Marketing Nottingham: JDI

Delicate, complex, tortuous.

Not exactly the three words you'd choose to sell Nottingham as an inward investment location, but entirely appropriate to characterise the process by which a proper place marketing organisation has emerged.

While the news is now out that Experience Nottinghamshire, Invest in Nottingham and Nottingham Means Business will come together under the umbrella of Marketing Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, the process to nail down the final shape of the organisation is far from complete.

The status of the different organisations means there are all sorts of employment and financial issues to resolve, political sensitivities to accommodate (this is a body that has to visibly serve city and county), and a significant degree of independence to establish.

Achieving that is going to require an experienced, respected, yet firm and forensic pair of hands. Nottingham City Council, which has played the driving role, knows who it would like to chair this process. But a key challenge for the person in the hotseat will be demonstrating to the rest of the county that this isn't going to be some metropolitan fix.

There is also a job to do in convincing politicians and businesses that a body with a very broad portfolio of responsibilities - it takes in everything from bidding for multi-million inward investments to promoting shire B&Bs - can still have a clear focus and a consistent message.

The bigger picture is that this is an organisation which needs to hit the ground running. The marketing of the city and county lags beind that of other major conurbations, and Marketing Nottingham will emerge at a time when the devolution agenda means cities in partcular are sounding an ever-louder drumbeat about their appeal as investment locations.

What's more, both city and county have significant unfulfilled regeneration opportunities - and the clock is ticking loudly on the current economic cycle.

Some close to the process - and many in business - have been more than a little frustrated at the glacial  progress. After all, the need for an organisation which marketed both city and county to businesses and tourists was identified years ago.

But the opportunities it can pursue haven't gone away. And constructing a narrative around them which is flexible enough to serve different purposes really isn't difficult.

Tortuous as this process has been, it's neither here nor there in terms of marketing Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. This is all about the message - and making it happen. JDI, as they say.

MIPIM 2015: Property and powerhouses?

In a few days' time, low cost flights from airports across the UK will be full of optimistists. They'll be heading for Nice then hiring a taxi for the short hop up the Cote D'Azure to Cannes. MIPIM here's again.

When I went last year it was, to borrow a phrase from one of the Nottingham team "as if an industry which fell off a cliff in 2008 has just jumped back on again".

The place was teeming with people and money was out there in a big way looking for places to go. A useful chunk of it found its way into the groaning tills of Cannes' bars, restaurants and hotels. Some even made a kebab shop owner smile, but that's another story.

The point last year was that it was obvious that a new investment cycle was underway and that landowners, developers and economic development teams in towns and cities needed to have attractive, oven-ready opportunities for investors.

Nottingham did ok last time round, with a presence more noticeable than it's had for some time. It bagged a restaurant directly opposite the Palais des Festivals, got some decent coverage with a beach cricket event, and won a few friends with a panel discussion dinner and its drinks reception.

This year will be tougher. Cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, which throw significantly more money at the event than Nottingham, will roll into Cannes on a wave of optimism brought about by regional devolution and the 'Northern Powerhouse' badge.

Now, the statisticians among you might well point out that the economic powerhouse outside London is actually in the Midlands, not the north. But perception is all, the Midlands hasn't (yet) got its message together and London politicians and media will lap up press releses which mention Manchester.

Nottingham will have some highlights to talk about - the enterprise zone centred on the Boots campus is now ready to go; Nottingham City Council is now engaged in a serious push to crack the regeneration of that swathe of the city from Eastside to Waterside; similarly, the city desperately needs new Grade A office space; and the march of its life sciences sector continues apace.

There will be one other significant announcement during MIPIM week. It could have long-term implications for the city. And I'm saying no more than that!

MIPIM: Has property's party started again?

It'll be one last blast at the bars and cafes in Cannes tonight.

While there'll be some brave souls hanging round for meetings on Friday morning, MIPIM 2014 is more or less over now.

It's been an at times frenetic event, dominated by a sense that there's a lot of investment money chasing too few opportunities.

Adding to the vague sense of desperation, construction firms have been telling anyone who'll listen that they'll run out of brickies and sparks to do all this development within 18 months.

You have to take the hyper atmosphere of MIPIM with a huge pinch of salt. Even so, it's pretty obvious that a new cycle is getting into gear on a serious level. Money is waiting for occupiers to be brave, and planners will need to act fast when proposals land.

Nottingham has almost certainly lined up some deals here, with some sites attracting a number of potential development partners. It's base, La Potiniere in Square Merimee, has had people walking through the door looking for serious conversations. Some won't go anywhere, but both political leader Jon Collins and chief executive Ian Curryer are convinced they are coming away with concrete options.

La Potiniere has been an effective base. Directly opposite the Palais des Festivals, it makes a stand look almost redundant (and don't bother ringing - I'm told Team Nottingham has already snaffled it for next year).

The council has to get results this time round. In the last cycle the CGIs ran well ahead of demand and two key zones, Eastside and Waterside, were left high and dry. Judging by the number of bidders who queued up with millions in their pockets to try to swipe Kevin Riley's troubled Riverside apartments, the demand has already arrived.

Today's announcement that the city council will share the risk with  Peel on 50,000 sq ft of Grade A space near the city's railway station tells you that some regional markets still need a jump-start. Whether the council will actually end up occupying the space depends on whether economic progress is sustained.

But there's a sense now that stalled sites in Nottingham and beyond are about to burst back to life. That or it was a good party...

SouthReef: From Dublin to Dubai

SouthReef will go down as a globe-trotting metaphor for the property crash.
It started in Nottingham, got its funding from Ireland, ended up in the hands of an Irish government agency, and is now owned by an Isle of Man entity with a UK subsidiary which is funded by a consortium from the United Arab Emirates.
It will also take the prize for the most unfortunate time to launch a major property development. Construction started in April 2007, just four months before the sub-prime crisis began to explode all over the banking system.
What was once touted as an excellently designed gateway project has stood like a sorry relic ever since, with an unfinished tower and only partially occupied offices.
So, here we are, fully six years after the scheme began, and a finish looks like it’s finally in sight. Who’s bought the project from the Irish Government’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Old Canal Street, Dublin)? That’s complicated. Nottingham One Developments is a Derbyshire-registered UK subsidiary of a company of the same name registered in the Isle of Man.
But control actually lies in sunny Dubai, where the new project’s funders are based. Their interest is being managed by former Lendlease executive Colin Wright, who has a string of major Middle East projects under his belt.
The multi-million sum involved in this deal hasn’t been disclosed, nor has the amount Nottingham One’s Dubai backers are investing. But I’m told it is, by their standards, a small project. The signals they were giving out suggest it should be fairly straightforward for them to make it work financially (and I doubt they paid NAMA top dollar).
It looks like they are building up a portfolio of what you might call distressed projects which have still got solid potential. And they are buying at the bottom of the market.
So what was once going to be apartments, offices, restaurants and a hotel will now be a simple residential and office complex. Some of the money involved will come back to Nottingham – Arup are project managing completion and the stout chaps at CPMG have been brought in to redesign the tower for residential use. As of yesterday, a main contractor hadn’t been appointed.
Nevertheless, the sound of hammers will be heard pretty quickly at the Canal Street site: the project is (unsurprisingly) being rebranded Nottingham One, and the SouthReef signs will be knocked down and binned.
SouthReef was the brainchild of architect-turned-developer Andy Grogan and Charlie Fish, of the family building dynasty, Thomas Fish. It isn’t the only name to have disappeared during the six year life of the project: Thomas Fish itself collapsed part way through, only to be bought out by Chek Whyte. His empire, too, would later hit the skids.
Nottingham City Council initially welcomed the scheme because it gave one of the southern gateways of the city something more modern and imposing than the weary old banqueting suite it replaced. It has been desperate to see the site make progress because it regards the whole area – with the empty eastside zone nearby – as unfinished business.
When Nottingham One is completed, probably in late 2013 or early 2014, it will be the first piece in what the council regards as a southern jigsaw: the money it has won under the terms of the City Deal should help it breathe life into the lace market, Hockley and perhaps even Eastside.
With Nottingham One tidying up Southside, this leaves only the thorny issue of Broadmarsh cluttering up the southern gateway to the city. The latest on that long, drawn out saga is one for another day.

