunity to bring forward the east of London, here and now,” Seeley says. “It is not often when you are doing a large-scale regeneration project that you are gifted such history and such evolution. And the mills, that centrepiece as you come over the water, stands out in terms of what this project can deliver.” Dig this Seeley was speaking with EG alongside Dan Bridge, Royal Docks programme director at the Greater London Authority, for a podcast recorded at the UKREiiF conference in Leeds in mid-May. The parties have been in discussions over the vision for Silvertown since Lendlease and Starwood bought the site – and an existing planning consent – in 2018. “Silvertown is the largest site in the mayor of London’s land portfolio, and when you are seeking a development partner to work with you on a project like that, you need to find somebody you are happy and willing to work with over a 15 or 20-year time period,” Bridge says. “You need to be able to find a partner you can trust through that period of time, through significant changes to economic cycles and potentially political cycles. Somebody you can develop trust with to deliver your original vision for the site in a way that might change over time.” Seeley adds: “From the moment discussions started, there was a conversation about the evolution of the project. If you stand still, it clearly is not going to work with the time periods we are talking about because the world moves on. Quite a complex planning strategy has developed to enable the project to evolve. But also, we are going. If you go out there now, there are diggers, there is a lot going on.” Say what you think Getting stakeholders on the same page means convincing the local community of a project’s worth as well. Seeley highlights the work of Lendlease’s project director Ed Mayes and his team in building on the work that had already been done earlier in the project. “They focused on spending time with the local communities and trying to understand what all parts of those communities were saying,” she says. “One thing we have learnt with complex projects is that some people are noisier and find it easier to speak than others. How do you try to engage people who would not necessarily say what they think?” To do that, Lendlease has pushed to “become part of that community”, Seeley adds, “listening, reflecting, acting, demonstrating that when people give us feedback, we respond to it”. Mayes has been particularly keen to build bonds with teachers and school leaders. “These people know its communities inside out,” Seeley says. “They are breeding the generations of the future – they are going to know it so much better than we ever can.” These efforts come on top of the GLA’s own efforts. “When my team started their work about four years ago, we had a year of a conversation with communities called the Big Conversation, where we used a range of different methods to engage with communities from cultural programmes – we repurposed a milk float with branding on it and that went around all different bits of existing communities.” A rebranded milk float might not have the same knock-out factor as a Marvel movie set but it is all part of the same picture for Lendlease’s Seeley. “We do not want to deliver history that sits in a box and does not embrace the community,” she says. “It is an approach of respecting the history, but making the history part of the future.” To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews Image: Lendlease In partnership with