1970s PRIVATE LIFE
9141 Hurst Park Hotel Project
Of one of the bugbears facing the Residents Association on Hurst Park was the undeveloped land to the East -- going towards Hampton Court. When Hurst Park race course had been split up, the estate - covering about half of it - had got planning permission against the trade-off for the open space along the river. This left something like 20 acres of space which was neither one or the other. Accordingly we tried to think of ways of protecting this open space. In particular Ian Donaldson, who was of course an architect, and myself spent considerable time on various schemes. The essence was that the usage had to be commercial, to make it worthwhile for Wates (the house-builders who still owned the land) go release it, but acceptable to the local residents. We eventually settled on the idea of sports club, but with a large hotel to offer the commercial. For the next several years we tried to implement this development. In retrospect we had a solution in search of a problem, but we got very immersed in it.
The idea was designed to meet local objections. Most of the open space was protected by the proposed development, the main buildings were relatively innocuous. Moreover, with a marina occupied much of the land the problem that this was flood plain was actually better addressed land than in any other solution.
At the time I was by on the local planning committee. Thus, I was able to use my expertise to establish what would be most acceptable solution.
The problem at that stage, though, wasn't obtaining planning permission. At some time in the future we would no doubt have had to face serious opposition in our attempt to get planning permission. Instead, in the short-term, the problem was quite simply finding the money for the scheme. To put it in perspective, at that stage - at the end of the 1970s - we were looking for somewhere around £12 million -- probably twenty to thirty million at current prices. We tried every means of finding this. Thus, we went to the merchant banks and that was a total and utter waste of time. At that time, a merchant bank -- if you would want to borrow money from it -- required that you had a track record of several years as a successful business operation. It then required that you had assets whose value exceeded the value of any loan require several times over. Finally, and having made certain in this way that the merchant bank would be exposed to no risk whatsoever, it then demanded - in addition to punitive rates of interest - also a significant share of the organisation it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the merchant banks have declined in recent years. Where they were once the promoters of entrepreneurs who would take risks, they became a lazy - using their cash mountains to make easy money only.
I also brought in a contact of mine, who I met through IBM as one of my potential customers, who was red hot financier. Even Robin couldn't find any money for us. We looked everywhere. In particular, at that time, the Saudi Arabians -- after the OPEC price hike -- were placing money all round the world. There was a lovely story told by the Ian Donaldson's ex-boss. He wanted to build an office building, part of which would have been used by his architec'ts practice. Accordingly, he'd gone out to contacts with the Saudi Arabians; and had raised some interest. At that time the office building was worth around 10 million sterling, of which the bit they wanted was about one million. After a while the message came back from the Saudi Arabians that the sums they were now dealing with were so large that it will be better if the £10 million was rolled together with £90 million in other loans in order to bring it up to 100 million sterling, which was the amount they preferred. After a further delay they eventually heard that the Saudi's required actually a billion pounds; and they were now being rolled in a together with another loan - which brought the overall total to 1 building pounds. A major part of this loan was in fact a loan to a national governments! Needless to say the whole thing fell through. It was rumoured at the time that the national governments in question was France. It was the more scurrilously rumoured that the then-President had scotched the deal because the Arabs were only offering him in a cut of 10 million. His successor, on the other hand and, accepted the £10 million bribe and the whole process was successfully signed.
I remember, during this period, going out on the final night binge from the IBM Business School, in this case to Ronnie Scotts. I found myself dancing in the upstairs disco with a very elegant -- not to say beautiful -- young girl. The key thing, it turned out though, was that she was a PA working for one of the Arab financiers. Accordingly, somewhat to my regret, the conversation was about how to obtain money from the Arabs rather than how to seduce her. I didn't find any money and certainly didn't seduce her!
With our ambitions running ahead of our abilities, we are also looking at bringing Disneyland West London. As a resul, one other group we were talking to was British Rail since we were looking at developing local stations. I well remember sitting in a meeting with British Rail's property director and -- that at the end of the meeting -- him leaning across to Ian Donaldson and myself and saying "...there is another development you might like to be interested in". Ian and I at that stage were the classical straw men, having only a few thousand between us. The development proposed, it turned out, was Liverpool Street; which went on the cost several billion pounds -- and even then the developer went bust. At that point Ian and I looked at each other, and realised that it was way beyond us; and said 'no'. But it shows how easy it can be to set up massive deals if you are trusted by the City.
We were at one stage looking at EMI as partners. I remember several meetings with them. In one of them they explained to us the economics of their CAT scanner, a major development which had been around for a few years. I was astounded to hear from them that they were hoping to break even in the near future. This was about 10 years after the first model had been launched, by which time IBM on a comparable project would have been well into the second round of massive profits. EMI lost that business to US competitors. I also remember, following that conversation, worrying that EMI was badly managed organisation. However, I consoled myself with the thought the any organisation based in ramshackle buildings around Golden Square, as they were, had sufficient commonsense that they wouldn't go bust. The next meeting I asked where the property director was, to be told that he was supervising the final plans for their massive new office on Tottenham Court Road. Soon after they did, in effect, go bust.
Ultimately I managed to bring together a consortium which contained Wates and Holiday Inns who were to become the operator, together with Brent Walker who had recently developed Brent Cross shopping centre and would be the main financiers.
Paul Wates, one of the sons, was a lovely guy, and I remember having lunch with him at the Cavalry Club while his chauffeur driven limousine cruised round the local streets waiting for us -- so that we didn't get wet in the rain. Holiday Inns was also an interesting operation, and was serious about being the operator. Brent Walker, were very interested; at least on the surface. I was nervous of them, though, because the original money had come from the brother, a leading boxer, but was managed by George Walker. I always had a feeling that George Walker was connected to East End money.
The crunch eventually came when we had a meeting at Brent Walker where we had lined up all the partners ready to sign up on the deal. George Walker was an hour or so late getting to a meeting, and when he did arrive he announced that he had just spent the money on buying a major department store on Oxford Street. The project crashed to the ground at that point. I was, for the first time, just matter of minutes away from being a multimillionaire.
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