Nottingham's Creative Quarter: It's better than b******s!

You might say it was when they talked about the money, or the skills, or the mentoring. And all of those things matter.
But for me the defining moment of the Creative Quarter workshop held in Nottingham was the moment when someone near the front delivered the judgement: “This isn’t bollocks.”
Too right.
I’m not being flippant (not much, anyway). This was unvarnished evidence that an audience of people who’ve seen economic initiatives come and go like trains in the night thought that Nottingham’s plans to develop a whole new quarter of the city actually made sense.
And so they should. For there are two key differences between the Creative Quarter plan and the now-wearily familiar CGIs of dreamboat developments that were wheeled out to wow us during the credit boom: this one’s tapping into an existing heritage – and it’s got money behind it.
Friday’s workshop at the Antenna creative hub saw people talk about Nottingham’s industrial past, the potential for social and environmental returns, inclusiveness, even the difference extending Nottingham’s political boundaries might make (yes, that one again).
But the single most important byte of information was contained on a Powerpoint slide flashed up by John Yarham, the City Council’s director of economic innovation. What did it show? £37 million for a venture capital fund, £20 million for a technology grant fund, £8 million of investment in infrastructure, money for start-ups, and business rate incentives.
As I’ve blogged before, when we talk about the creative quarter and the money lined up behind it, we’re really talking about a broad sweep of activities which range from programing, data analytics and life sciences through to creative design, digital content and media. All have knowledge at their heart, all have been present to varying degrees in the Nottingham economy for decades.
The audience at Friday’s event came largely from the creative design and media end of that spectrum. Some tuned in very quickly to the huge implications of the Creative Quarter initiative (Susi Henson, with some tough business experiences under her belt, spotted rent rises immediately), others were wondering how to connect with it, a few wanted to weld it to their own cultural cause.
It’s bigger than that, and the political and economic imperatives underneath it mean it will inevitably do some things a few people in the room won’t like. That’s business.
Yet there were some fascinating contributions to the debate about what Nottingham’s Commercial Quarter is going to be driven by. Adam Bird, the Esendex CTO whose idea of downtime is a quick 100 miles on a bicycle, banged on about business stepping up to the bar and collaborating in the name of economic progress.
This wasn’t woolly idealism, but the product of Bird’s own experience of what it takes to nurture an environment attractive to the techies which firms like his can collectively feed off.
This is about more than well-paid jobs: it’s about events they like to gather at, surroundings they feel at home in and facilities they value. It is understanding that these people look for a fulfilling way of life rather than a Perspex tech palace with ultraband bragging rights.
So it’s wrong to dismiss Bird’s approach as wishful thinking which ignores hard-headed commercial reality. It’s anything but: businesses who want to make the most of the commercial quarter – whether it’s being a part of it or selling services into it – need to understand that. Some of the businesses that grow or set up there will be familiar, traditional animals. Others may have a different cultural feel.
Councillor Nick McDonald, who leads the city council portfolio on jobs, skills and business, also made a number of interesting observations. The Creative Quarter has to deliver politically, and this is why it actually covers a broad range of business and a hefty chunk of the city – including Eastside, a stalled regeneration zone which should have been full of gleaming flats and offices by now if you believed the noughties CGIs.
It’s also the reason why a central component of the Creative Quarter/City Deal hooks into the massive issue of skills and youth employment. This is a nasty problem which has been darkening our corridors for far too long and all initiatives of this kind must have a component which answers the question: what does the future hold for our kids?
This tracks back to Adam Bird’s point: businesses cannot criticise an economy if all they’re going to do is take something out of it. If they think GCSEs are meaningless and don’t rate the skills of job applicants…well, do something about it.
While some involved in the workshop were nervous about attaching too much expectation to an initiative which, as Confetti's Craig Chettle put it, is still in the foothills, McDonald was happy to admit that Austin (home of ‘Keep it Weird’) was part of the inspiration, and pointedly said that Nottingham had been too inward-looking in the past and shouldn’t be ashamed to brag a bit.
There is, potentially, a massive amount to brag about at the moment. Besides the Creative Quarter and the wider City Deal, we have the tram expansion (£600m), the A453 widening (£140m), the transport interchange (£60m), the enterprise zone.
Very few cities can offer such a portfolio of opportunity for the next generation.
Nick McDonald said one of the reasons why the city had been shy about shouting about itself abroad was that overseas ‘jollies’ tended to up on the front page of the Nottingham Post.
The surprise would be if the opportunity presented by the Creative Quarter doesn’t make headlines at MIPIM and beyond. It’s a big story.

MIPIM: What next for Nottingham?

Back in March, I was lucky enough to hitch a ride to MIPIM, the international property, investment and economic development expo which takes place in the agreeable surroundings of Cannes.
I went with Team Nottingham, the informal group of surveyors, architects, civil engineers and other property professionals who kept the city's flame burning on the international stage after the city council decided it could no longer justify a yacht in Cannes harbour at a time of cutbacks.
While I can guess at the politics behind this decision, it left Nottingham looking a bit small town compared to the UK's other big cities. Team Nottingham has tried to overcome that for the past couple of years by paying for key officers from the council's development and inward investment teams to come with them.
Their presence added value to discussions about potential deals, and helped put the city in the spotlight when a major inward investment was announced and an award for being a key European business city was handed over.
But how will Nottingham tackle MIPIM next year? Getting your presence right takes months of planning and it has to take some key decisions very soon.
The first is what Team Nottingham is. Should it remain an informal group of property businesses using the city's name and opportunities as a hook to try to develop relationships and opportunities? Or should it go back to being what every other city at MIPIM is - an official delegation led by a figurehead where business and officials unite around a purposeful message?
And can Team Nottingham stay at the compact size it's been for the past couple of years?
The answers aren't straightforward. And it isn't just the existing Team Nottingham that has some thinking to do. The city council has to decide whether it's serious about one of the single biggest inward investment events in the world.
With a £600m tram expansion, a £140m fast road to the motorway, a £60m City Deal, a £60m transport interchange, an Enterprise Zone and a major push for a creative quarter all signed off, a half-hearted presence would be like building a moonshot and leaving it on the launch pad.
In short, it has some serious bragging rights and tangible opportunities rather than me-too CGIs. And worries about council staff being seen near flash yachts can be forgotten. What Mipim is - and isn't - is now well understood where it matters.
It clearly wants to influence the future direction of Nottingham's presence at MIPIM. So what is it bringing to the table in terms of resources and ideas?
As for the current Team Nottingham, it will struggle to maintain its compact size, especially if the city council comes back on board properly. The council can't support a closed club, and the Team sorely needs greater resources if it is going to raise its profile. More team members ought to mean more resources whether that's cash or in kind.
This is a sensitive issue for some Team Nottingham members, who probably feel the work (and money) they put in to keeping the whole show going for the last couple of years entitles them to either sectoral exclusivity or a better deal than latecomers.
The biggest question of all is what kind of profile Nottingham wants at MIPIM. Derby appeared to have a bigger budget and a slicker presence in March. But that presence was very traditional and ended up looking and sounding similar to a number of other English provincial cities, who seem to think samey CGIs and weary 'open for business' slogans are all you need.
Nottingham mustn't fall into that trap. Nor does it need to: it has some genuinely unique opportunities in the shape of tangible, properly financed projects rather than political pipedreams. A shoestring presence and me-too messages will sell those opportunities short.
There has been the odd hint sometimes that the city council doesn't see this kind of event as important, as if it is blinded by the glitz and doesn't appreciate the number of high-level decision-makers who lie behind the show - decision makers whose millions deliver jobs and growth.
Sure, there are aspects of the show which seem overblown and distasteful. But that is only one part of it and isn't where the real business gets done.
The city doesn't need to spend a fortune ( though the price of hotels and apartments means a yacht is actually a cost-effective presence). It can be smart rather than showy. But MIPIM is a stage - and Nottingham has to come out from the wings and step into the spotlight.
Come next March, Nottingham, and it's show time.

