Urban Policy and Research

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Flagship Regeneration in a Global City: The Re-

making of Paddington Basin

Mike Raco & Steven Henderson

To cite this article: Mike Raco & Steven Henderson (2009) Flagship Regeneration in a Global
City: The Re-making of Paddington Basin, Urban Policy and Research, 27:3, 301-314, DOI:
10.1080/08111140902968737

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Urban Policy and Research,
Vol. 27, No. 3, 301–314, September 2009

Flagship Regeneration in a Global City:

The Re-making of Paddington Basin
MIKE RACO* & STEVEN HENDERSON**
*Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK
**School of Applied Sciences, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

ABSTRACT Policy-makers in cities across the globe are faced with competing pressures. On the
one hand they are increasingly responsible for the economic development and enhanced
competitiveness of their cities. Their policy programmes often seek to capture a greater share of
global investment and to attract increasingly mobile skilled and creative workers. On the other hand
they are also required to enhance levels of social cohesion in cities and tackle the inequalities
associated with contemporary forms of economic growth. For many policy-makers large-scale
flagship development projects are seen as the pathway towards securing both objectives. This article
draws on the example of the redevelopment of Paddington, London, to explore the dilemmas faced by
policy-makers and the social and economic implications of contemporary forms of urban
regeneration. It argues that the recent buoyancy of London’s globally oriented property market has
presented developers, investors and policy-makers with significant commercial opportunities. This
in turn has skewed regeneration priorities towards a competitiveness focus which continues to shift
attention away from social concerns. The article concludes by suggesting that changing credit
conditions may have significant impacts on future developments.

KEY WORDS: London, global city, urban regeneration, competitiveness, cohesion

Introduction
In global cities, such as London, the 1990s and 2000s have been a period of both rapid
economic development and widening levels of social polarisation and inequality. This has

Correspondence Address: Mike Raco, Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London
WC2R 2LS, UK. Email: mike.raco@kcl.ac.uk

0811-1146 Print/1476-7244 Online/09/030301-14 q 2009 Editorial Board, Urban Policy and Research
DOI: 10.1080/08111140902968737
302 M. Raco & S. Henderson

caused new dilemmas and challenges for urban policy-makers, which although not new in
nature, are different in terms of their scale. On the one hand, policy-makers are to create
the conditions necessary for global inward investment and economic stability vis-à-vis
cities of a lower standing on international urban hierarchies. On the other hand, policy also
needs to create the conditions in which the benefits of growth are spread to a broader range
of population groups, particularly those living in the poorest neighbourhoods. In seeking to
link urban development to social objectives, urban regeneration policy has, more
generally, become an increasingly important and significant field of urban policy.
Compared to narrow micro-economic conceptualisations of trickle down, it has become
centred on visions and discourses which endeavour to provide more structured
development approaches. Examples include the recent promotion within the English urban
planning system of place-making, the formation of high-aspirational spaces,
environmentally friendly brownfield development and sustainable community-building.
In short, by drawing on such ideas the implementation of regeneration programmes
promises to create win – win scenarios. In cities such as London where the pressures of
economic growth and social dislocation have been most keenly felt, urban regeneration
policies potentially offer the greatest rewards.
And yet, the capacity of urban regeneration policies to deliver on these promises
remains a source of contention. Research has consistently shown that even though major
projects are often located in the poorest urban areas, they do not necessarily lead to the
development of those areas (Massey, 2007; Jones & Evans, 2008). At the same time, in
political terms, the propagation of regeneration discourses deflects attention away from
some of the wider processes that generate urban inequalities such as changing
employment conditions, access to housing markets and reforms to the operation of the
welfare state (Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Indeed within the context of such underlying
constraints, regeneration itself can be used strategically as a pacifying force.
In signalling and re-confirming global city status, flagship projects are often viewed
favourably, not least for the way they alter skylines, assist in global recognition and
provide futuristic living and working spaces. Their perceived importance in terms of
global economic growth encourages forms of development that are uncontested,
legitimated and unchallenged. According to this mindset, flagship developments will
help drive forward the economy, attract further investment and by doing so encourage
social inclusion. Indeed for the Blair and Brown governments, and successive London
Mayors, urban policy facilitates growth and enhanced equity, global economic
competitiveness and social cohesion. There is little recognition of the potentially
polarising effects that flagship projects can bring or of the continuing need for such
projects over time.
It is in the midst of this wider set of debates that this article examines the impacts and
effectiveness of the flagship Paddington Basin development in Central London. It draws
on a three-year research programme that was undertaken between 2004 and 2007.1
The research explored how and why the project had come to fruition and broader
questions over its longer term sustainability. The discussion shows how the
implementation of regeneration programmes in global cities, such as London, is
uniquely complex and that development agencies and policy-makers face acute
dilemmas in trying to create new economic spaces to facilitate the city’s growth whilst
ensuring that the benefits of expansion are enjoyed by a wider section of the population.
The Paddington case also demonstrates the importance of local, sub-metropolitan
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 303

