The EG Interview: The king of King’s Cross

“If you cut me in half, it probably says King’s Cross and Argent,” says Robert Evans with a laugh.  But after 23 years with both, the king of King’s Cross is seeking another role – perhaps a promotion to tsar – after stepping down from Related Argent at the end of last year. “I love the place to bits,” says Evans, who in 2018 became chief executive of the 67-acre estate he has been planning and shepherding for the past two-and-a-bit decades. He literally wrote the book on the urban regeneration scheme, penning Principles for a Human City within months of joining the developer in 2001. It would become the blueprint not just for King’s Cross, but for a new model of regeneration, one that has been praised, emulated and aped. When the government launched its plan to level up Britain in 2022, it didn’t talk about delivering another 20 Poundburys or Canary Wharfs. It promised 20 King’s Crosses. King’s Cross itself is nearly finished. Over 8m sq ft of development has been built since it was awarded outline planning in 2008, including nearly 3m sq ft of commercial space and 1,750 new homes, set amid 26 acres of open space. The 50th and final building of the estate was granted planning in July and will be built this year. The real work has now been handed over to the asset management team. “I’ve been nominally responsible for them for a while, but the truth is they are an incredibly capable team and the things that they need me for have been diminishing,” says Evans. “One mark of success is that you make yourself redundant.” Leave on a high Not that Evans has been working only on King’s Cross all that time. He helped write the bid for Brent Cross Town, worked on the Tottenham Hale scheme and worked in Manchester in the early years as well. He helped with the St Pancras Hospital project, which has just gone into planning. “But King’s Cross has been the mainstay of my life for the past 23 years.” Another reason for leaving is that Argent – ever in a state of evolution – is transitioning to something altogether new. Related Argent will have a new management team, new business models and new schemes to focus on, such as Brent Cross Town and Tottenham’s Heart of Hale. “Better to leave on a high,” Evans says. “If I left it another three years or so then I wouldn’t be in as good a position to go and do something else.” Evans, who turned 53 last year, has no intention of putting up his feet in his King’s Cross apartment and watching the world go by. “I’m not a sit-around kind of person,” he says. “I still feel there is plenty of fire in me. But I’m not in a rush. I’ll be doing something in the next two or three months, but the key thing is to find the right challenge.” He will shortly have a book published, co-written with Bob Allies, Graham Morrison and Demetri Porphyrios, about how they put together the King’s Cross masterplan. There are “a few discussions under way”, he confides. And there would be a “nice circularity” to returning to consultancy, says Evans, who started his career in 1992 at planning and environmental firm RPS, now owned by Tetra Tech. Ideally, what he would like to do is apply all that he has learnt at King’s Cross, and before, to help other big regeneration schemes come out of the ground. [caption id="attachment_1221120" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] Coal Drops Yard, King’s Cross[/caption] “I’d like to think that there are some things I’ve learnt that could be useful elsewhere,” he says. “That’s the idea. To use those big picture skills to solve the infrastructure challenges, the planning and the politics, the stakeholder management.” It is possible that exactly the right role may exist. When Related Argent posted the news of the 50th and final building completing this year, Evans recalls, some wag replied with a reference to the levelling up white paper’s promise. “Just another 19 King’s Cross-style projects to go!” For Evans, shepherding “the other 19” is enormously appealing. “I can see the attraction of something like that. Something that has that strategic quality to it, that allows me to utilise what I have learnt from King’s Cross on a broader canvas.” In that respect, he would be following in the footsteps of Argent’s founder, Peter Freeman. Since leaving the business, Freeman has chaired Homes England as it shifted from being a housing enabler to a regeneration deliverer, and is now spearheading levelling up secretary Michael Gove’s vast ambitions for Cambridge. Poisoned chalice Evans is flattered by the way King’s Cross has been held up as a replicable model, but believes that Gove et al have “misunderstood” how that can be done. “The ambition is good,” he says. “But what’s unfortunate about it is that if you’re somebody connected with a site in Hull or Sheffield or somewhere, the idea that you can just pick up something from central London is ridiculous. It is obviously a very different world in terms of values, you can’t just copy and paste. People are pretty wary about that concept and rightly so. Development is a local thing.” But there are principles that can be exported. “The idea of comprehensive masterplanning, land assembly to enable that, a long-term focus, patient capital, the idea that mixed-use matters, that public realm really matters. All of that is extremely applicable.” And there is plenty of experience and wisdom that Evans can share. When he joined Argent – the result of a boozy trip to France, a delayed