Has Nottingham bought itself a new future?

So, here we are toiling away in the midst of recession. Low growth, high costs and to cap it all summer’s been rained off. Dreary doesn’t even come close.
Don’t you just wish you were somewhere that had prospects?
Fantasise for a minute – just imagine what business would be like if you were in a place where someone was spending a bit of money - £500m here, £140m there, with the odd £60m thrown in somewhere else.
In this climate? You are having a laugh...
Well, if you still think that’s fantasy land, the joke’s on you: it’s actually Nottingham. Now.
The £500m is the vast civil engineering project that will turn the one-line tram into a fully-fledged three-line network. It’s underway now.
The £140m is the [scandalously overdue] scheme to turn Nottingham’s southern link to the M1, East Midlands Airport and the East Midlands Parkway railway station into a fast dual carriageway. It starts in January.
The £60m? Well, it’s actually £120m – one £60m sum is earmarked for the transformation of Nottingham Railway Station into a transport interchange connecting rail, road and tram, the other £60m is the combined sum Nottingham can lever to deliver the schemes which comprise a Government-approved City Deal programme.
So let’s just tot all that spending up for a minute: that’s £760 million of confirmed investment in your city. When Capital Shopping Centres finally get round to revamping Broadmarsh and the Vic Centre (2014, according to an analysis last month) it will take that figure up to around £1 billion.
One. Billion. Pounds.
Doesn’t seem quite so dreary out there now, does it? At least I hope it doesn’t – and this is the point: I’m really not sure people have woken up to what’s about to happen here.
Okay, it won’t happen overnight. Large-scale schemes take large-scale planning and the wheels of an advanced, mature democracy turn irritatingly slowly (particularly in Whitehall, currently way out in the lead for the ‘Plain Useless at Getting the Money Out’ prize).
But these projects will create jobs before, during and after they are completed.
The infrastructure investments offer the prospect of turning Nottingham into one of the best business locations in Britain for connecting commerce, customers and workforce.
In some ways it’s the City Deal and the Growth Plan which supports it that offers the most tantalising prospect, because it provides an answer to a big question: Where does Nottingham’s economy go from here?
The slow decline of traditional manufacturing here meant the city didn’t suffer an economic shock. But this slow transition left it far too dependent on the service sector/public sector, which together accounts for more than 80% of jobs.
You can’t grow business services when business isn’t growing and the public sector is actually contracting. So we have to grow in a new direction.
We already have some established traction in life sciences which was present through Boots’ old drug discovery activities, has been continued in university R&D programmes, and is being commercialised on a substantial scale at BioCity.
There are substantial research activities, too, in sustainable environmental technologies and a kernel of promising ‘clean tech’ businesses.
There are also clusters of coders and programmers in this city, working in fields ranging from advanced, niche data analytics through to the production of blockbusting computer games. Digital content, they call it.
So, massive investment, promising new industries. What’s the missing link?
There are a three of them, actually.
One is an education system which manufactures the raw material these and other businesses need – skilled, well-qualified kids who leave schools and colleges with attributes which satisfy employers, rather than the insanity of a system which allows kids to pick dud subjects which satisfy nothing other than a meaningless educational KPI.
The second is encouraging enterprise through meaningful advice from people who’ve done it. Formal training goes only so far – wise words from people who’ve tasted failure to find success counts for much more.
Finally, Nottingham’s massive potential should be supported by a big, bold message. We have a story to tell about big things that are going to happen and major opportunities that will emerge.
Have we just bought ourselves a new future? You decide.

Nottingham: Creating the Creative City?

Last year, I did an interview with Adam Bird, the Chief Technology Officer of the Nottingham-based technology company Esendex, and Toby Reid, the former civil engineer and one-time entrepreneur who is now director at BioCity Nottingham.
The interview centred around a discussion of Nottingham’s nascent tech community, exploring the kind of people and businesses who make it tick, and seeking to understand the kind of lifestyle and environment that encourages people like them to put down roots in a particular place.
At the time, the geeks and techies were feeling a bit unloved, as if Nottingham’s leaders were too busy wondering where the next office block might come from to notice that they had the potential gold dust that is knowledge and intellectual property growing under their very noses.
Since then, they’ve got noticed. Esendex was one of the first businesses to become part of the Invest in Nottingham’s Club’s creative class, a group of poster boys and girls for the emerging knowledge-based business community.
It’s the way of news that not all the work you put into a story makes it into print, and one of the shortcomings of the article was the omission of another interview I did to get an informed ‘outside’ perspective on what Nottingham needed to do to nurture and grow more creatives.
The interview was with Lucy Marcus, the American-born (but UK domiciled) technology investment consultant who is also a sought-after commentator on business and business ethics. She’s known to quite a few people in Nottingham through her links with BioCity’s investment fund.
I came across my notes again the other day, and what leapt out during the conversation with her was the answer she gave to the question of what the city’s authorities should be doing to support its creative class.
I’ll let the original unpublished article below do the talking. It’s something not just for creatives and technology companies to dwell on, but also Nottingham City Council, which is still working on its Economic Growth Strategy.
Put simply, it should think extremely carefully before it makes any commitment to create growth itself. And may be it should pick up the phone and give Lucy a call.
Here’s the article, see what you think – feedback would be welcome.


