For Barry Jessup and his colleagues at Socius Development, the bricks and mortar of the company’s mixed-use schemes aren’t really the heart of the business. For them, it’s all about what makes our cities click and citizens tick.
“We are people-focused in the way that we deliver our schemes,” says managing director Jessup. “Our interest is in the science of the city.”
Jessup launched Socius in 2022 when First Base – of which Jessup had been chief executive – split its team and portfolio. Jessup set up shop with colleagues Olaide Oboh, Daniel May and Steve Eccles, forming a new company with an old team and a portfolio of schemes in cities including in Milton Keynes, Bristol, Brighton and Cambridge.
Jessup and Oboh sat down with EG in Socius’s Fora offices in London’s Soho to talk about the company’s journey roughly a year from its launch. Neither come from a traditional real estate background. Jessup says he still uses his experience working in the oil industry in his twenties to assess the risk and rewards of deals that come his way. For Oboh, a sociology background pushes her to understand people and what they need from the places in which they work and live.
That is an important focus. Socius, named after its focus on social value, has specified in its company articles that its directors have an obligation to consider not only shareholders but all stakeholders and the environment in every decision they make.
Inside the schemes
Before the split, First Base had pivoted away from its origins in London affordable housing and towards urban regeneration mixed-use schemes, Jessup says. Much of the focus was on offices and food and beverage space, as well as residential and student housing. Spinning out was an opportunity to focus more on that side of the business (Jessup is still a non-executive director at First Base, which has since focused on public-private partnerships).
Socius’s latest development to reach practical completion is the Edward Street Quarter in Brighton. The scheme rejuvenated Mighell Street in the city’s Kemptown, which had been lost to demolition in the 1970s. As well as 168 homes, the development includes 125,000 sq ft of grade-A office space, with Octopus Energy signing as its main occupier. M&G bought the build-to-rent portion of the scheme, with L&G acquiring the affordable segment. The scheme also has for-sale homes.
“Edward Street Quarter strengthens our core belief that mixed-use is the way to regenerate towns and cities across the UK,” Oboh says. “Just providing offices, people work there, and it is great you get that economic growth. But once people go home, and at the weekend, it’s dead – and with residential-only, it’s the other way around.
“But when you bring those uses together to create that vibrancy in a location, you bring jobs, and you also get people living there. You increase the local spend, you get council tax – all those benefits work better when you create that mix.
“And when you add in all the leisure facilities that you are including, you bring people in from outside who are going to spend money in the development. It really creates that vibrancy and activity that you need to help cities grow.”
Socius has half-residential and half-commercial schemes in the works in Bristol and Milton Keynes as well. In Bristol, it is Soapworks, a £215m regeneration of an existing building into 180,000 sq ft of flexible workspace and 243 build-to-rent homes, with 20% affordable, and space for independent retail and food and drink offerings, including Bristol’s first purpose-built food hall.
In Milton Keynes, Socius is redeveloping Saxon Court in the MK Gateway scheme, which will provide 185,000 sq ft of workspace incorporating office, co-working and R&D space, as well as a dedicated innovation hub. The residential element will consist of 288 BTR flats, with 31% affordable, in a new building the company says has been designed for “post-Covid-19 urban living”.
Socius says it foresaw the government’s regulation around second staircases coming and implemented it into its design 18 months ago. “What we’ve done is managed to turn the second staircase, rather than simply being an additional cost that a lot of other developers are whingeing about, into a feature,” Jessup says. “That actually drives through what we describe as vertical villages on every floor. So it becomes a part of the wellness offering of the scheme, encourages people to use the stairs between those floors and creates more of a sense of community.”
Then there is a £500m GDV office scheme in Cambridge in partnership with the railway pension scheme Railpen.
The development, Botanic Place, has consent for around 500,000 sq ft of workspace and was designed by architectural firm AHMM. As well as two proposed office blocks, which the partnership will develop, the site includes an existing 70,000 sq ft office building called Botanic House, developed by Pace Investments in 2013, as well as the former Flying Pig pub.
Ambition and aspiration
Is the Socius team concerned about the future of the workplace? “I didn’t buy into the narrative of ‘nobody’s ever going back to the office’,” Jessup says. “I think what’s going to happen is nobody is going to go back to a crap office.
“We have seen now that people are very much focused on the high-quality spaces and the ones that are convenient to get to and the ones where you can cycle and have a nice experience when you arrive and where they have more amenities. Those are the aspects from an employee level, but from a corporate level there is a massive focus on ESG, so if you marry those amenities with ESG credentials then you have something people will continue to want.”
Oboh agrees, but boils it down to something else: the best offices now “have much more soul”.
“We don’t just want to go to an office and leave to go home at 5pm,” she says. “You create vibrancy and bring people into the office environment to bring activity throughout the day. We are starting to add on, looking at food markets and gaming studios and what actually creates that interest in a building.”
In identifying new sites, the Socius team digs into a city’s demographics, economic growth and political environment. But Oboh emphasises that the company also gets “boots on the ground” and has conversations with people in the neighbourhoods they are interested in to discuss “what’s the ambition, what’s the aspiration, what are the issues?”
“We are not here to solve all the problems, but we are here to use development as a vehicle to solve some of those big, significant issues,” she says, adding that this approach is what helps Socius create the “magic” in its developments.
Boston to Bristol
As the next step on its mixed-use journey, Socius is looking to life sciences. Jessup and Oboh went to Boston last year to analyse the kind of developments the US has seen success with and work out what can be replicated here.
Jessup believes a segment of life sciences offices in the UK will follow the trend of moving away from business parks and into city centre locations. “I think chemistry, most of that will probably stay in the science parks. But the biology side, which tends to be dry labs, and tends to have a younger demographic in terms of the employee, is definitely going to be urban-based in the future.”
Socius is looking at locations in the Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London for life sciences and residential mixed-use schemes, as well as Bristol and Manchester, where it sees rising demand.
The developer will also look to partner with a life sciences operational developer, Jessup adds. “The operational side of all of our schemes is as important as the development side… You need to understand the way it’s going to be operated in due course.
“You can’t just build something and they will come. You need to build it in a way that gives you flexibility.”
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