Placemaking: Bringing New Life to London

An Edwardian department store on London’s Queensway, soon to be a luxury apartment building and hotel; Battersea Power Station, a 20th-century industrial icon reinvented as a new kind of powerhouse; an Art Deco cinema on the King’s Road, Chelsea, repurposed as a work space for independent creatives…

Welcome to urban life as reimagined by the placemakers, whose task it is to create vibrant neighbourhoods, sometimes from unpromising beginnings – and make a location so desirable that it isn’t just somewhere to sleep, but a place to work, shop, eat and play. This process might take several years – ensuring that local authorities and the communities they represent are on board, overcoming logistical challenges and sharing the vision of what the place could represent. But the end goal is to get us all to look at a location with fresh eyes and think: “Yes, this is where I want to be.”

The word “placemaking” first gained currency in the 1960s. But in the UK capital, some of the best modern examples of placemaking projects can be found in the portfolios of the “great estates”, which have owned and managed much of central London for centuries. Today’s scheme to transform Grosvenor Square comes almost 300 years after Sir Richard Grosvenor first laid out the vast garden square bearing his name, establishing Mayfair as the centre of aristocratic London life. Later his descendants would transform what was once farmland into the residential areas of Belgravia and Pimlico. 

The Grosvenor Estate is always changing, says Amelia Bright, who is leading its South Molton Street scheme, designed to make the most of its new connectivity, next to the Elizabeth Line’s Bond Street station. 

“We continually adapt, invest and innovate to ensure places’ resilience and relevance,” Bright says – as do London’s other great estates. These include the Howard de Walden Estate, which has 18th-century beginnings, and raised the placemaking bar in the 1990s with its deft curation of Marylebone High Street.

Alongside it, the Portman Estate is home to buzzy Chiltern Firehouse, which helped to turn Marylebone into a full-blown scene. The Crown Estate owns much of St James’s and prides itself on “creating brilliant places to live”. And in Chelsea there is Cadogan Estates, whose award-winning redevelopment of Pavilion Road – as a breezier, more villagey sibling to Sloane Street – is often held up as a model of urban placemaking. 

Curation is key: nurturing the right mix of shops, bars, restaurants and cultural players to give a place a heart and a sense of community. As Cadogan’s CEO, Hugh Seaborn, explains, rather than financial criteria, “we start with what the businesses and people will bring that is interesting and distinctive”, attracting tenants that will “help Chelsea thrive” and achieve “sustained buzz”. Which means the street has a fishmonger, a butcher and a baker, along with design hub The Conran Shop. 

According to Vinita Dhume – who, as head of Savills Urban Design Studio, has worked on placemaking schemes great and small, including Battersea Power Station – community and placemaking are intrinsically linked.

“You’re connecting people to place – and for that you have to genuinely engage with communities and enable their participation in shaping liveable places,” Dhume says. Prestigious brands are vital to creating prestigious places, while interesting “independents” help to establish what Guy Taylor of Savills, who works closely with the great estates, calls “sticky places” – where people want to live and spend time and money. 

The team behind The Whiteley in Queensway is aiming for prestige and “stickiness”. A Six Senses hotel will occupy a quarter of the building. There will be a superb spa, a pool and great dining options inside the Edwardian former department store, along with some carefully curated retail – all of which is expected to open in 2026.

But the scheme’s ambition stretches beyond the building. The plan is to “trigger the regeneration of Queensway and the surrounding area”, says Marcus Meijer, founder and CEO of MARK, the development business that acquired the one-time store. The area had become “largely overlooked”, says Dickie Wong, executive director of C C Land, the main investor, with MARK, in the scheme, which is helmed by Finchatton.

“We realised that the biggest challenge was the street landscape,” explains Finchatton’s Alex Michelin. “We had control of a third of the street. Because we were investing more than £1 billion, we thought this was an unbelievable opportunity to get all the other landowners on board.” Together they created the Queensway Steering Group, which effectively mimics the sheer clout of a great estate. 

Just like the estates, they have consulted and cultivated the goodwill of both the community and the local authority, Westminster, which has made Queensway a single-lane street, allowing for landscaping. And they are building affordable housing, funding a new playground for a nearby school and also a refurb of the street’s two Tube stations (with nearby Paddington also offering connections to the Elizabeth Line and Heathrow). 

All of the above is a long-term strategy, key to persuading local stakeholders that while The Whiteley is a luxury development, such schemes can help the broader community. As Wong sees it, this is an alliance that brings together “a diverse range of partners – all united in their dedication to breathing new life into this historic high street”.