Lucy P. Marcus has long experience of the difficulties businesses face when they try to get recognition for creative original thinking.
The chief executive of Marcus Venture Consulting, she advises early stage technology companies on the best way to connect with venture capital. She also chairs the Mobius Life Sciences Fund at BioCity.
Marcus also has a unique perspective on the Nottingham economy. Born in the USA, she was a high flyer who worked for the US Government before coming to the UK.
Her verdict on the city’s emerging creative community is that it’s an important part of the Nottingham economy – but must find its own way ahead.
“I think one thing that would puzzle me a little is why it would be a big thing for them to get the city on board,” she told Business Post.
“A creative entrepreneurial spirit and the eco-support system for it is not something which can be engineered. It just happens.
“The lifestyle around it is important, the universities can feed into the development of it, but its development will tend to be organic rather than structured. Entrepreneurs are all about doing it themselves.”
Marcus says the sector must have some momentum and “density” if Nottingham is going to become recognised by potential financial backers as a centre for the growth of creative technological businesses. “It’s got to be obvious that there is a lot going on here,” she says.
Nationally, talk about the growth of creative business has been made fashionable by a cluster of web-based technology businesses in London’s Shoreditch that have become collectively known as Silicon Roundabout.
“People were priced out of London and they found a place with cheap rents and good facilities where creatives could gather,” says Marcus.
“Nottingham has got the DNA to make this happen. We have the universities, we have the graduates. If we make it attractive for them to stay, if there are companies for them to work for, then they will stay.
“But if it’s going to happen it will happen naturally – you can’t manufacture a sector through city policy.”

I’m going to revisit this issue from time to time, because it’s an important one. In the meantime I’d also recommend those who are interested in this kind of thing sample a couple of chunky pieces of brain-food.
One is Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, the book which was probably the first serious analysis of this new breed. It first came out years ago, but is well worth revisiting for first principles.
The second is a more recent tome, urban economist Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City. This, I think, raises some really big questions about the way Nottingham views itself and the world it’s part of.

The questions a vote left behind

So no directly-elected mayor for Nottingham. Not for the forseeable future, anyway.
Last week’s vote against having one can be read any number of ways, but the turnout in the Arboretum ward – a paltry 8.45% - offers a clue: one way or another, many voters just aren’t bothered about it.
May be they thought there wasn’t a lot to bother about. This wasn’t a well-sold or well-explained campaign, and (despite some daft rumours) wasn’t well-financed, either.
The mood music seems to be that there are bigger fish to fry. Which is pretty much what the Nottingham East MP, Chris Leslie, suggested before the vote.
A wise city council leadership won’t claim this as an emphatic endorsement of the current leader-and-cabinet system, though - 57% for No and 43% for Yes doesn’t tell us that.
Labour worked harder than the Yes campaign to mobilise a No vote, and won a postal vote with a turnout north of 65%. That’s an astonishing number against attitudes otherwise dominated by indifference.
But many of its voters look to have stayed at home on the day, which doesn’t suggest passionate endorsement of everything that comes out of Loxley House.
I said in previous blogs that there was an extremely important message underneath the backing for the Yes campaign, and it still stands. Though it wheeled out a couple of ‘trusties’, the No campaign was not able to demonstrate widespread business backing for the status quo. Such backing does not really extend beyond the pragmatism of a working relationship.
Influential sections of the city aren’t happy with the way things are run, whether it’s the service they get from the city council or the alleged failure to bat for Nottingham nationally and internationally. Their view, as Tim Garratt has pointed out elsewhere, is that the city doesn’t properly punch its weight and can sometimes be a three-course meal to work with.
That strikes me as harsh. There have been some massive successes – making the tram extension project happen against a background of significant public sector cutbacks was immense. No one can take that away from Labour.
But how did an ability to make such giant strides also translate into 10 whole years of stumbling around Broadmarsh? And of a once-in-a-lifetime development boom sailing straight past Eastside and Waterside? Even now, there is a major project in the city which has gone bafflingly quiet.
The relationship between the city leadership and Whitehall has been hit-or-miss. Notable achievements have been mixed with childlike spats (on both sides) and a stubborn refusal on the city’s part to come clean about some of its spending.
The result of these bouts of churlishness is the poke in the eye Nottingham got when it applied for a comparatively small amount of money to invest in ultra high-speed broadband. What should have been a straightforward economic decision became a political one.
Local MPs have hesitated to raise Nottingham’s case in the House of Commons because they know the city’s attitude is going to be thrown back at them. Some were also livid at the conduct of the No campaign, particularly after ‘leafletgate’. There have been long-running frictions between the Labour party nationally and the party in Nottingham.
Away from politics, these grudging undercurrents are what bother some very senior business people – that, and an apparent belief that community comes first. If it comes first, why not invest more heavyweight political capital in attracting the investment and the programmes that could deliver the growth community needs, they wonder? If the council really wants the jobs and growth it so regularly campaigns for, why doesn’t it back the people who can deliver it to the hilt?
Life before May 2010 is gone. There will be no return to big government spending, no Building Schools for the Future budget to wield, even if a blundering coalition throws in the towel tomorrow. And there is no regional development agency to give a paternalistic steer or oil the wheels of an investment inquiry.
One of the most telling – if coded - contributions to the mayoral debate came from Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP for Nottingham South. He dismissed the idea of a mayor out of hand, but offered sharp criticism of the city council, which he claimed lacked visionary leadership and risked dumping Nottingham into the second division.
Simpson is not an entirely disinterested party – he didn’t get on with the city leadership. But his criticism plays to another issue for Nottingham: it may have a vision in parts, but it doesn’t have a clear story to tell.
Let’s be clear – there is a lot happening in Nottingham and a lot is going to happen. The infrastructure development pipeline is significant, investment will take place in upgrading the city’s retail offer, we do keep appearing on the inquiry list for significant inward investments.
But these big opportunities beg a far more assertive approach to economic development which tells a compelling and original story about a powerful conurbation which leads a region – one where a walk through the door immediately tells you that you are in the company of ambitious people who know how to make things happen.
As someone said to me at MIPIM, the people, the opportunities and the conurbation are all there. But where is that single, powerful, unified vision?
If Nottingham really is serious about its place in the universe then there are some big decisions to make.
So how Nottingham organises itself as an economic entity will come back on to the agenda at some stage. If it is to compete for the government’s City Deal money it has to demonstrate there is a mechanism for joint action between neighbouring local authorities.
Businesses want a figurehead, and a compelling story about a big conurbation which is easy to work with. MPs wish some of the city’s politicking was driven by big picture vision rather than small-town spats. Some civil servants simply expect more of what should be a regional capital
We have some massive opportunities in this city. There are people who can deliver. There is a track record of achievement. Is the way forwards really that difficult?

