“The Dawlish influence has been positive,” asserts Frost. “Anything that raises the urgency of re-opening the line helps with the legal process. Because if we reinstate our five and a half miles, that leaves only 12 miles in the middle that need to be put back.
“Network Rail is at an early stage of looking at options. Some alternative to Dawlish is clearly going to be needed, and ours is a realistic option.”
When the planning approval came through last year, Nevin Holden of Bovis Homes hailed it as “a national blueprint for the delivery of new rail infrastructure”. Really? Nowhere else has got far with this approach.
“No one has tried a whole route,” concedes Frost. “Some stations have been opened as a result of residential development, though.
“The nearest idea is on a much larger scale - the East West Rail project. It has some similarities because it is linked to a series of developments through Bedfordshire towards Cambridge. They’ve identified similar housing allocations that can be tied in with contributions from the developers towards the reinstatement of the railway.
“But there, of course, the rail reinstatement has other drivers as well as the housing. It’s the rail project that came first, not the development opportunity. We are doing ours in tandem.
“Long Marston near Stratford-upon-Avon is still a live project. We’ve been working with CALA Homes, which has half the former RAF site. It has a rail link. They are going through the process at the moment to see how it could work - they’re at the stage we were ten years ago, but it could work much quicker there.
“There’s also an attempt to develop Bordon in Hampshire linked to reinstatement, but Network Rail hasn’t offered a lot of support, so that will more likely go ahead without the transport infrastructure.”
So why has Tavistock been a one-off? Frost offers this analysis:
“Network Rail is a rail operator, not a property developer. It has looked at partnerships to redevelop station assets, but not the wider opportunities. It has such a huge property asset base - it has almost limitless potential. So far it has targeted the obvious and best opportunities - King’s Cross, Waterloo. It probably doesn’t have the time or manpower to set up more joint ventures.”
Case study: Reading
Reading’s new station is almost complete. Her Majesty the Queen opened the station last July, and a ten-day blockade over Easter will bring the final parts of this five-year, £950m transformation into use. Yet around the station, the arid urban landscape is in desperate need of modernisation.
“Reading Borough Council has been very proactive,” defends Labour councillor Tony Page, deputy leader of the council and cabinet member for environment, planning and transport.
“We created a development framework for the station in 2002. It was Reading’s pioneering work that pushed the Department for Transport and the rail industry to provide a catalyst. Looking at it 13 years on, it was far-sighted.”
But the station still stands out like a sore thumb. Network Rail has played its part - by 2030, passenger numbers through the station are expected to double from today’s 15 million. So why has the local council yet to seize its opportunity to “do a King’s Cross”?
“Back in 2002 we called it an arc of renaissance, which sounds a bit pretentious now,” says Page. “But the area around the station is only freed up when Network Rail pulls out. That’s later this year.”
The Station Hill area promises 300 new “residential units” (most people would call them flats or apartments) as part of a “mixed-use urban area of character and quality, refreshing and interesting retail”.
That description comes from Sackville Developments’ assessment of its £500m scheme, which has been given the go-ahead after years of local wrangling. The developers claim Reading offers more than 200 trains an hour to London… just a little over-stated? Try knocking the last 0 off that figure!
The first phase will entail the demolition of unloved and run-down shops opposite the station entrance. There will be a new seating area in front of the station, in the style of an amphitheatre. And a refurbished car park will boast a five-a-side football pitch and running track on the top.
Although the new station was effectively ready a year ago, the first new office building won’t be up before 2016, and the project will take until perhaps 2024 to finish.
“Without that huge investment in the station, it is inconceivable that this scale of redevelopment could have come forward,” argues Page.
“There would have been some regeneration, but nothing like this. The station was the crucial bit, developed on the assumption of doubling footfall.
“Those companies investing in Reading now have the confidence that the railway will be able to deliver the passenger flows needed to justify the investment. Because we took the initiative, we bought ourselves a seat at the table in a way no other local authority was doing at that time. We sat with Network Rail, the DfT and the train operators on an equal footing for the redevelopment.
“In terms of the public realm, we’ve had to wait. A lot of the area around the station has been the contractors’ building site. So a lot of the stuff for which we are paying could only be started once the station was done.”
Property values, he says, have gone through the roof, with the council believing that the station investment has fed through to inflated house prices. The extension of Crossrail to Reading and the expectation of a new service offering four trains an hour directly into Heathrow from 2021 have contributed to that. It has been critical to developers’ decisions to buy sites north and south of the railway line.
