Commercial property blog

By Christine Eade

As the MPs’ expenses scandal reaches the fifth of – only the Telegraph knows – how many weeks, I reflect on parliamentarians’ living arrangements when I began reporting Parliament 40 years ago.
They either lived like the haute bourgeoisie or like students.
In the last year of the Labour government, Cabinet ministers were intimidatingly grand, and seldom lived in their constituencies. 
I would never have dared ask Anthony Crosland why he didn’t live in Grimsby; Roy Jenkins why he didn’t live in Birmingham; Barbara Castle why she didn’t live in Blackburn or Jim Callaghan why he had no home in Cardiff.
They generally had second homes, but these were country cottages or, in Callaghan’s case, a farm in Sussex.
Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, used to joke about the grandee who said Continue reading »

By Christine Eade

Before feminism frowned on frivolity, in about 1955, there was a top model who persuaded three lovers to buy her the same mink coat from Fortnam & Mason.
One man paid for the coat, while a shop assistant took the cash from the other two dupes, creamed off enough to buy her silence, and passed on the balance to the model.
Each lover wined and dined the mink-clad woman, believing he had bought the coat.
I reflected on whether this could not happen today during the British Council of Shopping Centres’ breakfast lecture at Fortnam & Mason’s St James Restaurant on 29 April.
Could a woman pull off such a scam today?  Probably not.  The paparazzi would have made sure that each lover knew about his rivals.
But would a woman want to?  I looked around the breakfast audience, cross-referencing those eating and listening to the guest list: out of 150, 44 were women; half of these were involved in managing or leasing shopping centres; a dozen were lawyers and the rest were in planning, public relations or journalism.
Since we all had proper jobs, we would not stoop to the mink coat scam. 
But this was mere speculation, because Continue reading »

By Christine Eade

I am impressed that twice a year at 7.45 am Knight Frank fills all the breakfast tables at the Dorchester ballroom in Park Lane to present office market reports on central London and the M25.
There has never been a spare gilded seat.
No fund manager, developer or investor ever dared miss the slick presentations from Knight Frank’s researchers or agents.
Surely the 3rd February presentation on central London would be different. 
The market and the weather were dire. Continue reading »

By Christine Eade

Black america has come a long way - how far has Northern Ireland come in a similar time?

The Presidents’ Club in Belfast was a fitting place to hear the televised inauguration speech of President Barack Obama on 20th January.
There was a fleeting opportunity to gage the reactions of Belfast businessmen to one sentence: ‘Old hatreds shall one day pass.’
While the television commentators marvelled at how far black America had travelled, I reflected on the journey made by Catholics and Protestants.
The journey led them on that wet, cold Tuesday evening to the Presidents’ Club on the top floor of the Midtown Center, a warehouse-in-to-business centre conversion by a local developer, Mark Finlay, chief executive of Barnabas Ventures.
He decided that the best use of the top floor space in the Cathedral Quarter was a club for those from the US, Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland who believed in ‘the island economy.’
And so we partied in the open-plan club with its IT facilities and bar. On the walls there were portraits of the eight US presidents who identified most frequently with their Irish ancestry – not just the familiar twentieth century ones like Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, but also the more obscure like McKinley, whose fame lies in being assassinated.
Four were Republican; four Democrat; four from the north, four from the south.
It was not as easy to categorise Tuesday’s guests. Yet when I first visited Belfast 39 years ago, everyone wore a label coloured orange or green. Continue reading »

By Christine Eade

I had a dawn bus tour of Swansea on 23 October.

It was too cloudy for a blinding sunlight to rise from the bay.

But Swansea at dawn stands up to comparison with any other UK city.

The bus collected me from the Dragon Hotel, whipped down to the Marriott at the Maritime Quarter and finally to Morgans Hotel, the conversion of the old port authority building.

The five-star hotel was the venue for christening parties by Swansea ex-pat Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I wanted to peer in to see the clever conversion.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached Morgans, the bus driver hardly bothered to stop.

His brief was to wait for five minutes at Swansea’s five top hotels to collect delegates for the WalesRegeneration Summit and to drive them the two miles to the summit Liberty Stadium.

He arrived at my hotel at 7.25 am with no passengers having called at the Premier Inn.

‘I expect they’re all having a lie-in,’ he said generously. ‘They’re waiting for my second run.’

We waited in silence while a disc jockey on the radio discussed the life and bad times of Kerry Katona.

Half an hour later, I arrived at Liberty Stadium the only passenger in a 50-seater coach.

I have no idea whether the coach was more popular an hour later.

Somehow, 300 delegates made their way to Swansea.

As with all conference these days, there were plenty of green statistics.

The irony of the coach was not lost on me.

How much had my shapely carbon footprint been elongated by being the only passenger on a 50-seater coach?

I am sure the Welsh Assembly Government, the organisers of the summit, has all its green credentials in place, turning off lights and outlawing standby buttons.

But before organising another shuttle bus at taxpayers’ expense, it should check with delegates to make sure they are green enough to travel by coach.