Elected Mayors:Campaign hits a low

Nottingham Labour looks to have shot itself in the foot with its latest attempt to persuade city residents to vote against having a directly elected mayor.
While the party nationally actually has official candidates in some cities where an elected mayor has already been signed off, the branch in Nottingham has set its face against even the concept of one.
And not by half.
It has variously suggested that an elected mayor would cost £1million, would struggle to work with the city council, and might even be easily corrupted. For good measure, it’s slung a bit of mud at the yes campaign by questioning not what it’s said but who is paying for it.
Even supporters of the current leadership have privately expressed disappointment at the no campaign's failure to sketch out the existing system’s successes or an alternative vision for moving the city forwards.
Some of those concerns have now come out into the open in the wake of the appearance of leaflets bearing Nottingham Labour's imprint which critics claim are naked scare tactics.
The leaflets claim that having an election for a mayor risks allowing far right organizations like the BNP or English Defence League take power in Nottingham. But they don’t use quite so many words. One leaflet says: ‘Racists Want a £1m Extra Mayor!’. So that’s telling you...
The BBC says some of those leaflets have been distributed near mosques. While they are clearly from Nottingham Labour they don't bear the details of a named publisher, which is naughty under electoral law.
The likelihood of the BNP winning a mayoral vote in Nottingham is somewhere close to hell freezing over on the probability scale. And the EDL couldn't actually field a candidate because it isn't a political party.
So what is Nottingham Labour’s no campaign up to?
City council leader Jon Collins says it's irresponsible not to point out the risks attached to a mayoral vote. But these supposed risks would surely affect everyone - why point them out only to certain communities?
The reaction among some of Labour's own party members and supporters has been one of contempt. Writing on the left-leaning website Labour List, Jo Tanner, the national director of a Labour yes campaign, said such scare tactics were “not what I expect from the Labour party I joined”.
She went on: “I could talk about the breach of election law which demands that materials should feature an imprint by a named person. I could talk about the total distortion of the facts, that in 2011 the BNP received 760 votes [in Nottingham] compared to the Labour Party’s 112,325.
“For me, though, it is the impression this sends to the people of Nottingham – and beyond – of the Labour Party, of the depths to which some of our number will sink.”
The tone of Jon Collins’ response on Labour List suggests he realises there is a case to answer, but – despite Jo Tanner’s emphatic statistical evidence – he insists the risk is real.
I don't know who sanctioned these leaflets or what process concluded they were an appropriate tactic. But they risk being seen as an aggressive and distasteful attempt to exploit fear among some communities. Whatever the result, it's unlikely these leaflets will be forgotten.
They are, though, consistent with a no campaign which has made a series of controversially negative claims, and appears to be targeted not at the city's movers and shakers but at certain communities.
The no campaign may well find itself in the winning camp next Friday morning, through a combination of voter apathy about an issue which does not immediately solve day-to-day hardships and Nottingham Labour's famed ability to get the vote out (particularly a postal one).
But even those movers and shakers sympathetic to the city leadership will not view this as a victory. The yes campaign has attracted significant discreet backing from people who believe that, for all its undoubted community-level achievement, the city council has failed to spell out a vision of where Nottingham needs to be in the future.
While ministers might be expected to say Nottingham will miss the cities' boat without a mayor (this is a government initiative, remember), senior civil servants in Whitehall have also suggested the city appears to be confirming itself in the role of a "second division" player, confirming the earlier analysis of former Nottingham MP Alan Simpson.
Their concern is that the city council - despite the presence of some genuinely talented and committed public servants - doesn't appear to have an over-arching vision for Nottingham's economic future, and isn't seen knocking on departmental doors in Whitehall to press for help delivering it.
Other cities are, partly because they always have done, partly because they are responding to a widely held cross-party consensus that cities should be drivers of economic growth across their surrounding area.
This is why the tone struck by the no campaign has gone down badly in some influential quarters. It has failed to address the ambitions and concerns which lie behind some of the support for the yes campaign.
These are people who think growing the city economically and geographically presents the best long-term opportunity to overcome its notorious – but misleading – figures for poor education, poor skills and crime. In their eyes, a campaign built around ‘no change’ is the wrong answer to the questions the mayoral campaign has raised.
I don't think those questions will go away even if the idea of an elected mayor is rejected on Thursday. Government has also left the door open to further discussion about the city's boundaries, which probably hold the real key to addressing Nottingham's long-term economic and social ambitions.
If, of course, its leadership believes this kind of big picture vision really matters. For those whose views about the city transcend political allegiances, this latest leaflet is not an optimistic sign.

Elected Mayors: The Vision Thing

Nottingham: trying to find a vision?

There’s been a fascinating contribution today to the debate about whether Nottingham should vote for a directly elected mayor.

It’s from a Labour politician, and it’s in the ‘anti’ camp. But it doesn’t mention anything about ‘£1m Tory extra Mayors’ on ‘fatcat salaries’.

Infact, some are bound to view this support for the campaign against an elected mayor as a devastating critique of some of the people behind it.

The contribution comes from Alan Simpson, who was the Nottingham South Labour MP up until the last election, when he retired and the seat was taken by Lilian Greenwood.

Simpson was never a great mate of the city leadership, and there will be a few in Labour who think his piece settles a few old scores.

But there will be a lot of people involved in business, in particular in property and development, who will agree wholeheartedly with some of Simpson’s observations - even if they are actively supporting the pro-elected mayor campaign.

Indeed, those criticisms are probably the reason why they support it.

You can see Alan Simpson’s piece here. To cut to the chase, he argues that an elected mayor simply doesn’t address what he claims is the big issue in Nottingham politics: its lack of ambition and vision. While he acknowledges some significant achievements (like the tram), he points the finger at the city council leadership over its refusal to publish full details about finances and a lack of genuine, big picture imagination. He also takes a swipe at the Tories and the Lib Dems for ineffectual opposition (though I suspect city boundaries count against them).

Simpson says: “Good governance demands strong Opposition as well as visionary leadership. Nottingham has neither. This is the Council’s Achilles Heel. To demolish the case for a mayor, it must open its own books and then be more imaginative.”

He describes Nottingham as a “second division” city, and adds pointedly: “…we have to break from a culture of contentedness that holds the city back. Pride and ambition are not qualities you can claim for yourself, without inviting ridicule.”

This plays to one of the central criticisms of the ‘anti’ campaign: that its relentless focus on the negative demonstrates exactly that point about the absence of the vision thing. Where it could be pointing to achievement and ambition under the current system, or painting a picture of a dynamic future, it instead drones on about the cost of a mayor, the risk of corruption and who’s paying for the yes campaign.

The case for an elected mayor isn’t proven, and Simpson says cities need real power rather than real figureheads. In that context, he thinks an elected mayor would be a sideshow.

But in Nottingham the ‘marmite’ flavour of the current leadership and its failure to give voice to an alternative vision leave the Yes campaign in a potentially strong position. What is most likely to count against the Yes camp is an issue which should cause serious concern on both sides – voter apathy towards politics and politicians. The turnout looks like being low.

Nottingham has a tantalising opportunity to develop an ambitious and genuinely challenging vision for the future, and Alan Simpson’s painfully blunt critique suggests one is sorely needed – whichever system we have.

I go back to the point I made in my last blog: Nottingham needs to think bigger in terms of its boundaries. Simpson suggests those boundaries also appear to encircle the council’s vision like a philosophical wall – that the city’s very horizons are just not wide enough.

You decide which way is best to unlock the potential. It’s YOUR city.