politics and contexts in shaping the contours of flagship projects in London, a point that
is often overlooked in academic and policy discussions on ‘global cities’. However,
even with this ‘local’ dimension to the politics of regeneration, projects have become
more globally and less locally oriented over time and surrounding neighbourhoods
remain amongst the poorest in England.

Regenerating London—Sustaining London’s Global City Status

The politics and practices of regeneration in London are particularly complex and
challenging. As Power and Houghton (2007, p. 114) argue “London is by far the most
complex, most diverse and most socially mixed city in Britain—a jigsaw of such vast scale
and miniscule pieces that no one quite grasps its totality”. Its geographies are changing
rapidly. The population has risen from a low of 6.8 million in 1983 to 7.6 million in 2006
and a projected 8.7 million by 2026. One-quarter of this population is foreign-born and
over 300 languages are spoken by London’s schoolchildren (GLA, 2002). Whilst London
has experienced 15 years of strong economic growth and has a GDP of 140 per cent of the
European average, large sections of the population and whole areas of the city have
become increasingly impoverished. Central London now possesses an extreme
juxtaposition of what Butler and Lees (2006) term super-gentrified neighbourhoods on
the one hand and pockets of severe socio-economic deprivation on the other.2
It is in this context that urban policy has become, what Mitchell Dean (2007) terms, a
‘political project’ or a set of initiatives and ways of thinking that establish specific
problems to be tackled and the appropriate policy interventions that are required to solve
them. A growing political consensus has emerged that sees regeneration as a policy
solution to the city’s problems in two inter-related ways. First, it facilitates enhanced
economic competitiveness for London as a whole by opening up new physical spaces for
in-migrating firms and for expanding indigenous businesses. In the central London context
this is particularly significant as demands for commercial space have increased rapidly at a
time when heritage and conservation orders mean that new development is always a
contentious and politically charged issue (see Davidson, 2009). Second, regeneration can
also, in theory, encourage enhanced social cohesion by bringing jobs, environmental
improvements and a range of socio-economic opportunities to some of the city’s most
deprived localities. The presence of new businesses in such areas, it is argued, encourages
new entrepreneurial cultures to be established and positively affects the aspirations of the
low skilled and the unemployed (see Blears, 2008; Byrne, 2008). In short, urban
regeneration can create a virtuous circle that brings new rounds of globally oriented
competitiveness whilst spreading the benefits of growth to those who most need it.
In concrete terms such discourses have been a core feature of planning agendas for the
city, particularly under the former Mayor Ken Livingstone.3 Planning frameworks
visualised London as a single space of action to be worked on and improved through
strategically significant policy interventions. The needs of its globally successful business
and financial service sectors were to be given greatest priority, with development agendas
focused on ‘sustaining success’ (see London Development Agency, 2006; Tewdwr-Jones,
2009). At the same time the introduction of what was termed a ‘sustainable’ urban
regeneration agenda gave greater legitimacy to such an approach. The Mayor was able to
argue that with effective forms of redistributive urban policy in place, a globally focused
development strategy could be of benefit to the whole city, not just those working in specific
304 M. Raco & S. Henderson

professionalised sectors. In The London Plan of 2004, 28 ‘Opportunity Areas’ were

