The following is taken from an interview between Tom Bloxham MBE and Regeneration and Renewal magazine.

From selling posters to property development, Urban Splash’s founder says that his work has always been about adding value. But the recession has brought new challenges, reports Adam Branson.

‘It’s like when I had my poster company. You have a piece of paper that cost 15 pence, you put some ink on it that costs you 30 pence and you sell the poster for £3,’ says Tom Bloxham, the ubiquitous chairman and co-founder of developer Urban Splash. ‘Likewise, what we’re trying to do in property is to take some land that’s not perceived to be particularly valuable, add great architecture and make it more valuable. Whereas property development is about fulfilling demand, regeneration is about creating it. It’s much more fulfilling to take a really crappy place and turn it into something beautiful.’ That pretty much sums up Bloxham’s attitude towards regeneration.

Founded by Bloxham in 1993, Urban Splash grew quickly, specialising in spotting opportunities offered by dilapidated buildings and in run-down areas that others had missed. With his love of quirky design and talent for publicity, Bloxham and Urban Splash were soon poster boys for noughties regeneration. In 2008, Bloxham was elected chancellor of the University of Manchester and last year he was appointed as a trustee of the Tate art galleries by the Prime Minister. For the past five years, he has been chair of think-tank the Centre for Cities, although he recently pledged to step down once a replacement is found. ‘The value of the centre is that it’s not just theory from boffins; its research is based on empirical evidence from doing a lot of work inside cities,’ says Bloxham, adding that he believes the think-tank has been hugely influential in the development of city-regional policy in England.

However, no matter how successful the last two decades have been for Bloxham, nobody operates independently from the wider economy. The last two years have hit Urban Splash hard.

Bloxham is clear about the reason for the firm’s struggles. ‘This crisis was caused by the banking industry and it hit housebuilders particularly hard because our buyers couldn’t get the mortgages that they’d agreed (because the lending criteria had changed by the time the homes were finished),’ he says. That meant that, on the multiple schemes on which Urban Splash was working when the crisis hit, the company went from thinking that it had sold most units to being able to complete sales on just a few. ‘On different schemes, between 30 and 70 per cent of sales weren’t able to be completed,’ says Bloxham. ‘But I firmly believe that we’re a better company for what we’ve been through. It’s taught us a lot of lessons.’

Now that some of the dust has settled, what lessons has Bloxham learned? ‘Lessons about managing change, about changing a business plan very quickly,’ he replies. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, the only mistake we made was that we should have phased some of the projects rather than trying to do them all at once. But, at the time, everybody was keen to get them done and the homes were mostly all sold, so we did them in one lot. And I guess that the other thing we’ve learned is that things can go down as well as up and you have to prepare for that.’

However, it is also clear that Bloxham believes that the regeneration sector has fundamentally changed since the crisis hit. ‘Housing-led regeneration, led by pre-sales, is finished for a number of years,’ he says. If that’s the case, how has the developer’s business model changed to reflect the new economic reality? ‘The demand for Urban Splash housing is as strong as it’s ever been. The problem is that people can’t get mortgages, so they want to rent it not buy it. What we’ve done historically is sell off the housing and kept the commercial parts of schemes. Increasingly now, we’re keeping both the commercial and residential parts,’ says Bloxham. ‘What we’re trying to do is to set up an Urban Splash lettings business. We want to maintain and manage the properties ourselves.’

More crucially, Bloxham believes that the economic situation demands that the public and private sectors find ways to ‘work more closely together’. Historically, when developers have said that they want to work more closely with the public sector, they have meant that they want the public sector to cough up more money. Bloxham, however, insists that he’s talking about finding more efficient ways to get the job done. ‘There are still billions and billions of pounds of public money being spent and I believe that there are more efficient ways of working and making it go further,’ he says. A typical example, he says, is education. ‘The greatest single driver of housing choice is where the good schools are,’ Bloxham says. ‘Yet in regeneration, there’s very little joined-up thinking between the provision of new housing and the provision of primary schools in particular. People often move into Manchester as single people and then move out to places like Stockport or Trafford when they have children because the schools are either better or perceived to be better. Getting some great primary schools in the city centre is one way of reversing that.’

Ultimately, however, Bloxham is urging public bodies to be upfront about what they want to get out of regeneration sites. ‘What happens typically is that when the public sector is disposing of some land they say: ‘Give me the highest value for it’. A better way of doing it would be on a more qualitative basis,’ he says. Under the system that Bloxham proposes, the price of the land would be fixed at the point that a council goes out to tender and developers would then bid against each other according to other criteria. ‘So then (the public body) says: ‘We’ll give it to the people who’ll give us the most affordable housing, the best new school, the most mixed community’.’ Choosing a developer based on the price offered for a site may be easier, he says, but it doesn’t necessarily make for better places. ‘What I’ve got a problem with is that everyone in the public sector gives lip service to good design and mixed-use, but then they go with the people who give the most money, because they can judge that absolutely,” says Bloxham. ‘I’m asking for some bravery and decision-making from the public sector: picking developers because they believe in what they can achieve.’

See more images of the Urban Splash portfolio here.