Nottinghamshire's Icelandic saga

Another misleading claim today about the attempts by local authorities to recover the money they lost when the Icelandic banking system went bust in the crunch.
If you remember, local authorities across the country had invested vast sums in Icelandic banks which were offering returns on investment accounts which seemed too good to be true when you factored in the size of the economy underneath them.
The Nottingham Building Society had reached that conclusion in 2006, placing its treasury investments elsewhere.
Unfortunately, councils continued to put money into Iceland because the investment rules they adhered to never included a measure of the size of a banking system relative to an economy – and Iceland’s was way out of proportion with the ability of its lender of last resort (i.e., the Icelandic government) to meet all liabilities if the banks went belly up.
Local authorities looked no further than the credit ratings of the banks. Hindsight tells us this wasn’t a rigorous enough analysis, as we now know the ratings agencies had unhealthily close relationships with the banks at the time.
Among those left standing at the altar was Nottingham City Council (which had more than £30 million in Iceland) and Newark and Sherwood District Council, which had a more modest £2 million.
Newark and Sherwood has sought to suggest today that it has now got back 80 per cent of its money.
What it neglects to say is that it has almost certainly lost money in the process.
How? Two reasons – the money was put into an interest-bearing account and never received any, so an investment under-performed. Secondly, any sum of money frozen in an account for any length of time loses money through depreciation. Newark & Sherwood’s £2m went on deposit in January 2008, so that’s four years of value eaten away by inflation.
There will also have been some exchange rate costs, because the £2m was held in a variety of different currencies, ranging from sterling to euros.
So the council may have got back 80 per cent of the original capital sum, but because it is now worth less than it was they will never get back the 2012 equivalent of £2m unless some interest-based compensation is paid.
Local authorities and the Local Government Association have sought to suggest that we needn’t worry about this unfortunate episode because their brave battle to get the money back will result in recovery of all the cash.
That’s disingenuous. Cash, perhaps, but value? Almost certainly not.
These were poor investments and you can’t get away from the irony of Nottingham City Council continuing to invest in Iceland when a financial institution less than a mile away had concluded it no longer made sense to do so.
Councils fell victim to a poor set of rules and a tendency to believe that if they were following the same rules as everyone else nothing was likely to go wrong.
I’m not aware that any council or the LGA ever crash-tested these investment rules. Have they done so with what are presumably amended and improved guidelines?
As for Newark & Sherwood District Council, it invested in Iceland expecting to receive a measureable amount of interest. Its council minutes (where information about the refund is contained) don’t say what that sum was.
The council will get some interest – 3.35 per cent will be paid on the remaining £356,000, which is currently held as Icelandic krona in Iceland. That won’t match the losses, though.
Councils need to be straight about this because pretending a problem has been solved helps no one. They were far from alone in making expensive mistakes during the boom – the professional financial institutions which organised these investments were guilty of incompetence of historic proportions.
Councils are custodians of public money and we expect them to use it wisely. So what safeguards are in place now? And are they absolutely sure these safeguards are effective?

Broadmarsh: Nothing to see here, says OFT

To no great surprise, the Office of Fair Trading has concluded there are no grounds for a Competition Commission probe into Capital Shopping Centres’ takeover of the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre.
I’m not going to go into a rehash of the whys and wherefores of this process, other than to puzzle over why it happened in the first place – there was little likelihood of it leading anywhere.
All it really meant was further delay in a city where major retail redevelopment should have taken place anywhere between five and 15 years ago.
So, over to CSC and the question of what its intentions are now that it owns both the Victoria Centre and Broadmarsh.
Is it going to run Broadmarsh as a value retailing location and put all the posh frocks in the Vic Centre, or will it go at least some way towards satisfying the city council’s wish to redevelop Broadmarsh in a way which rids Nottingham of what many consider to be an ugly embarrassment?
In particular, what will it do to satisfy Marks & Spencer, which surely wouldn’t want to be in the same centre as John Lewis and House of Fraser? What will it do for Apple and Hollister, who were lined up to go near the foot of Bridlesmith Gate?
CSC has so far managed to avoid saying anything publicly. It can’t maintain that position much longer.

Au revoir MIPIM 2012



My Range Rover parked at Cannes...in my dreams



There’s something almost comfortingly familiar about a four-day trip to an exotic sun-drenched Riviera resort ending in an Irish bar with your ear drums being hammered by 1980s disco music.

But that’s how Nottingham’s mission to MIPIM chilled out last night. There were some notably impressive performances by ‘DJ’ Ashley Cowdrey of M&E firm CPW and the impossibly hip Tim Garratt of Innes England, but those shocking revelations are for another day (or sensible negotiation).

Before you run away with the idea that Team Nottingham’s trip to MIPIM has been a thinly-disguised journey to the usual boozy haunts, let me reassure you that the downtime has been well-earned.

The model Nottingham has adopted for MIPIM is a solid and sustainable one: a core of private sector property and construction industry businesses paying their way and bringing key public sector decision-makers with them to let would-be investors know that great development opportunities will not sink under a painful planning process.
David Bishop, Nottingham City Council’s corporate director of development, maintained a professional distance from raw deals while offering authoritative reassurance that planners understood what business was trying to achieve.
Solidly supported by the widely-respected Lorraine Baggs, the city’s head of inward investment, and the seasoned experience of Mike Taylor, head of Nottingham Regeneration, the council team provided a back-up which added authority to the whole delegation and off-the-cuff advice at the kind of impromptu meetings which dominate MIPIM.
If you want to criticise the glitz and glamour of MIPIM you can, because Cannes has a lot of it. The closest I came was nearly being glued to the tarmac by a be-chromed Bentley driven by someone for whom pedestrian crossings and the people who use them were clearly an inconvenience too far.
I’m ashamed to say that I showed my appreciation of his driving in the traditional English manner.
If you haven’t been to MIPIM what you have to get your head round is the fact that this is a veneer of glitz and glamour (and sometimes grossness) which comes from a Riviera resort within spitting distance of Monaco, the place where millionaires and billionaires go to look at their money.
The veneer is there to serve them, not the likes of Team Nottingham or most of the other ordinary business people who come to pack into four days meetings which would otherwise take months to tie down.
The truth is that this isn’t a playday away from home, but a frequently foot-destroying round of meetings and discussions which stretch from dawn until dusk.
The results of those meetings I’ll write about in Business Post on Tuesday. For now we’re well beyond dusk and Cannes has gone quiet.
But Nottingham has come away with a lot to talk about.

Clock ticks on Broadmarsh

For some time now, there’s been very little in the way of news about Capital Shopping Centres’ intentions towards Nottingham.
You’ll recall that the owner of the Victoria Centre shocked nearly everyone in town when it pulled off a late night deal back in November to buy the rival Broadmarsh Centre from Westfield.
The shock came not just from the fact that no one locally had any inkling that the bombshell was about to drop, but also because it called into question whether an decrepit 1960s eyesore was ever going to be dragged into the 21st century.
Those fears may be well-placed.
CSC has kept its counsel in recent weeks, officially because it was waiting to find out whether the Office of Fair Trading - which had decided to cast its eye over a deal which handed over an entire city to one operator – thought the purchase merited intervention on competition grounds.
The OFT told me upfront that it had been its own decision to examine the acquisition because it routinely looks out for major transactions of this kind. Perhaps; but rumours suggest the OFT may have been economical with the truth there, and that what we’ll call a prominent industry institution had been whispering in its ear.
Even more intriguing was a statement buried away in CSC’s annual results last week, which said it was “optimistic” about Nottingham’s retail potential provided there was a “pragmatic approach” from Nottingham City Council, the planning authority.
Put that together with a statement elsewhere in the results where it talks about “complementary redevelopment” in Nottingham and what have you got?
Pretty clear evidence that CSC wants to plough serious money into the Victoria Centre, not Broadmarsh.
How come? Suggesting optimism about Nottingham’s retail potential, rather than the new asset it’s just bought (Broadmarsh), tells me it thinks the immediate potential is in its existing asset, the Victoria Centre. Remember that this has a book value of £333m, while CSC says Broadmarsh has a book value of only £65m. This is not only less than the Vic Centre, but £8m less than it paid for it only four months ago.
The giveaway is surely the use of the term “pragmatic”. While it never said so publicly, the City Council was desperate for Westfield to go ahead with an ambitious redevelopment of Broadmarsh because it would have replaced Berlin Wall-standard concrete blight with a new gateway to the city centre.
CSC presumably believes a pragmatist would realise that it is unrealistic to expect the owner of a £333m shopping centre to spend disproportionate fortunes bringing the ugly sister down the road up to the same standard. After all, what would that do to the asset value of the Vic Centre?
The whole point of CSC’s purchase of Broadmarsh was to take out the competition.
The prospect of Broadmarsh being left to fester as a relic full of cheap retailers is one which will appal some people inside the City Council. They had been looking for a commercial partner who, in return for wholehearted support, would invest in development which dovetailed with the long-term strategy for the city centre.
A “shed half way up Mansfield Road” (as the Victoria Centre expansion plan was described to me privately) doesn’t tick that box, and may drastically tip the commercial centre of gravity away from a Southside quarter which is, in every sense, front and centre of City Council thinking.
When the City Council next gets round the table with CSC it still has a couple of cards left in its deck. One is its ownership of land near the Victoria Centre which CSC theoretically needs to allow expansion there.
The other is a ticking clock. A number of upmarket retailers had been ready to sign deals for units in the first stage of the (now abandoned) Broadmarsh redevelopment. They have already been waiting a long time to come to Nottingham. Will they continue to kick their heels if CSC gets involved in a drawn-out battle about the Vic Centre with city planners?
Or will they go elsewhere in the city centre instead?

