City of London

Property Week reports that Shard developer Sellar, MTR Corporation and Network Rail, have submitted a joint planning application to the City of London Corporation for their £1.5bn redevelopment of Liverpool Street station. The plans include an Andaz hotel with 256 rooms, which would take up the top six levels of a 16-storey building above the station that would also feature a new culture, retail and leisure district. The development would have a total of 21-storeys. The station concourse would also be doubled in size from nearly 70,000 sq ft to more than 145,000 sq ft.

The Architect’s Journal reports that Piercy&Company has been given the go-ahead to overhaul and extend a 36-year-old SOM-designed office block at Broadgate in the City of London. The Postmodern eight-storey 1 Appold Street building was completed in 1986 as part of the original Broadgate development. It sits next to Liverpool Street Station – which Herzog & de Meuron has just submitted plans to build over – as well as Exchange Square and Make’s giant 2011 office block for UBS.

City of Westminster

BE News reports that British Land has received planning permission for an ultra-low carbon logistics hub at Paddington Central. The 121,000 sq ft facility at 5 Kingdom Street, which will be built on a former Crossrail works site, will provide inbound access to HGVs with outbound deliveries via smaller electric vehicles and electric cargo bikes.British Land says the new hub will remove around 100 large vans from roads of the borough of Westminster every day, reducing annual carbon emissions by up to 90%.

Property week reports that Great Portland Estates (GPE) has paid £53m for two central London freehold buildings to add to its flex office portfolio. The group spent £39m on 33,717 sq ft of vacant space at 141 Wardour Street in London’s West End.The Soho building has planning consent for a refurbishment that will provide office and restaurant spacer on the lower ground, ground and six upper floors. In the second deal, GPE paid Canada Life Asset Management £14m for Bramah House on Bermondsey Street in south London, reflecting a net initial yield of 5.9%.

Property Week reports that Streetwear and sportswear retailer Footasylum is to open a 20,000 sq ft flagship branch at 73-89 Oxford Street in central London in the second half of this year, as part of its national roll-out of a larger store format. Footasylum, which was bought by private equity firm Aurelius Group last year in a £37.5m deal with JD Sports, said the flagship site would trade across two floors, with customer service and click-and-collect lockers in the store’s basement.

The Architect’s Journal reports that Benedetti Architects’ competition-winning scheme for a £20 million ‘comprehensive refurbishment’ of RIBA’s headquarters at 66 Portland Place has been delayed by at least a year, according to sources.The project to overhaul the institute’s 90-year-old George Grey Wornum-designed central London base had been expected to start on site early next year. However, the AJ understands that, following early feasibility studies, the start of works has been pushed back until 2025 ‘at the earliest’.

Property Week reports that Music retailer HMV is to return to its first ever location, at 363 Oxford Street in London, having withdrawn from the site four years ago.The store, which has trading floors of 10,000 sq ft out of a total 16,000 sq ft taken by the retailer, was closed in February 2019 after Canadian owner Doug Putman, who bought HMV out of administration that year, blamed a lack of profitability and landlord support. HMV first opened at the site in 1921.

Kensington & Chelsea

The Architects Journal reports that The Grenfell Tower Inquiry will not publish its much-anticipated second and final report into the disaster until next year. The report will detail the causes of the 2017 fire, which killed 72 residents in the 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington.But its publication, which was due later this year, has been delayed until early 2024. Acknowledging the public’s desire to see the findings ‘as soon as possible’, the inquiry team said the delay was necessary to ensure the report is ‘complete and accurate’ and conveys a ‘definitive version of events’.

Lambeth

Property Week reports that the potential closure of iconic south London music venue Brixton Academy has been called “a stark wake-up call” for all leisure and venue operators, after the Metropolitan Police called for it to lose its licence following a fatal incident. A crowd crush at the O2 Academy, owned by Academy Music Group, left two people dead in December after fans without tickets tried to enter a show by Nigerian artist Asake, leading to local authorities suspending the venue’s licence for three months. A decision on whether the site can reopen is expected to be made at an upcoming Lambeth Council licensing meeting.

General

BE News reports that office take-up activity in London fell significantly in Q1 2023, according to new research from Gerald Eve. The first quarter figure of 2.4m sq ft was down 19% on Q4 2022 and 16% below the five-year quarterly average. Gerald Eve said macroeconomic headwinds, such as increased costs associated with business rates, debt, utilities and labour, had “weighed down on corporate confidence” with many firms reviewing their space requirements. Around 400,000 sq ft was returned to the market in Q1 and tenant-controlled space reached a record-high of 6.5m sq ft, which accounted for around a third of the increase in overall availability, which now stands at 8.6%.

Property Week reports that plans for a new type of investment fund unveiled in a government consultation last week could unlock “hundreds of millions” for UK real estate, according to property finance experts. HM Treasury and HM Revenue & Customs launched a consultation on the Reserved Investor Fund (RIF), which proposes an unregulated UK-based vehicle for both professional institutional investors and high-net-worth retail investors. The structure would be open to all asset classes but is likely to be particularly attractive to commercial real estate investors as a fund to hold UK property.