From Oliver Marriott’s book The Property Boom:



Joe Levy is a small, jovial man in a large, rectangular office. Inside a faceless Portland stone building in the Haymarket, it is unremarkable except that it has had a great deal of money spent on it. The walls are of neo-Georgian panelling. On either side of the fireplace are two domed recesses with glass shelves scattered with precious ornaments and photographs of his family. “Will you have a drink? I must show my little gimmick,” said Joe Levy, bouncing up from behind his desk with a genial grin. He pressed two of a battery of switches beside his desk. Across the room the two alcoves began to revolve. One turned into an array of glasses and bottles of Liquor. The other was a television set. “I have to have that so that I can watch my horses when they are racing.”

Marriott was the financial editor of the Times. His fascinating book was first published in 1967. Levy was one of the giants of the London property trade during that era, a bookmaker’s son who became an estate agent in partnership with his brother David in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. The Levys later formed a business relationship with Scottish financier Robert Clark. David died suddenly in 1952, but in the same year Joe started out on the path to becoming one of the capital’s top tycoons.



It all began when a Mr Young asked him if he would sell on his behalf a one-acre corner site facing Euston Road and Stanhope Street. It didn’t happen straight away, but Levy secured outline planning permission from the London County Council (LCC), which was in charge of such things in those days. Four years later, the deal came back to life. Levy went to see LCC valuer Jo Toole and an under-valuer, Ernie Sames. Marriott’s book takes up the tale:

Joe Levy recalled this meeting. “Jo Toole produced a huge map and shook his head when he saw our plans. “No. I’m sorry, you can’t have permission to build on that site. We have a plan to build a main East-West road there and we shall need most of the site for part of the road widening.” “That’s interesting,” I replied, “but I happen to have a little piece of buff paper and if it isn’t an outline planning permission for a 120,000 square foot office block, you’re not valuers of the LCC. And if you intend to acquire that site compulsorily, it will cost you some £1 million in loss of development rights.” Curiously, the LCC’s valuers had forgotten the outline permission. Sames was sent out of the room to look up the file.

The LCC’s desire to widen the Euston Road put Levy in strong position. He exploited it quietly and remorselessly. Jerry White has summed this up in his excellent London In The 20th Century:

Levy put together a jigsaw of secretly linked property companies and began patiently to buy houses, factories and land along the north side of Euston Road. It took him four years. At the end, he offered to give the LCC the Euston Road frontage in return for generous office planning permissions based on the site he would have had if the road had not been built. In this way, Levy broke through the LCC’s “plot ratio” of floorspace to site area, a rule designed to prevent over-development of hemmed-in spaces. The result was a wider Euston Road, enabling the LCC to build an underpass beneath the Hampstead Road junction and Joe Levy’s huge Euston Centre - offices, shops and luxury flats, with twin towers of 17 and 34 storeys.

As both White and Marriott explain, the evolution of this development - one of the largest in the capital in modern times - took place with almost no-one noticing. By the time the Evening Standard put the pieces together and broke the story in 1964, demolition work was already underway. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