Nottingham's plan for growth

Government’s don’t grow economies, businesses do. Bur government in all its forms can make growth a whole lot easier – sometimes by what it does, sometimes by what it doesn’t do.
This week, we’ll find out what our own ‘government’ – Nottingham City Council – is going to do to help make growth easier in and around the city.
In front of an audience of businesses and city organisations, it’ll be unveiling the Nottingham Economic Growth Plan, a wide-ranging document which contains a range of ideas for what it will do – and what it won’t do – to help stimulate the city and Greater Nottingham economy.
Though the detail has yet to be determined, the Plan will already be familiar to some people. Partly because a draft has been out for consultation over the past few weeks, and partly because some parts of it are straight out of previous economic development documents.
Partly, also, because some of its ideas are plain common sense.
But that’s not to decry a genuine effort to get the city thinking about moving its own economy forwards.
And there are some genuinely big ideas in the Nottingham Economic Growth Plan – notably the idea that there should be a fund to back promising local businesses, and a separate fund to help kick-start stalled development schemes.
We haven’t seen the detail on either, but I know some serious work has been going on to try to make them happen. Here’s hoping.
There are also opportunities to exploit the use of local taxation.
The bigger picture is an identification of the key areas that will help the local economy grow. This is a mix of promising business sectors which can bring real value to Nottingham if they are sensibly supported, measures which would make doing business an easier, more friendly experience, and a push to raise skill levels.
You can probably guess the first two – creative, technology and science-based businesses which are built on original ideas you can’t ship offshore (plus the likes of retail), along with a push to raise the game of city planning (which, in the past, has been a miserable experience for developers).
It’s the last – skills levels – I’m going to look at because it is, in some ways, the single biggest challenge Nottingham faces. As I’ve blogged before, we need to get our heads around an unpleasant truth about youth unemployment – it’s a problem which has been around longer than some would like to admit.
While recession has certainly made it worse, official figures show that it started to accelerate around 2003-2004 and that there is a very serious issue with unemployment among 16-17 year olds. Some of these kids are not only leaving school with qualifications and attitudes which make them unsuitable for work, evidence in the Growth Plan suggests some are then going on spend time doing college courses which do nothing to improve their employability.
This is a waste of their lives and a waste of educational budgets.
So when the detail of the Growth Plan finally emerges, it has got to demonstrate that this awkward truth is being confronted.
Otherwise, the risk is that it is being seen to focus its efforts on the symptoms, not the cause, and tackling a problem in colleges which actually happens in schools.
Nottingham’s economy does have some structural issues which won’t be solved overnight. While only 20 per cent of the UK’s working population is in the public sector, in Nottingham the figure is closer to 30 per cent.
This not only means the city has a lower than average productive capacity (the public sector is, by definition, non-profit), it also leaves us exposed in an era when public spending is bound to be constrained for years to come.
So the city has to put much more emphasis on an entrepreneurial culture and the growth in the basic stock of businesses – we almost have to rebalance our own economy if we are to improve levels of prosperity.
Once again, that won’t happen overnight. The cultural traditions of what was once a large industrial city are taking decades to shake-off, and the youth unemployment suggests we are neither educating nor inspiring our kids in the way we need to.
A growth plan should NOT fixate on problems – entrepreneurial businesses certainly don’t. It has to start with opportunities and adopt measures which make it easier to exploit them.
Most of its success will rest not on what the city council does but on what business does. But if business gets it right then we should tell that story in the city’s classrooms. Our growth and their future should not be separated.

Broadmarsh: They think it's all over...it is now

Capital Shopping Centres now owns Nottingham.
Well, in retail terms anyway.
It agreed a deal today to buy the remaining 25% shareholding in Broadmarsh from the Royal Mail Pension Fund. With the 75% it agreed to buy from Westfield for £55m, it means it now has complete ownership of the centre.
For those interested, it paid £18.3m for the pension fund’s 25%. It’s the same quantum as the Westfield price, and probably a premium over the paper value.
The wording of CSC’s announcement, made to the Stock Exchange, is interesting.
CSC had said it wanted to pump £250m into expanding the Victoria Centre, which it already owns. The fear in Nottingham was that this would mean a more ambitious revamp of Broadmarsh – which would also tidy up a massive eyesore on the southern approach to the city – would be sidelined.
Not only that, but the artist’s impressions of what CSC has said it wants to do to the Victoria Centre are, shall we say, quite traditional (and that’s putting it politely
Anyway, this is what David Fischel, CSC’s chief exec, said in today’s announcement:
“CSC is delighted to have acquired this important asset in Nottingham. Common ownership of Victoria Centre and Broadmarsh greatly improves the prospect of transformational retail and leisure led development taking place within the city to the benefit of the local and wider Nottingham community.
“The Victoria Centre has been at the heart of Nottingham for over 40 years and this acquisition further underlines our commitment to the city, which is one of the UK's top ranking retail destinations. We look forward to working with Nottingham City Council on this exciting opportunity.”
That may just be holding back an already familiar deck of cards. Or it could be an olive branch to a City Council which privately has considerable concerns about what CSC may – or may not – do. Or, it could be an indication that, now it’s got two centres, it will revise both plans.
Legal completion of the purchase hasn’t gone through yet, so I doubt we’ll hear a categorical statement of intent until then. CSC will also be discussing its options with the likes of Harvey Nichols, Marks & Spencer, Apple and Hollister, all of whom had agreements of varying status in relation to Westfield’s Broadmarsh redevelopment.
Either way, it’s time for CSC to start talking to Nottingham.