identified as potential sites where such agendas could be put into practice. The sites
included Elephant and Castle, the Isle of Dogs, King’s Cross, Paddington, Shoreditch and
Wembley, all of which were formally industrial areas, possessed difficult to develop
brownfield sites and were hubs on the London transport network.
By concentrating regeneration efforts in such areas through the creation of flagship
projects, it was argued that urban change could occur in ways that were economically,
environmentally and socially sustainable. And yet the track record of flagship projects
in London and elsewhere shows that they are never the straightforward catalysts that
they are envisaged to be. Nor is their imposition on the existing urban landscape an
uncontested process (Ball & Maginn, 2005). Flagship-oriented regeneration tends to be
exclusive, rather than inclusive, and creates new forms of division, rather than
encouraging a greater sense of cohesion (see Harvey, 2000; Jones & Evans, 2008). It is no
coincidence that the greatest spatial juxtapositions of inequality in London are to be found
in locations that have experienced the greatest amount of regeneration. Instead of tackling
these inequalities, flagship projects have played an important part in reproducing them.
The Borough of Tower Hamlets in East London, for instance, currently ranks as the third
most deprived local authority area in England despite its location at the heart of the
London Docklands regeneration area and the inflow of billions of pounds of public and
private sector money from the early 1980s (see Brownill, 1999). In the Canary Wharf
development, in the heart of Tower Hamlets, the average pay of a male worker in 2005
rose to more than £101 000 (Thornton, 2005, p. 1), yet in contrast, two-thirds of the
borough’s children are growing up in households officially defined as ‘poor’ and economic
inactivity rates are as high as 46 per cent (Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2008). Similar
situations are being replicated across London where rapid gentrification and
professionalisation have been rolled out at a growing pace (see Hamnett, 2003; Butler
& Lees, 2006; Davidson, 2009).
At the same time as such inequalities are growing, the complexity of institutional and
governance arrangements in London makes effective urban planning particularly difficult.
Indeed, for Travers (2004), London has become an ungovernable city of staggering
complexity in which the mobilisation, management and delivery of ambitious urban
regeneration projects represents a significant challenge (see GLA, 2002; Keith, 2004).
On face value, this does not appear to be the context in which the strategic role of flagship
developments can be re-conceptualised and re-fashioned. Yet it is within this context that
the remainder of the article draws on the example of Paddington Basin in Westminster City4
to explore and assess some of the tensions and opportunities that surround the rolling out of
urban policy in the city. Paddington has been put forward by the former Mayor and others as
a flagship model example of sustainable urban regeneration. Major developments are
taking place on former industrial sites and the socio-economic character of the area is
being transformed. It is on a public transport hub and is creating jobs in a location that is
adjacent to one of the most deprived inner-city areas in London. However, as the discussion
will show, there are significant tensions over the embeddedness of the developments that are
taking place and the extent to which regeneration is or should be focused on meeting locally
defined, Westminster City, and/or London-wide priorities and objectives. The first section
contextualises the Paddington development. It is followed by a discussion that is divided
into two parts the first of which looks at broader questions of economic competitiveness
and the second explores issues of community inclusion and social cohesion.
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 305

From a Problem Place to an Opportunity Space: The Regeneration of Paddington

A Regeneration Agenda for Paddington
The Paddington area of London represents a typical example of a place that has suffered
from both de-industrialisation and ‘comprehensive’ post-war redevelopment. In the early
19th century the area now known as Paddington Basin was an important spur on the
London canal network and this generated low-level industrial activities and the
establishment of a local working-class community. During the 1840s the Great Western
Railway selected Paddington as the site of its Brunel-designed terminus and this led to a
rapid expansion in the area’s industrial and population base. This early growth physically
divided the neighbourhoods around Paddington. To the south of the railway lines
expensive, middle-class housing was built particularly in the areas adjacent to Hyde Park.
To the north, working-class communities were established, characterised by low-quality
housing and over-crowding. These physical and social divisions still have a significant
influence on the politics and geographies of Paddington today (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Paddington regeneration area.

