Proposals for the renovation of a 35-acre site included the creation of a British response to Venice, a snowmobile and Chinese schools. Designed to coincide with international interest in London around the Olympics, a lengthy bidding process has been dominated by Chinese investors. In 2013, Johnson, then mayor of London, awarded the contract to the little-known Advanced Business Park (ABP) based in Beijing. The 1, 1.7 billion deal was to include offices, shops and homes and create thousands of jobs. A decade later it has been described as a “ghost town”. Construction stopped more than two years ago with ABP securing only a few tenants. President Xu Weiping, meanwhile, is unable to return to China after a Beijing court imposed a travel ban and severe spending restrictions on unpaid debts. “The Royal Albert Docks were supposed to be the crown jewel of London’s only Enterprise Zone,” said Unmesh Desai, a member of the Workers’ Assembly for the region. “But the former mayor’s promises that the developer, ABP, would provide thousands of jobs and billions of pounds in inputs to the UK economy clearly did not materialize.” City Hall tried to remove ABP from the suspended program by issuing a final termination notice in February. Earlier this month, six of the development buildings were put up for sale by Savills after the company came under management. But perhaps the seemingly mixed path to securing a developer served as a warning of how things turned out.
Closes China
According to minutes of meetings of consultants Drivers Jones, Deloitte and London and Partners, published under the Freedom of Information Act, interest from a wide range of Chinese companies was expressed at a time of different relations with Beijing. Civil servants warned in internal emails that Chinese investors were on “a sharp learning curve in terms of investment / land acquisition in the UK, particularly in the public sector”. Meanwhile, in a note from the most inactive London Development Agency, another said that any Chinese developer would need a greater degree of “hands-on”. In 2011, a trip to China was planned to gauge the interest of the parties who wanted to build at the Royal Docks. The Shaanxi Tianhe Enterprise Group, whose main activity was bookstores, was hosted at Deloitte headquarters in Beijing by five City Hall advisers and one London Development Agency. He wanted to start a “Fast Chinese” school, which guarantees speaking Mandarin four weeks later in collaboration with The Mountbatten School. At the meeting, officials representing the United Kingdom went through a prepared list of British real estate agents, in a demonstration of the holding level. Other meetings took place with Zongchen, a leading motorcycle manufacturer, at Deloitte’s Chongqing headquarters. CSST International, a security firm, also said it was looking forward to a meeting over Beijing’s “exit policy” at the time, which encouraged top business people in all sectors to leverage the λι billion credit from the National Bank of China and invest in international projects. And Han Guangyun, president of the Chongqing Taizheng Group, spoke about his desire to “[emulate] the Chinese dragon “in the spatial order” of the project that incorporated a Confucian academy and recreated a “Chinese Venice” in the Thames where cruise ships could be moored.