“Now, of course, electrification is joining up the dots,” says Page. “It is not unconnected that a Thai consortium has just bought Reading Football Club. Their mantra was that to reach the best development sites, you land at Heathrow and turn left to Reading, instead of turning right into London.”
Rail architect Paul Beaty-Pownall is more critical: “Reading station is a lovely architectural creation, very clever. But I can’t see its relationship with the town centre. It doesn’t face the town. There’s no connectivity with the shopping area, the town hall, the bus station. There’s no joined-up thinking.
“Birmingham New Street also seems very inward-focused - a fantastic new environment without a relationship with the city around it.
“These two projects are driven by Network Rail. From a national infrastructure point of view they are essential. But it’s all about the additional platforms to handle extra services. They’re not driven by any relationship with the communities they sit in, because that’s not Network Rail’s business driver.”
Two stations up the line from Reading is Oxford. It too has big plans, with a new Chiltern Railways service via Bicester to London cleverly branded as the first new inter-city route in a century.
“Network Rail and the Department have additional problems there, because Oxford’s not a unitary authority,” cautions Page. “They have to deal with the city council as planning authority and the county council as the highways authority. They have different agendas. There’s a parish council in there, too. Reading could speak with one voice, where Oxford cannot. There are tensions around that project that we never had.
“The lesson for others is that councils have to take the lead. Network Rail is not hot-wired for partnership working. You have to work at it. Network Rail has a big task just co-ordinating all the bits of its own empire, so to get it to work with outside areas requires a lot of effort. People who’ve spent all their working lives on the railway don’t necessarily understand what a council can do for them.
“Without being critical of individuals, with the station project we saw a lot of people who were very focused on delivering an important piece of engineering. The noise, the dust, the pollution, the movement of stuff to the site was ancillary to them.
“They’ve never seen us as the enemy, but at the start we weren’t necessarily friends either. We had to do our lobbying through Government separately, to make sure that all our ducks were aligned. Mind you - I shudder to think what it would have been like if we had still been dealing with Railtrack!”
The view from Hong Kong
Hong Kong railway operator MTR, which today runs London Overground and will soon take on Crossrail, first tried to enter the UK through a bid for South West Trains in 2006.
It wanted to export MTR’s successful way of working - a model that it called “rail plus property”. The corporation was handed parcels of land, which it developed. The profits were then used to fund the railway line. Typically, high-rise developments stand on massive concrete plinths above railway stations.
UK Chief Executive Jeremy Long wanted to apply the same principle in the UK, at stations such as Clapham Junction.
“In Hong Kong the model has continued apace. We show interest here - we’re still trying to find a way of structurally getting involved in rail property outside our concession, where we are not the franchisee. That’s still difficult to achieve.
“We carry out works for Transport for London on almost all the Overground stations. But where Network Rail is the freeholder and others are operators, it has proved difficult to find a structure that allows separate commercial development. Where a train operator is a leaseholder for only a small number of years, most people think commercial development has not happened as far or as fast as it could have done.
“In Hong Kong we start out as master planners of a community. We look at the community first and the transport second. But the plots of land are much larger, the spaces here from Network Rail are more limited.”
Argent’s Gibbs sees little similarity between the Hong Kong and UK rail models: “MTR is a property company which runs some trains. The property and the railway go hand in hand. They see the railway as something which makes the land more valuable.”
Network Rail’s Biggs says the Hong Kong model is not transferrable to the UK, also citing the example of Clapham Junction.
“Clapham is clearly a problem: a complex railway with very large footfall. We should be adding value by building above, but it is very difficult to get commercial schemes like this to stack up. To pay for a new station with a big concrete raft over it requires all the money up front, ahead of any development. The numbers generally do not add up.”
Long notes: “Land near railways in the UK was often low value. There was steam and dirt. The railways were unattractive places to live nearby, so they were poor. As trains have cleaned up - and particularly been electrified - stations themselves have lost the smoke and smut. And property around a station has gone from being cheap to more expensive, more desirable.”
Future development around stations
“In 20 years we won’t use station buildings the way we do today,” asserts Paul Beaty-Pownall, who is director at bpr architects, and who has spent the past 15 years preparing station strategies for train operators, exploring how they ensure stations remain fit for purpose.
“Customers will be fully supported by mobile technology. And a lot of things that happen in station buildings now will happen on board the trains instead. So do stations really meet the future needs of customers? As architects we do a lot of station enhancement. But we’re up against the limited funding allocated to stations as part of a franchise bid.”