306 M. Raco & S. Henderson

After the war, however, the area’s economic base gradually declined and it became an
easy target for urban motorway development during the 1960s. What followed was the
demolition of many working-class urban and civic spaces around which communities
had formed. To cope with displaced populations and immigrant communities arriving at
Paddington train station soul-less modernist housing estates were constructed (see
Porter, 1989; Duncan, 1992). In the words of one community activist “we lost the whole
of the town centre . . . we lost the Police Station, we lost the Town Hall, we lost shops,
we lost cinemas, we lost churches, you know we were messed over”. The redevelopment
only reinforced the perception of Paddington as an area of decline so that, in the
words of one Westminster City Council (WCC) planner at the time, “Paddington
always had the problem of being, you know, on the edge of things . . . neither one thing
nor the other”.
However, from the late 1970s, thinking about the Paddington area began to change.
With growing demands for commercial office space and the difficulties (pre the Docklands
developments) of finding suitable sites for expansion, the area’s derelict and waterfront sites
were increasingly seen as an opportunity, rather than a problem. In 1976 Paddington station
was identified in the Greater London Plan as a preferred office location. At this point such
plans were strongly opposed by the local authority, WCC, who argued that Paddington
was outside of London’s core commercial zone, and that the area’s largely residential
status should be preserved. This conservatism was a reflection of the political power
of Westminster and Paddington’s wealthier neighbourhoods, for whom regeneration
was viewed, even from this early stage, as a threat to the area’s local character.
It was not until the mid-1980s that the first major regeneration projects were proposed.
There were two key periods of subsequent development pressure. A key catalyst for the
first development phase was the designation of the Paddington Special Policy Area
(PSPA) by WCC in 1988. WCC saw Paddington as a development space that could help it
to manage rising development pressure across Westminster City, without impinging on the
City’s historical landscape or upsetting its core supporters. The PSPA was an attempt to
“secure . . . development in a balanced manner, which establishes an identity for the area
as a place of interest with its own character where people can live and work” (WCC, 2002,
p. 23). If office development was to come to Paddington, then it must occur in a fashion
that was sensitive to its relatively low-rise residential surrounds. This initiative gave the
project key institutional support and a sense of direction (see Raco & Henderson, 2009 for
a wider discussion). Although development pressure emerged across at least five different
sites, only the refurbishment of Paddington train station and the expansion of existing
hotel capacity took place during this period. Following recession in the early 1990s, the
announcement and eventual completion of the Heathrow Express Rail Link in 1998 made
Paddington the London terminus for Heathrow passengers and enhanced its status as a
development node within the city. Westminster City remained supportive of Paddington’s
redevelopment, with the proviso that additional traffic and pedestrian movements should
be strategically considered.
By the mid-2000s more than 7 hectares of office development, 900 new homes and 1.5
hectares of retail and leisure spaces had been completed. In addition, there have been
major environmental improvements with the old canal spur, known as Paddington
Basin, cleaned up and made into an important site for commercial and outdoor leisure
uses. New bridges have been constructed across the railway and canal to overcome some
of the physical barriers that have blighted the area. Major investors have established
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 307

headquarters in Paddington Basin, including the retailer Marks & Spencer and the
mobile phone company Orange. Developments were given an additional boost in the
2000s with the designation of Paddington as a flagship Opportunity Area in
the 2004 London Plan and a key strategic site for further investment in London.
Policy-makers now claim that eventually 30 000 jobs will be created making it one of the
most significant urban development projects in Europe (Paddington Central, 2008).

Creating a Competitive Place—The Regeneration of Paddington

There has been a growing tendency within policy and academic literature on development
in London to see the city as a unified space of action, a trend most explicitly captured in the
global cities thesis of the 1990s. However, the case of Paddington highlights the multiple
spaces of regeneration that exist across the city and the highly localised emergence and
implementation of major, flagship development projects. Paddington Basin owes much of
its existence to the restrictive post-war planning controls established in Westminster and
the desire of WCC politicians in the 1990s to create competitive spaces that would
rival other parts of London, particularly those of the London Docklands to the east.
Restrictions over the height of buildings in particular, and the desire of more affluent
residents to maintain the character of existing neighbourhoods meant that WCC’s
options for finding new sites for development were limited. As a chief planner noted in
interview:

the constraints of the West End and their projections for the amount of office space
that you required within Westminster led WCC to identify Paddington as an area for
larger-scale developments that couldn’t be accommodated in the core West End
commercial property market.

