The head of the Queen’s extensive property portfolio has revealed she is considering a ten year plan for the £8 billion Crown Estate. Speaking to the Evening Standard Alison Nimmo, the first woman to hold the post, was also keen to highlight the diversity of the Estate’s assets.
Regent Street
Nimmo took over the running of the Crown Estate a year ago following a stint as design chief for the London Olympic Games. Prior to this she had overseen the regeneration of both Manchester and Sheffield city centres and hopes to bring this experience to bear in her current role.
Consequently her first priority is the redevelopment of London’s St James’s district where the crown owns 4 million sq ft of retail, office and residential space. The £500 million project aims to sensitively create a world renowned location for shops and restaurants while consolidating St James’s position in the West End office market.
Nimmo hopes the project will prove as successful as the Regent Street Vision programme which has seen substantial investment poured into the Crown Estate’s 1.5 million sq ft of prime retail space. In addition over £25 million has been invested in public spaces forming the gateway to Regent Street, including Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus.
“It is a microcosm of what the Crown Estate is really good at,” Nimmo says. “You take a pretty grotty bit of town with huge potential and some listed buildings and you do quite a difficult, complicated scheme.”
Besides owning these profitable swathes of central London commercial property, the Crown Estate contains a vast amount of regional assets with a focus on retail, office and industrial properties. These include 14 retail parks in locations as far apart as Liverpool and Portsmouth.
The diverse portfolio also includes forestry and parkland, energy and infrastructure assets, 263,000 acres of agricultural land and virtually the entire seabed surrounding the UK up to a distance of 12 nautical miles from the coast.
Although changes to the Civil List announced last year mean that the Queen’s income is related to the performance of the Crown Estate, the Royal Family has no jurisdiction over it. Instead, it is run by a board which is formally accountable to Parliament.
The Board has a mandate to deliver a return on its assets, with the estate’s profits going to the treasury for the benefit of the nation. During the past decade the Crown Estate has delivered £2 billion to the exchequer.
