Are we agents for positive long-term change in society? I

n a small coda to my professional career (I haven’t been employed since 2017), I sold a property last year. It wasn’t mine, I supervised its sale as a trustee of the charity which owned it. It was an unremarkable o ce building in London’s East End and the charity had owned it since 1958 when my grandfather bought it for them. He was also a Chartered Surveyor and a trustee of the small venerable charity (created in 1735). His firm, long since swallowed up and, after repeated mergers and takeovers, now lodged somewhere inside the Avison Young empire, laid claim to being one the oldest firms of Chartered Surveyors. Perhaps it’s pointless to speculate what my grandfather (let alone his forbear partners) would make of the current world of property advisers and advice? And that ordinary building on the Mile End Road, what has it been witness to since 1958? In those 65 years, there have been changes as profound as anyone might have imagined them. Our CULS Magazine Editor asks a fair question, does our profession and industry shape change or simply reflect it?

Jeremy Newsum Founder Chairman of Cambridge Ahead

When my grandfather bought the building, the idea was to exchange the charity’s low yielding 4% Consols for a higher yielding property (actually 7%, being a fixed rent from a long lease with more than 80 years of the term left to run). Inflation in 1958 was 1.75% but round the corner, if not visible, were the value destroying years of stagflation. In the blink of an eye, that freehold interest was worthless (and probably an embarrassment for my grandfather) but, having inadvertently created a perfect investment for future beneficiaries, the trustees hung on to await the reversion. The headlease did retain value, of course; in the mid-1980s, it was owned by MEPC who decided to sell. The trustees asked me for some informal (aka “free”) advice. In those days, pension schemes couldn’t buy enough short leasehold investments and the charity was able to acquire the 40-odd years remaining on the headlease and simultaneously sell a new 20-year lease to a Pension Fund for the exact same sum. My favourite deal ever! Nothing much had changed, even in the charity’s balance sheet, but the reversion was 23 years sooner. Long-termists understand the real di erence between 2042 and 2065, the equivalent dates today.

In 1958, the building on the site was a tyre depot, quite newly built in the bombdamaged area. Ahead was the era of the car and everything associated with it from tyres to road building, car parks and out of town shopping centres. However, by the end of the century, the location was less suitable as a tyre depot and the building sublease was bought by a Housing Association and converted to o ces. No great surprise in the type of occupier as the post Thatcher decline in council owned housing gave way to the rise and rise of the housing associations, themselves now being eclipsed. And the world started to move towards Mile End Road as the City expanded upwards and outwards and Hackney and Stepney became more desirable places to live.

The reversion date duly arrived and the charity’s income was transformed. Over the next decade, options for redevelopment to housing were explored but, post pandemic, the decision was taken to sell. And what a sale – 40 viewings, 20 o ers, best bids, a big premium over book value. The charity, expecting a drop in income as it exchanged rent for dividends, has no such decline at all. My grandfather made a good deal after all!

This property has played many di erent roles over the last 65 years, both as a building for occupation and as an investment. I especially like the unwitting role of the pension fund supporting many of the charity’s beneficiaries. Unlike my grandfather’s generation, there has been nothing on the scale of the rebuilding required after WW2 but we’ve seen almost everything else including a 22% increase in the UK population and even bigger increase in the number of households. The need to repurpose and improve buildings is constant whether it be reclaiming redundant dockyards, repurposing bingo halls or refitting the entire building stock for a zero-carbon world. Our industry thrives on this constant change. Styles of buildings change too and it’s interesting that the Victorian builders gave us the most adaptable buildings. Contemporary buildings will not last so long.

We may love the change but I cannot argue we create the change. We go with the waves, mostly surfing, occasionally drowning. There was a period, leading up to the great recession of 2008/10 when the industry was kidnapped by finance, when buildings became primarily a financial instrument and the real purpose of a building, for occupation, was forgotten. It’s a shame that we let this happen but it’s just another example of the industry as an enabler not shaper. Today, the existential threat to us all is from climate change which manifests itself in the built environment as the carbon challenge. It might have been possible to get ahead of this wave and there were some far-sighted views and experiments 20-30 years ago but our industry is inherently cautious. Its professionalism is backward-looking – or more politely, evidence-based. So, the industry was bound to be a follower in the climate challenge; those who can claim to be doing most are to be applauded but being best of the rest is still not the same as shaping.

Some designers and, to a lesser extent, occupiers are willing to be innovative and provocative. But those who commission buildings, those who build them and finance them generally resist innovation. It’s a sad conclusion to come to but it doesn’t mean we have no value as an industry. Just don’t expect us to solve society’s problems.