Or as the leader of WCC noted:

planning policies got tighter, as a result commercial landowners were feeling the
pinch . . . so the two came neatly together, there was this underdeveloped derelict
land out at Paddington, it was blighting the area, it was a poor area anyway, and
there was much demand for commercial space.
In this sense Paddington was seen as ticking all the necessary boxes of a ‘sustainable’
urban regeneration project. It provided brownfield, inner urban sites for new employment-
oriented land uses adjacent to an existing public transport hub. At the same time it solved a
local political problem for politicians and planners in Westminster by diverting
development pressures away from affluent, conservative neighbourhoods.5
At the same time the project has been pulled in different directions and in many ways
has been ‘ratcheted up’ in response to new national and international commercial
opportunities and policy agendas. The Heathrow Rail Link, opened in 1998, in particular,
has played a part in encouraging nationally and globally oriented companies to move in to
new commercial properties alongside the canal basin. The area’s improved transport links
have made it better connected to suburban areas, particularly those along the rail lines west
of London. This has encouraged new commuting patterns into the area, thereby limiting
the opportunities for local people to access employment. Local service provision,
particularly retail and leisure spaces, has also been created with this new, relatively
308 M. Raco & S. Henderson

affluent group of consumers in mind making the area look and feel increasingly
disconnected from neighbouring communities.
But this ‘ratcheting up’ of development has not simply been a product of a more
globally oriented set of visions. Despite significant changes to the area, there is still
suspicion amongst some developers and investors that its longer term sustainability as an
investment space is vulnerable and that Paddington still represents a ‘peripheral’ space
within Central London. In interview respondents were particularly cautious about what
one described as the “significant viability issues” that still existed because of the high cost
of land in and around Paddington. Not that the high cost of land or heightened landowner
impressions of land value around core property markets is uncommon. In the case of
Paddington it is for this reason that development interests have attempted to legitimate the
construction of relatively high value end-use developments and residential apartments.
In addition, as one developer admitted local planners were already “turning a blind eye” to
quality issues and questions over community involvement and impacts and that a culture
had emerged in which “it is frankly what the developer can get away with”. For WCC
there are therefore emerging tensions between the promotion of an economically
successful flagship regeneration project that serves the wider needs of the global city
agenda and the desire to use the investments to generate real and sustained improvements
in the quality of life of local residents. It is to debates over community involvement and
social cohesion that the paper now turns.

Community Engagement and Social Cohesion—Embedding the Regeneration

One of the recurring difficulties with the Paddington regeneration has been over definitions
and conceptions of community (see Ball et al., 2003). As a number of interviewees noted,
one of the reasons for investing in the area has been the explicit absence of local
communities and the de-politicised nature of the development in a context where
“the community doesn’t yet exist”. The boundaries of the PSPA were specifically drawn to
exclude residential communities. As a WCC planner noted:

in the local context we’ve never actually had to argue our case . . . Paddington has
never been to a public inquiry, our policies have never been challenged by anyone at
the UDP [Urban Development Plan] level . . . so we’ve never been tested!

This partly reflects the local geographical imaginations of development that exist in
Paddington with much of the new investment being made in relatively ‘invisible’,
marginal and ‘un-owned’ (in community terms) sites between the railway lines and the
Westway Motorway.
Institutional respondents also noted that it has proved almost impossible to establish
coherent community engagement mechanisms in the Paddington area owing to its social
diversity and complexity. According to WCC’s leader it is filled with “terminally hard to
reach communities” as is a “reception area for people newly arriving in the country or in to
London, so what you get is a turnover of people who will always start at the bottom”.
In addition, it has an extremely high social and linguistic mix. In 2001 71 per cent of
Westminster’s BME (black and minority ethnic) communities were located around
Paddington, a significant proportion of whom were ‘refugee and asylum seekers’
(Westminster Primary Care Trust, 2004a). The political consequence of this mix,
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 309