Westfield and CSC: This town wasn't big enough for the both of them

So, what are we to make of Westfield’s decision to walk away from Broadmarsh within sight of a much-vaunted £450m revamp?
I don’t think there’s any question that they’ve decided it would be an awful lot easier to make the numbers add up elsewhere – specifically in the south east, which simply isn’t experiencing anything like the downturn seen in the rest of the country.
In Nottingham, they waded through a complex land assembly and protracted planning, only to see the economic tide head back out.
But the signs are that Westfield may not have made the first move in this decision (though it was certainly wearying of a planning process which went on so long a rival appeared).
No one locally knew about this decision in advance. There is evidence, too, that Westfield’s own UK executives may not have been the first to find out, either. Senior figures here were still proceeding with this plan as recently as last week.
From Capital Shopping Centres, under whose name a statement confirming the intended £55m purchase of Broadmarsh was issued yesterday, we have heard nothing.
So who was the driving force behind this move?
One interpretation is that this has the stamp of a clear-sighted attempt to solve the fundamental dilemma facing both Westfield and Capital Shopping Centres: both were pitching the same set of high-profile retailers.
So only one scheme was going to succeed.
This would have affected the prospects – and therefore the value – of the losing side. The respective shareholders in Westfield and CSC would not have wanted that to happen. So there was a price to be negotiated, one determined by the present and future value of one centre and the impact its development might have on the value of the other.
It’s the kind of deal negotiated by people who know development lives on private profits not public plaudits. Pretty no-nonsense hard-heads, I’d guess.
The no-nonsense hard-heads behind this deal have solved their problem. Infact, they’ve handed the dilemma back to the city’s planners and politicians…whose measure of success is defined by the same criteria in reverse: plaudits not profits.
Nottingham City Council wanted the Broadmarsh revamp to go-ahead because it would rid the city of a series of shockingly decrepit 1960s eyesores which should have been levelled by a smartbomb 20 years ago.
Instead, we would have a new, expanded shopping centre featuring big-name retailers in eye-catching street scenes which spoke of an ambitious regional capital.
So one last deal is still to be done. It will determine whether Capital Shopping Centres expands the Victoria Centre and merely dusts a few cobwebs off Broadmarsh, or is persuaded that there is a way of making the Broadmarsh numbers add up in a way Westfield decided it couldn’t.
This will be a very tough negotiation for Nottingham City Council, a negotiation which will determine the way our city looks for perhaps 30 years ahead.
Whether in person or proxy, the man they will effectively be dealing with may well have been cutting a deal with someone in Sydney recently.
He is clearly a formidably determined character. And he now has Nottingham’s retail future in his hands.

That shabby shopping centre...

A replacement for soemthing shabby?

If someone called your shopping centre shabby and outdated and suggested few people enjoy shopping there you’d be pretty unhappy, right?

Wrong. In Westfield’s case it was entirely happy to spread the bad news about Broadmarsh this week.

It may have a motive for releasing the results of a shoppers’ survey, though: on Wednesday, Nottingham City Council planners will vote on whether to give the go-ahead to plans for a £500m redevelopment of the centre.
And Westfield is hardly telling us something we didn’t know already. Broadmarsh is a 1960s Arndale dinosaur which should have been redeveloped at least a decade ago. High end retail chains voted with their feet. To call it outdated is an understatement.
The bigger issue here – one which Westfield has now acknowledged – is that its redevelopment is an opportunity to do more than play retail catch-up.
It is a chance to get rid of a brutalist concrete eyesore and present people who come in from the railway station approach with a proper entrance to Nottingham – one which is modern, upmarket and has street scenes which lead you to the heart of the place.
Westfield’s decision to release information about a survey which lays bare how poor shoppers think the current centre is does more than up the ante at development control.
It also suggests that, after all the years we've been waiting for Westfield to get on with it, the Aussies are at last ready to push the button.
They have already committed to a £40m spend on the main square in the existing centre and the walk that leads up to Bridlesmith Gate.
That side of things seems to have gone quiet, though. Instead, a lot of noise is now being made about the bigger redevelopment and extension of Broadmarsh.
So what’s Westfield up to?

Finally Broadmarsh: The £500 million game-changer

I was sitting in the office early last week looking over some sprawling indicative drawings for the wholesale rebuilding of a massive part of Nottingham. And it’s a big deal.

The drawings sketch out the detail of a £500 million retail scheme ranged across three levels which could not only put Nottingham beyond the reach of its regional rivals, but also rid the city of the out-dated eyesore that is its southern approach.

So what was my reaction? One of deja vu.

The story of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh is a modern-day parable about the relationships between big cities and big developers and shopping centres and the economy.

I first saw photos, drawings and CGIs of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh in the early noughties. Even then, redevelopment was long overdue, with the centre which defines the boundary between the city centre and its southern approach looking every inch the 1960s Arndale dinosaur it really is.

As time went by, the amount Westfield said they were going to spend on the redevelopment slowly rose. But so did the sense that it wasn’t their top priority. Nottingham City Council bent over backwards to try to make sure it remained a priority. Indeed, some critics would point to the strange decision to rid Lister Gate of what looked like perfectly healthy trees. Chopping them down opened up a nice sightline to a re-clad Broadmarsh entrance, but was there really anything wrong with the trees? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that while Nottingham City Council tried to keep what had become a £700m scheme alive, Westfield promptly went and spent a load of money in Derby.

The Australian developer has a long-established reputation for taking a robust attitude to business, but this decision went down very badly in Nottingham – on two fronts.

With the arrival in the City Council’s planning department of Jennifer Dearing, an experienced outside consultant brought in to give some backbone to a drifting planning department, Nottingham’s attitude to Westfield hardened.

More than once, I heard senior figures in the city say that if all Westfield had to offer was a bigger version of the curtain-walled giant they built in Derby, then Nottingham was no longer interested.

It didn’t stop there. The city took the advice of some senior national figures in architecture and urban development and decided that, whatever happened, the plans Westfield had sketched out to the council all those years ago were dead. Whether it was Westfield or someone else, a new approach was needed – one which would use large-scale retail redevelopment to solve an ageing blot on the landscape.

The credit crunch effectively killed off Westfield’s original plan. No one was going to throw £700m at a large scale shopping development when retailers were being deserted by consumers suffering from badly-bruised credit cards.

But none of this changed the fact that Nottingham is Britain’s fifth biggest shopping city and the centre of the East Midlands’ catchment. It may have bled some people to Leicester (which now has a John Lewis as well), but Derby hasn’t got the high-end retail brands to challenge. Neither is as big.

So now, finally, we have a new plan - all £500 million and 5,000 jobs worth of it.

Going back to my initial point, I have to admit that I haven’t seen it all before in the design sense. The drawings I pored over last week show a scheme that has changed drastically. Instead of a monstrous, old-fashioned mall, Westfield has now agreed to produce a series of smaller buildings which will open up new street scenes, and rid one of England’s eight most important cities of a Berlin Wall of a centre which shouts regional mediocrity at anyone walking in from the railway station.

It could lead to Nottingham getting something genuinely different – a new generation of shopping centre which doesn’t stand out like some monstrous blob. One with streets to wander through and an open air atmosphere, one with views of the city it is part of.

So it’s wrong to be churlish about this plan. If it proceeds the way Westfield are suggesting then it could change the face of the city for the better while bringing in 5,000 jobs.

The knock-on impact of its construction will be considerable: a project of this scale will have an economic multiplier during and after construction through the jobs it creates and the money spent during building and the likelihood that – if it brings in new names – it will bring in new visitors.

Those new names should, finally, include Harvey Nichols, with whom Westfield has an informal agreement.

It may also add to the logic behind investment in redevelopment of the railway station and expansion of the tram

In short, a project of this size has the potential to give the city’s economy a noticeable tick-up.
A scheme on this scale does not come without its question marks. What will happen to other parts of the city’s retail core when Broadmarsh opens? And what impact will it have on the Victoria Centre (which has expansion plans of its own)? How will we cope with radical revisions to the city’s road network implied by this plan?
The biggest question of all is the oldest question of all. After all these years, is Westfield finally going to come good on its promise?