For railway-obsessed British home seekers, it could be just the ticket. Network Rail is collaborating with the company behind what was once called the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Together, they have rebranded their property development arms into a new agency. From now on, it’s trains on platforms one, two and three – and houses on “Platform4”. The new identity has been set up to remediate and regenerate otherwise surplus railway real estate.
The merger of Network Rail’s Property Development business and the property arm of London & Continental Railways could spell new life for redundant goods yards. However, not for goods yards. Platform4 concentrates on redeveloping railway land – mostly land with no platforms at all. It will actually repurpose outdated and unused freight facilities, with an overall aim of raising funds for the modern railway.
Here are some we made earlier
Small scale redevelopment of parcels of land – typically redundant local goods sidings attached to neighbourhood stations is part of UK culture. On a much greater magnitude, Britain’s rationalisation of its railway estate in the 1960s left vast tracts of land – often in city centres – ripe for redevelopment. Examples of that scale of development may be Edinburgh’s Festival Square hotel and commercial quarter, Manchester’s Grand Central conference centre and the City of London’s Broadgate public realm and office complex.
However, the 1960s reorganisation also left Britain with a legacy of ‘white elephant’ goods yards – on the sale of continental marshalling yards – which were designed for wagon-load freight formations. This traffic never matched that ambitions and, consequently, there are many sites now almost derelict – or at least very much underused. There is also the legacy of Britain’s coal industry, which also accounted for large numbers of goods complexes, attached to collieries, which are now completely redundant.
Homes and commercial space on a big scale
Some of these sites are now in the hands of private developers, who regenerate “brownfield sites”. A typical example may be Harworth Group, who are active in the sector – typically remediating sites for new commercial purposes. A good example is the regeneration of Gascoigne Wood in Yorkshire, where former colliery sidings have found new purpose as railway stabling and new commercial and logistics projects.
Platform4 seems to follow a different model. Despite the close association with the railway industry, this is a break from the railway heritage of the land it intends to market. Promotional images of projects – such as the former Forth Goods Yard in Newcastle – show developments completely divorced from railway overtones. It may be of concern that two railway companies are not overtly promoting rail transport as an integral part of their property proposition, but Platform4 already has a commitment to build 40,000 new homes and a vast portfolio of commercial space over the next ten years.
Precluding the original purpose
A blueprint may be an earlier redevelopment in the southeast of Edinburgh. The once vast Millerhill marshalling yard, motive power depot and colliery sidings have all been swept away. In their place, a whole new neighbourhood for the Scottish capital: Shawfair (complete with its own station on the ten-year-old Borders Railway) and a modern electric traction depot. There is also a new “waste from energy” plant on the site – built by the local city administration to replace a rail-served facility in the city centre. The new plant is adjacent to that new railway line, but, as the citizens have come to expect from their city council, they overlooked the provision of a railway connection to the plant.
“Platform4 adds to Network Rail’s wider property expertise, which includes a successful retail estate which generated over £914m [about €1.1bn] in sales in the last financial year across its 19 managed stations,” says a supporting statement from the new company. If Network Rail is to raise extra cash for developing the existing network in Britain, then it has to use its greatest asset – its portfolio of land. However, the immediate reaction must surely be that any development on railway land precludes using that land for its original purpose – or indeed for any new purpose – such as that missed opportunity in Edinburgh’s Shawfair neighbourhood.