it is argued, is a lack of engagement and/or interest in local development politics amongst

local communities and, more significantly, a disparity between the bureaucratic –
institutional mechanisms of community engagement that WCC and local developers have
tried to establish and the life-worlds of people living in the Paddington area. Marrying
these up in a simple way has proved to be a major challenge.
This simple story of community disengagement and disinterest underplays the extent to
which there are long-standing community groups in the area which have campaigned for
particular outcomes and have developed alternative regeneration agendas. In practice a
significant community politics has arisen and there have been heated discussions around
area deprivation, the changing character of local communities and possible local benefits
from the regeneration of Paddington Basin. In focus groups and interviews residents from
local housing estates reported a significant disengagement with the developments that had
taken place in Paddington and felt that the regeneration had skewed the priorities of public
service providers, particularly the police and WCC. There was much criticism that little
had been done to tackle the problems surrounding drug-related crime or the quality of
urban environments in the northern parts of Paddington. With the PSPA and a newly
formed Business Improvement District on commercial streets immediately south of the
regeneration area patrolled by security guards and/or street wardens (see Ward, 2006;
Cook, 2008 for a wider discussion) there is a growing sense of polarisation between the
controlled and regulated spaces and those outside of it.
There were also significant concerns over ‘affordable housing’ and the sense that the
regeneration involved a ‘missed opportunity’ to both construct new housing units for the
children of existing local residents and to avoid the future densification of social housing
in north Paddington. By 2008, of 900 completed dwellings only 130 (or 14 per cent) were
described by development interests as affordable.6 In contrast the previous Mayor of
London advocated a target of 50 per cent (GLA, 2000). Most of the new housing in
Paddington is made up of apartments for commuters and/or childless couples. For
commercial reasons there has been little or no attempt to attract families by providing
accommodation and infrastructure that would be suitable for children. Instead, the
‘desirability’ of attractive new apartments is presented by developers and regeneration
agencies as an important ingredient in the development of ‘aspirational cultures’ amongst
local residents. Indeed, the short-term existence of inequalities is seen as a policy objective
per se as the presence of more affluent, office-based workers will, it is argued, not only
stimulate a greater sense of personal activism within local communities (where it is
currently absent) but also change the ways in which individuals and communities will
think about themselves and how they can benefit from the regeneration. In this respect
what has been happening in Paddington reflects what has taken place elsewhere in England
(see Gallent et al., 2003; Gallent & Tewdwr-Jones, 2007).
WCC and the developers argue, however, that the development has generated a
broad range of benefits for local communities, including the establishment of a
significant Social and Community Fund under a Planning Gain agreement which
eventually will provide upwards of £10 million for WCC and other selected local
interests to spend on community projects. Disagreements have emerged over principal
objectives and allocation procedures, however, its existence provides some evidence of
a more community-focused set of planning agendas. A number of developers in
interview felt that the establishment of such funds created a sense of ‘goodwill’
amongst local communities for instrumental reasons. As one noted, “the first thing
310 M. Raco & S. Henderson

