The Earls Court Project, the high-rise, high-priced and highly unpopular £12bn west London “regeneration” scheme for which the term “monumental waste of space” might have been coined, is enthusing some of the top brass of its developer Capital and Counties (Capco), if hardly anyone else.



A lengthy press release about the company’s preliminary financial results for last year discloses on page 51 (section 27) that directors of the company have been buying up some of the ludicrously expensive flats yet to actually be built on the section of the development area dubbed Lillie Square. This is, in fact, the erstwhile Seagrave Road car park of the now closed Earls Court exhibition centre - the legendary London venue Capco intends to “re-imagine” as a vacuous speculator “village” containing no affordable homes.



Top of the off-plan list comes Capco chairman Ian Durant, who, together with his spouse, “exchanged contracts to acquire an apartment for a purchase price of £725,000” in April last year. In the same month non-executive director Andrew Strang too exchanged contracts for a Lillie Square apartment for the price of £855,000. Also in April, non-executive director Henry Staunton and his spouse did the same thing for an apartment priced at £1,999,000. Let’s hope the market doesn’t crash, or anything.



Another non-executive director, Graeme Gordon, has been investing even more ambitiously. In December, he exchanged on two apartments, one for £1,925,000 and one for £2,725,000. Also in December a company called Blue Lillie Ltd, described as “an entity connected to Graeme Gordon”, exchanged on two further Lillie Square apartments priced at £1,975,000 and £2,542,500 respectively. The press release informs us: “The above transactions with Directors were conducted at fair and reasonable market price based upon similar comparable transactions at the time.”

All this, I’m sure, will gladden the hearts of residents of the 760 homes of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates just down Lillie Road from the non-existent Lillie Square. Capco wants them turfed out so it can knock the estates down and build yet more unaffordable residential “investments” in their place. Fortunately for those residents, the anti-social strain of Conservative politician that took control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council in 2006 - initially led by Boris Johnson’s policing deputy and would-be successor Stephen Greenhalgh - and pretty much gave Capco the run of the place was replaced last May by a Labour administration under Stephen Cowan.

Labour’s manifesto promised a less cosy relationship with property developers and pledged to “work with council housing residents to give them ownership of the land their homes are on”. Cowan and colleagues have now been locked in exacting negotiations with Capco aimed at saving the two threatened estates for several months - engrossing times for politically-minded flies on the wall. They’ve also set up a residents’ housing commission chaired by former housing minister Keith Hill. The council says that more than 350 tenants are now signed up for a conference on March 7 entitled Moving Forward Together where they will air their views about the future of council housing in the borough.



Working out the best way to move forward may be as demanding in its way as those negotiations with Capco. But what a rare pleasure it is to see ordinary people doing some the talking about what’s best for London for a change.

My copious previous coverage of the Earls Court project is archived here.

