Related Argent’s £8B Next Act In North London Starts To Take Shape

How do you follow up the £3B urban regeneration of King’s Cross, widely regarded as one of the most successful urban regeneration projects in modern European history?

For Related Argent, the answer is to launch a project more than twice its size — and take the lessons from King’s Cross to build a whole new town. 

It has been 10 years since the company that was then simply Argent got involved in the Brent Cross Town scheme in north London. It could be another 20 before the £8B project is finally complete.

But with the first residents having moved in this spring, a new build-to-rent development launching last month and about £1B of capital already invested or committed, the project is going from grand plan to solid reality. 

“This regeneration project was talked about for about 20 years, and it never quite came forward,” Related Argent Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Morwenna Hall told Bisnow. 

“I think it's been only in the last nine to 12 months, when the buildings have really started to come out the ground, when people have thought, ‘It really is going to happen.’”

At 180 acres, Brent Cross Town is almost three times the size of the 67-acre King’s Cross site. It will ultimately comprise 6,700 homes, a mix of BTR, student, coliving, affordable and for-sale units; 3M SF of commercial space; three redeveloped schools; seven parks, set in 50 acres of green space; and the possibility of a hotel in later phases. 

The project is a joint venture between Barnet Council and Related Argent, with the council providing much of the land where Related Argent is undertaking vertical development. In 2020, Homes England provided a £148M loan to fund land assembly and infrastructure investment. 

At the King’s Cross joint venture, the majority of the scheme was funded by original partners Federated Hermes and LCR until relatively late in the development’s life. At Brent Cross, Related Argent is bringing in different partners for individual elements of the project to diversify sources of capital.

These investments include a £600M commitment from Invesco Real Estate and Related Argent for 800 residential rental homes. Last year, a second £200M JV was struck with Japan’s NTT to build another 226 rental homes in a second phase.

Other residential JVs include a partnership with Fusion to build a 662-room student block that will launch this autumn and another with Audley Group to build the project’s first senior living scheme, with its size and timeline to be determined. 

On the commercial side, the first office building, the 239K SF 3 Copper Square, is currently under construction and set for completion next year. Sheffield Hallam University has leased 110K SF for its first outpost outside of Yorkshire.

Office rents are about half the level of King’s Cross, where prime rents in the central location are currently around £100 per SF, Hall said.

In the third quarter, Neighbourhood Square, a collection of shops and restaurants aimed at serving residents and workers at the project, will be completed. 

Conductor House, which comprises 120 affordable homes, was the first building on the site to deliver as well as the first that residents have moved into. The building was designed for existing secure tenants and leaseholder residents on the nearby Whitefield Estate. The homes are managed by L&Q and delivered in partnership with Barnet Council and Barnet Homes. 

Residents will start moving to The Maple, a 500-apartment BTR scheme, in the autumn. On the for-sale side, 170-unit The Delamarre has wrapped up, and a 107-apartment scheme, The Ashbee, will be completed later this year.

Like King’s Cross, much of the Brent Cross site was underutilised industrial land before the regeneration scheme took shape.

But unlike the central London location, Brent Cross is more of a blank canvas. Related Argent utilised the urban topography provided by historical buildings and public spaces at King’s Cross, whereas Brent Cross is almost entirely new development.

That creates its own challenges. 

“On the high street, we spent a lot of time thinking about, ‘What is a high street vernacular,’” Hall said. “Where are the horizontal lines, where are the awnings, where are the dwell points? How do you break things down from being like blocks that are 50 meters long into kind of smaller rhythm?”

While the site itself may have been a blank canvas, it is surrounded on multiple sides by existing residential communities, all of which have thoughts and ideas on what should and shouldn’t be built on the site. 

“The project coming forward, whilst I think a lot of people have been waiting a long time for it, there's no doubt that when change comes, not everyone is feeling super positive about it,” Hall said. “So we continue to do a lot of work with the communities.”

A big part of that outreach has been utilising the outside space provided by the site while it is being developed.

Related Argent built a children’s playground on a part of the property that is not part of the first development phase that has been well-used by the local community, Hall said. When that area is developed, the playground equipment will be moved elsewhere. 

One of the first parts of the new scheme to be completed was Claremont Park, a larger children’s playground in landscaped gardens. It was opened in 2022 and is visited by 18,000 people a month, the developer said. During a tour of the scheme on a sunny midweek morning in May, it was busy with children playing on equipment that Hall said was deliberately more challenging than the average play area. 

A key plank of the appeal to the local community as well as new residents and commercial tenants is the 50 acres of open parklands that form part of the site.

Related Argent plans to relandscape the area as well as build new sports facilities like football and hockey pitches, a biking area, and parkour and bouldering areas. The area is not particularly well-used, Hall said, as evidenced by the fact that usage dropped during lockdowns despite being one of the only local green spaces.

The company also brought in outside consultants to help it bring a dying local stream back to life and make it a feature of the new scheme.

“It's down to small things — in this area you actually need to introduce more obstacles in the water flow to slow it down and create an environment for different types of creatures,” Hall said. 

The increasing focus on health and well-being from both individuals and large companies means that these sports and health facilities will help draw corporates to an area that is not a traditional office market, she added. 

Ensuring Brent Cross Town is the first place in Europe to achieve both WiredScore and SmartScore Neighbourhood certifications for high digital connectivity is also part of the drive to make the scheme stand out. 

A project of this size will go through multiple economic cycles, as did King’s Cross. But Hall said Related Argent and its partners are able to look through that to the longer-term goal. 

“We have got critical mass coming forward, so each of our investors is genuinely excited about how they're part of something bigger, and they can see it coming forward,” she said.