we did was to get the community on our side because if they are against us from the
very beginning, as they generally are, they’re a bit cynical”. There have also been
positive impacts on the organisational capacities of local actors and they have been
successful in bidding for, and acquiring, community-based grants. For example,
drawing on private sector support from the developers, a community organisation, the
Paddington Development Trust, was able to secure a £13.5 million central government
funded Single Regeneration Budget programme (1999 – 2006) to fund small-scale local
projects centred on young people and education, health and community safety,
employment and enterprise and community capacity-building.
Alongside these funds, a local employment brokerage scheme known as Paddington
First has been so successful that it has now become a model for flagship development
projects elsewhere. It was established, in part, for economic reasons in that developers and
local employers needed to find employees in important sectors, such as construction,
cleaning and transportation. Filling these low-paid posts in London has become
increasingly difficult and a dedicated scheme was seen as an efficient way of solving
problems of both competitiveness and cohesion. However, it was also introduced for
political reasons. For WCC it was a vehicle for making the development more legitimate
to sceptical local communities. It also represented part of a wider backlash in urban policy
thinking in the UK in which the socio-economic inequalities generated by the London
Docklands developments of the 1980s were increasingly seen as ‘bad practice’ to the point
that one WCC interviewee explicitly argued that “we never intended to create our own
version of the Docklands here!” By 2005 approximately 4000 people had been placed into
employment (see Paddington First, 2008) and the scale of the scheme has expanded with
additional support from national and London-wide agencies.
Despite these positive programme outcomes, the regeneration, in quantitative terms, has
yet to significantly improve the socio-economic conditions of surrounding neighbour-
hoods. Queen’s Park, to the north of the development, remains amongst the most deprived
wards in England with more than 60 per cent of its children living in families receiving
benefit (Westminster Primary Care Trust, 2004b). The Harrow Road and Bayswater wards
are also amongst the 100 most ‘housing deprived’ wards in the country and in 2008 the
former was still within the most 25 per cent of deprived wards in England, with one
neighbourhood ranked amongst the poorest 5 per cent (WCC, 2008). Just under a third of
the working population in the area is classed as ‘economically inactive’ and despite the
regeneration project, by 2002, official unemployment rates in adjacent neighbourhoods
was 10.5 per cent, well above the London average and not including those on incapacity
benefits and others excluded from the claimant counts (Select Committee on ODPM, 2002,
para. 239). It is impossible not to contrast these ongoing problems with the wider
perception that the regeneration has been ‘successful’ in policy terms. Its most significant
economic benefits have been accrued by in-migrating companies and property investors,
whilst WCC’s broader political credibility and reputation have also been significantly
enhanced.

Conclusions
The paper has used the example of Paddington to examine the form and character of
contemporary regeneration projects in a global city and to assess the role played by
urban policy in shaping the urban and social character of London. It has argued that the
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 311

longer-term buoyancy of London’s property markets has presented developers, investors

and policy-makers with the temptation to prioritise the development of high-return forms
of property and legitimate them by highlighting the ‘contribution’ that they make to
London’s ‘global economic needs’. As a result, regeneration projects such as Paddington
Basin have been ‘ratcheted up’ over time and become more ambitious in scope and scale,
with a greater emphasis on the needs of commercial users and higher income groups.
As with developments elsewhere it has reflected a particular politics of time in which the
benefits of development for local communities are expected to appear in an imagined
distant future (see Raco et al., 2008). The priority for policy-makers is to change the image
of the area and, in the short term, turn it into an investment space.
The article has also demonstrated that within global cities there exists a specific, locally
oriented geography of flagship projects. Whilst policy-makers and some academics have
sought to re-imagine London as a unified space of governance and action, the Paddington
example demonstrates that sub-metropolitan factors play a significant role in shaping the
contours of regeneration programmes. The local authority has been a core actor that has
simultaneously tried to reflect the concerns and needs of its electorates whilst facilitating
commercial development. The community funds and projects that have been established
owe much to the involvement of WCC and there is little guarantee that similar schemes
will be established in other flagship regeneration projects elsewhere in London where local
circumstances and governance arrangements have taken on a diversity of forms.
The history of the Paddington area has left significant physical, social and economic
legacies for policy-makers to deal with. The development has also been driven, in large
part, by the objective of changing dominant geographical perceptions of Paddington and
turning it from an ‘edge’ place to a ‘central place’. Again, this specific ‘local’ factor has
been a major contributor to the flagship development that has emerged.
In broader terms the article has illustrated some of the key characteristics of
contemporary urban regeneration policy in a global city. It has shown that the broader
political project (cf. Dean, 2007) that underpins contemporary regeneration policy
rationalities and practices, namely, that globally oriented economic growth does not have
to come at the expense of social inequality, justifies and legitimates the implementation of
major flagship projects. For Swyngedouw et al. (2002), projects like those in Paddington
play a significant part in the recreation of the capitalist global economy. Their legitimation
through the ‘soft’ discourses of sustainability and social cohesion only masks their true,
investment-driven rationalities. The findings in our study however, as noted above, were
slightly more nuanced. Where a local authority has had a strong role in shaping
development priorities and community-focused programmes, then the benefits of
regeneration can trickle down to local community groups, albeit on a relatively limited
scale when compared to the absolute level of investment incorporated into development
projects. There was little sense amongst local community respondents that the
regeneration of Paddington had ‘legitimated’ a global city agenda to them, indeed the
existence of the development had increased interest amongst groups in local regeneration
politics. The effects of such projects are, therefore, significantly influenced by local
contingencies in different contexts, something that generalisations of policy often
underplay.
Finally, the Paddington example also demonstrates the ways in which the supposedly
‘new’ regeneration agendas of the 1990s and 2000s have not, in reality, moved
significantly away from the property-driven forms of development that characterised
312 M. Raco & S. Henderson