ferry ride and an opportune, if barely remembered, conversation with then-chief executive Roger Madelin – Evans was already a dab hand at large, complex and controversial projects. During his nine years at RPS he put together the UK training estate for the British Army, brought about Heathrow’s Terminal 5, Stansted’s expansion and the Jubilee River. “I never really did lots of mainstream development,” he says. “It was all big Tonka Toy stuff.” That was the experience that appealed to Argent. King’s Cross had seemed cursed – “one of those poisoned chalice projects”, says Evans. The area had been in decline since the Second World War. The London Regeneration Consortium, which featured “really impressive people” like Godfrey Bradman and Sir Stuart Lipton, had almost won planning in 1994, but been forced to walk away. “But Argent were incredibly optimistic and probably quite naïve,” Evans recalls. They were used to working in cities like Birmingham where people would “support a good scheme with nice designs”. “Argent had this faith in the system because they hadn’t been exposed to the sort of ‘anti’ politics that London had at that time. It was attractively naïve.” Evans, by contrast, was used to working on controversial schemes that attracted a lot of opposition and criticism. It took his team seven long years to get outline planning across the site. Changes of administration at Camden nearly sent the whole thing back to the drawing board. Legal challenges from occupiers went as far as the High Court. Islington withheld permission over its 1.6-acre Triangle Site in the north-east corner of the plot, forcing the scheme to public inquiry. Finally, in July 2008, the plans were approved by communities secretary Hazel Blears. “Seven and a half years’ work. That’s a very long time and it did grind us down. But we were always determined and optimistic,” Evans says. That is a feature of Argent people, he adds. “Peter Freeman has it, Roger Madelin has it, David Partridge has it and I have it. There is a sort of bloody mindedness about us that you need to do these big projects.” Purple ink But getting planning permission was merely the start. They had a site – they had paid the landowners, LCR and Exel, now their partners, for a half share. But when the global financial crisis hit they couldn’t raise any money to move it forward. The turnaround came thanks to a trip to Edinburgh to meet an architect. The architect didn’t end up getting the gig, but Evans, along with then joint chief executive and now chair David Partridge and director André Gibbs, found themselves with time to kill in Edinburgh Airport. The team literally sketched a new business plan on a napkin. Originally Argent had wanted to build and own the entire scheme as a modern London estate. It had said no to long leaseholds and selling plots to other developers. But now that shifted. “Suddenly we thought, ‘we need to bring some money through the door’. And the best way of doing it was to start saying yes to some of these long leasehold capital deals.” But they would be ruthlessly selective. Only those that could bring something long term and positive to the masterplan as a whole would even be considered. That led to a deal with Urbanest, the student housing supplier, then BNP Paribas, and then Google. “Until 2012 it was a miserable hand-to-mouth existence. We would do a deal, bring some money in, and go and spend it all on pipes and wires and cleaning up contamination.” It took until 2015 for Argent to get back to its original business plan of holding assets and making choices. After seven years of planning, it had spent seven years struggling for cash. “But in a way that period was the making of the project,” says Evans. “And the making of me in some respects.” This is the core of the message he wants the “other King’s Crosses” to hear. The precarious position of King’s Cross during those lean years meant that Argent had to be focused, optimistic and disciplined. The numbers were constantly climbing. By 2016, it was spending an estimated £1m a day on construction. “We used to print a graph of the net cash position daily, in purple ink.” Argent still prints that graph, every day. “It isn’t always purple, and everyone gets very confused when we refer to it as the purple graph, but we still have that discipline.” The experience of King’s Cross means Evans knows that planning is not the main problem that needs fixing. But he does believe the changes made to the system over the past two decades have “made it go backwards”. “They have encouraged a fire-and-forget model favoured by housebuilders,” he says. Innovations like CIL “have actually made it harder to pursue a developer-owner-operator model”. But that long-term approach is exactly what is needed, he insists. “We need the debate about how to encourage more people to stay in as long-term investors, to take the long-term view. We need to focus on the capital structures, how you bring the right money to bear in the right structures with the right alignment.” But for all the complexity inherent in delivering a major regeneration project, Evans says the rules he would pass on are actually very simple. “Choose the right developer. Incentivise them to think and act long term. Be comprehensive in your approach and be visionary. And come up with a development model that keeps one eye on the long-term vision and one eye on the short-term cash flow,” he says. “And keep a plentiful supply of purple ink.” Main photo: Argent