The area around Queensway in London has long been the poor cousin to the nearby neighbourhoods of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. Littered with souvenir shops and fast-food outlets, the street itself, which runs perpendicular to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, might be best described as unremarkable. If you were less generous, you might even say it was a bit of a dump.
All that looks set to change, however, with a £3 billion facelift of a half-mile stretch that will sweep aside the luggage shops and mobile phone repairers and replace them with luxury housing and high-end restaurants.
Key to the revamp has been the overhaul of the once majestic Whiteleys department store, which first opened its doors on the street in 1911. At one time it was one of London’s most luxurious places to shop, rivalling Harrods, Liberty and Selfridges, but it had been lying empty and gathering dust since December 2018. The department store, which according to its slogan once boasted of being able to provide customers with everything ‘from a pin to an elephant’, has now been carved up into 139 homes, a 109-room Six Senses hotel and retail space that has already been snapped up by the likes of Everyman Cinema, gym group Third Space and 3812, the art gallery specialising in Chinese contemporary art. The colonnaded Grade II-listed façade has been kept, with architects Foster + Partners appointed to gut and reshape the innards.
New luxury homes
Just down the road, change has already begun with Park Modern – a £500 million, 55-apartment block from Fenton Whelan, coming to completion last year – beneath which sits a new Jeremy King restaurant, the Park. King is one of London’s most respected restaurateurs, having co-founded Piccadilly dining institution the Wolseley.
Marcus Meijer, founder and chief executive of Mark, a property investment company that bought the 1.1 million sq ft Whiteleys site more than a decade ago, says: ‘The regeneration represents a truly unique and privileged opportunity to transform an entire neighbourhood in the heart of London. It is exciting to be able to breathe radical new life into an architectural gem.’
Alex Michelin, co-founder of Finchatton, the development manager responsible for building and designing the new homes within the old department store, adds: ‘The gentrification of the area has been a long, long time in the making but it’s finally here.’
[See also: Finchatton: The Whiteley is about connecting people]
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The median price per square foot in Bayswater was just over £1,300 in 2022, according to Savills research published in 2023. That’s significantly less than the figure of nearly £1,800 achieved for other neighbourhoods around Hyde Park.
The area has benefited from the recent arrival of the Elizabeth line station at Paddington, but there have been headwinds for its ambitious reimagining. Some of the apartments up for sale in the Whiteley complex, such as the four-bed home furnished and decorated by interior designer Joyce Wang that boasts 6m-high ceilings, are priced in the region of £15-17 million. Meanwhile, a five-bedroom penthouse – which has almost 4,500 sq ft of outdoor space and 360° views over London – came up for sale for £40 million last June. Those prices might be a stretch, given the UK’s super-rich are reported to be leaving Britain in their droves as a result of policy changes enacted by Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
Indeed, as we reported in the last issue of Spear’s, global mobility experts Henley & Partners forecast that the UK would see an ‘unprecedented’ net loss of 9,500 millionaires in 2024 – second only to China worldwide, and more than double the 4,200 who left Britain the previous year.
The departures, as they saw it, would be primarily because of higher taxes. ‘Even before the starting gun was fired on the UK’s July 4 general election, it’s apparent that the wealthy in Britain were already leaving,’ a Henley & Partners report read. More exits, they said, would arise due to the party’s move to scrap the UK’s ‘non-dom’ rules, as well as the move to add 20 per cent to private school fees by removing the sector’s VAT exemption at the start of next year.
Michelin, however, says 70 per cent of the apartments have already been sold off-plan – something he says is ‘unheard of with this kind of development’, highlighting that the building has a residents’ library, a club room, a sports hall with a padel court, a half basketball court, a music room and a children’s playroom.
A sales representative at Finchatton adds: ‘For different reasons we heard that many high-end buyers were going to leave London after the 2016 Brexit vote, for example, but that never really happened, and I suspect the same will be true this time around. There are very few places like London, and leaving is not an easy decision or one that people will want to make lightly.’
The flats are being presented in Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, but Michelin says around two-thirds of buyers have come ‘from just a couple of miles away’. ‘I guess what we’ve done is dig into the zeitgeist of all these people who live in Kensington, South Kensington, Chelsea, Maida Vale and Holland Park, where there are no flats over 2,000 or 3,000 square feet,’ he adds.
‘We’ve taken the view that some people want to live in flats rather than houses, whether that’s for security reasons or for convenience, and we’ve seen them come here [to the Whiteley] in their droves. Our predominant buyer pool has been those in the neighbouring W11, W9, W10 and W8 postcodes.’
Having the apartments lived in rather than bought by those flying in just a couple of times a year could be key to the success of the project and the regeneration of the area as, alongside the £1 billion refit of the old shopping centre, the entire street will see an additional £2 billion of funds being pumped in. Having residents walking around and spending their money will be vital.
Tom Gibbon, executive director of property manager GMS, which owns 18 retail units in the block directly next to the Whiteley that includes a newly opened M&S, agrees. He is a member of the Queensway Joint Steering Committee, which has set out plans for Parisian-style pavement pavilions for the area, as well as the planting of trees, reduced traffic, major upgrades to both its tube stations, new benches and a new entrance to Kensington Gardens, with twin gates.
‘The prices being mentioned for the flats next door are phenomenal,’ he says. ‘I find it amazing that those sorts of numbers are being achieved. But the most important thing is that I hope they will be occupied. It would be very sad if it finishes up as another development where the units remain in the dark. We don’t need another dark development.’
Michelin bats this away. ‘This is not like a lot of schemes I’ve done in Knightsbridge, Mayfair, and Belgravia where people don’t really end up living there. In those areas, people are typically coming into London for a couple of months a year and it’s one of their many homes globally. Those people might still call England their home, but really they are travelling a lot. The Whiteley, however, is the most local scheme I’ve ever built.’
[See also: The best property agents 2024]
The other big buyers of the flats will be bankers and those who work in the City, he adds, due to the area’s transport links. ‘Obviously we’ve got two tube stations on the street, which is amazing and makes it very easy to get into the City in 15 or 20 minutes. As a result, we’ve had a lot of Goldman Sachs bankers and private equity guys, these sorts of people, buying in the building. It’s a place where people are going to live.’
Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, but the addition of the Six Senses Hotel, the group’s first foray into the UK, should provide a healthy dose of footfall for the area, with the site including a spa with 11 treatment rooms, a 20m indoor swimming pool, a gym, a lobby bar and lounge and an all-day restaurant.
Neil Jacobs, CEO of the hotel group, who grew up close to the old department store but now lives in New York, says: ‘Before we went ahead with Whiteleys, we looked at locations in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, but they didn’t feel right. We also bid on the old American embassy in Mayfair, which we didn’t get, but I’m now glad we didn’t, as I believe the Whiteley will be a much better home for us.
‘We actually like the grit and grunginess of Queensway and, although the gentrification of the area will be well received, we don’t want it to change too much. As a hotel we want to be cool, not a white tablecloth sort of joint – just like the street.’
This piece first appeared in Spear’s Magazine: Issue 94. Click here to subscribe