urban policy of the 1980s. The buoyancy of property markets has encouraged policy-
makers and investors to make unrealistic assumptions about the levels of future return
from property investments and changing market conditions have exposed the weaknesses
of this development model. At the time of writing rapid changes are taking place in
financial and property markets not only in London but also across the global economy.
It is now anticipated that more than 20 000 jobs will be lost from the financial services
sector in the City of London alone between 2008 and 2010 (see The Economist, 2008;
The Independent, 2008). The Mayor of London has publicly stated that the City’s longer
term international competitiveness is under threat (see Mayor of London, 2008). In the
context of market contraction what will the future be for the viability of developments
such as Paddington Basin? If property prices in London Docklands and the City fall then
one of the key attractions of the Paddington site—its commercial relative affordability—
will be lost and it is not clear which direction future policy will take. It may be that there
will be a stronger emphasis on promoting growth or the possibility that state agencies will
use the opportunity to build more social housing and community infrastructure.
Whatever course is taken the next decade in the history of Paddington will be as
transformative as the last.

Acknowledgements
The research carried out for this article was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council’s Sustainable Urban Brownfields: Integrated Management (SUBR:IM) Research Consortium (Grant
Number: GR/S148809/01). The authors would like to thank Seamus O’Hanlon, Geoffrey Binder and two
anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the article. The views expressed here
are, of course, those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SUBR:IM Consortium
as a whole.

Notes
1. The research was conducted over three stages. The first examined the history of regeneration in the area and
primarily involved archival research at Westminster City Council archive and semi-structured interviews with
those responsible for planning in the 1960s and 1970s. The second involved interviews with over 40 local
stakeholders including planners, politicians, investors and developers. The third involved detailed work with
people living in the area including interviews with key government and non-governmental representatives and
focus groups with local residents. The research focus was to investigate the politics of development planning
in the area and the ways in which broader debates over sustainable urbanism have shaped development
trajectories.
2. Overall levels of deprivation have also been increasing. In 2002 over a third of children (36 per cent) and 30 per
cent of working adults in Inner London were living in poverty (see GLA, 2002). Mortality rates in 2008 were
15 per cent higher in these areas than the London average and approximately three-quarters of a million people
are reliant on welfare benefits, most of these concentrated in a handful of boroughs. Inner London’s
unemployment rate, at 9.5 per cent, is the highest of any sub-region of England and in 2007 four boroughs were
listed amongst the top 10 most deprived local authority areas in England (DCLG, 2007; see also Imrie et al.,
2009). At the same time as communities and neighbourhoods have been falling behind, concentrations of
professional and highly paid/skilled workers have been increasing. London now possesses the highest
concentrations of affluent workers in Europe often living in juxtaposition to those on low incomes
(see Hamnett, 2003; May et al., 2007).
3. Ken Livingstone was the first elected Mayor of London and was in office from May 2000 to May 2008 when he
was replaced by the new Mayor Boris Johnson.
4. Westminster City Council is one of 32 London boroughs. The boroughs are the administrative units of local
government in the city.
 Flagship Regeneration in a Global City 313

5. It is important to note that WCC has long been dominated by the local Conservative Party. Westminster is
politically divided with Labour councillors consistently returned in deprived neighbourhoods north of
Paddington but unable to challenge the dominance of the ruling Conservative group.
6. The definition of ‘affordable’ is, in itself, a contentious term. Respondents refused to provide a concrete figure
and argued that in the London context affordability was a flexible term relating to the lower end of the price
spectrum.

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