It was heralded by Boris Johnson as a dazzling ‘beacon for Asian investors’: a £1.7bn waterfront office complex that would become ‘London’s third largest business district’ after the City and Canary Wharf. As mayor of London in 2013, he promised it would be a dynamic “city within a city”, buzzing 24 hours a day, with Asian companies drawn here by tax breaks, operating on Beijing time and breathing new life into a long-abandoned stretch from the Royal Docks in East London.
Almost a decade since Johnson signed the deal with Chinese developer ABP (Advanced Business Parks) to build his dockside fantasy, the area has been a ghost town. About a tenth of the project has been completed: a row of pristine office blocks framed in a sea of asphalt and overgrown bushes, with no tenants. Last week, after years of uncertainty and missed deadlines, the Greater London Authority finally kicked the developer out of the project, citing a lack of progress on the scheme, leaving the future of the 14-hectare (35-acre) site up in the air.
Visiting the site today is like walking through a computer-generated image of a correctional facility. It has the feel of a bleak open-air prison for white-collar criminals condemned to purgatory in a haunted business park. An endless grid of identical windows extends on both sides of Mandarin Street, the district’s central thoroughfare, accentuating the relentless 200-metre facades of gray brickwork. A row of thin trees punctuates the desolate scene as a lone security guard zips around in an electric golf buggy, stopping occasionally to sweep up a stray leaf, keeping the sidewalk clear for his community of imaginary denizens.
“There isn’t a single office tenant here.” Photo: Oliver Wainwright
“There’s not a single office tenant here,” he says. “Neither one. They were trying to rent them out, then the pandemic happened and – poof! – we made a ghost town. A Job Center finally opened here a few months ago, so at least I have company now.”
The project was conceived at the height of Sino-British relations, described as the dawn of a “golden era”, when the deal was toasted at a lavish ceremony at Mansion House in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese money poured into London at a rapid rate, funding Thames-side towers that offered “a whole new level of luxury”, with five-star room service and private karaoke lounges. Some of these projects have since been put on hold as a result of the collapse of the Chinese property market, along with Brexit and the pandemic. Construction work on the Royal Albert Dock stopped in 2019.
This is a perfect place to take pictures because there are no people. If we are careful with the pictures, we can make it look like a normal place
“I used to be a billionaire,” ABP founder Xu Weiping told the Guardian in 2020, “but not anymore. The virus is just one of the reasons. Brexit has resulted in a lot of my UK assets being devalued.” Documents filed at Companies House in December last year showed ABP made a loss of £13.2m in 2020, more than 10 times the in 2019, and had financial liabilities of £14.5 million.
Struggling to lure Chinese tenants as the pandemic unfolds, Xu has launched a latest plan to convert the 21 offices he has built so far into 2,000 self-contained, COVID-proof micro-capsules. “Inside this cube, the person can do their work, but also rest and relax,” he said. “Each cube is equipped with a multi-functional wall, including a coffee machine, mini fridge and day bed,” designed so that workers never have to leave their 3m x 3m capsule.
Unfortunately, my pleas to visit the brave new capsule-powered future were never granted and the GLA served ABP with a final termination notice last summer. The parent company, Dauphin Holdings, incorporated in the Isle of Man, assumed the obligations under the agreement, but in March this year Dauphin was served with a further termination notice. ABP has now collapsed into liquidation following a series of winding up petitions from creditors.
“London Street Chimera Lost in Digital Translation.” Photo: Oliver Wainwright
Today the place has a Ballardian atmosphere. On a sunny weekday lunchtime, a man trimmed to the waist is the only inhabitant of the neighborhood’s central square, doing push-ups on the manicured lawn and admiring his reflection in the empty glass windows. After a long time walking around the blocks, trying doors and pressing buzzers in search of life, I find another man sitting on the curb sipping coffee. An office worker at last?
“We’re shooting an ad for Marks & Spencer,” he tells me. “It’s a perfect place because there are never people around. If we are careful with the pictures, we can make it look like a normal place.
The eerie quality of the set comes in part from the way it was built. To save time, the development was completely designed in BIM (Building Information Modelling) so that the buildings could be made in a factory in modular components and quickly assembled on site. The flawless, computer-generated look of the brickwork comes from the fact that these aren’t brick walls, but thin ‘pieces’ of brick glued onto 9m x 4m concrete panels, which were then driven in and lifted into place at a speed of 10 panels per day. Look closely and you’ll see the tell-tale sealant joints where the panels meet, like a mold bug.
The intention of the Farrells, who were the main designers and architects of the buildings, was to create a ‘new dock typology’ inspired by both the dock warehouses and the Georgian terrace. Which sounds reasonable enough. But the resulting place is whitewashed of all character and nuance, as if it had been designed on a diagrammatic scale and simply printed on a production line – a chimera of a London street lost in digital translation.
Photo: Oliver Wainwright
The collapse of the project will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed this troubled scheme from the beginning. Just like the empty cable car nearby, the losing ArcelorMittal Orbit, the overheating Routemaster bus and the ill-fated Garden Bridge, the Royal Albert Dock plan bore all the hallmarks of Boris Johnson’s town hall: an overblown vanity project built on shaky foundations.
When the deal was first announced in 2013, Johnson promised that London was in a “win-win” position, claiming the scheme was “backed by the People’s Bank of China” and that many tenants were already signed up – not just to rent, but also for buying the buildings. However, a Channel 4 News investigation the following year raised major concerns about ABP’s performance and its “cozy” relationship with bidders. ABP and their partners in the Chinese local government are alleged to have been involved in the forced removal of residents from their homes at the site of their only completed compound in Beijing. Amateur footage has emerged showing demolition crews demolishing a family’s home with all their possessions inside. Johnson told Channel 4 he was not aware of this, but that ABP’s human rights in China “were not relevant to the bidding process”. ABP has strongly denied any connection to the evictions and said the development had already been completed by the time the footage was taken.
The investigation also revealed that ABP shared an office in Beijing with London & Partners, the mayor’s foreign investment attraction agency, which is an “interested party” in the procurement process. London & Partners confirmed it shared offices for a period with ABP, but said it was purely for logistical reasons and denied having a role in deciding who won the Royal Albert Dock contract. ABP disputed all allegations of impropriety and said it went through a “robust and thorough” bidding process.
“The whole thing was a disaster.” Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Separately, according to the report, the Chinese-born wife of a junior home secretary appears to have played a role in supporting the bid, while donating significant sums to the Conservative Party. The program said Xwelyn Bates, a property developer who married Tory peer Lord (Michael) Bates in 2012, held talks in 2008 with Xu Weiping and made at least one trip to China paid for by the Chinese company . She also set up a company called London China ABP, but dissolved it before it had to file accounts, and has donated more than £206,000 to the Conservatives since 2010. Lady Bates said any donations she made were purely personal and London China ABP had no connection to the Chinese firm, which also denied any knowledge of or involvement in its actions.
“The whole thing was a disaster,” says one nearby coffee shop owner, who was looking forward to an increase in footfall from the new offices. “I don’t see anyone taking on the project for at least another decade.” In the meantime, at least London has the perfect abandoned movie set to film the next zombie office worker apocalypse.
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