Thornsett Group

You won’t believe your mince pies

Thought the East End was all council flats and barrow boys?
Not any more, says Hugh Graham – It’s going middle class

Stratford

The word “fashionable” has never been applied to Stratford – until recently a transport hub with no “there” there. It is the ground zero of Olympic regeneration, yet buying here is a gamble. For one thing, it’s not pretty. Dominated by fly-overs, traffic islands and brutalist architecture that would make even a communist cringe, it seems an unlikely setting for London’s middle classes to play happy families. But change is in the air. In addition to the Westfield, which will have 300 shops, including John Lewis and Waitrose, and feature arty interiors designed in consultation with the likes of Tracy Emin, a £10m scheme will transform Stratford High Street into what planners call a “Manhattan-style boulevard”, with shiny skyscrapers, new roads and pavements, improved lighting and 3,000 trees and shrubs. Plus, the transport links are only getting better: the two Tube lines, DLR, and high-speed rail will be joined by crossrail in 2017.
Bernadette Cunningham, the director of Thornsett Group developers, says Stratford is a blank canvas for “adventurous iconic architecture”: the Olympic Stadium and Zaha Hadid’s £268m wave shaped aquatic centre are inspiring developers to be “a little bit different”, hence the proliferation of futuristic tower blocks with names such as the Velocity and Icona (one-bed flats in Thornsett’s avant-garde Lett Road development start at £199,950; 0207 7226 6611, currell.com).
Stratford will also be home to London’s first new public park in 150 years: the 500-acre Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, on the River Lea, will be the capital’s third-biggest green space. The Olympic athletes’ village, set in 91 acres of the park, will morph into 2,818 new homes, 1,379 of which will be affordable housing marketed by Triathlon Homes in 2013; the rest will be sold privately, and there will be no council homes.
Olympic villages have a way of turning into white elephants – sales of flats in Vancouver’s £650m complex, for instance, have been disastrous – but the developers in Stratford promise a landscaped Shangri—La where residents can use Olympic facilities.
“Stratford’s future will depend on the success of the Olympics legacy,” says Marcus Dixon, associate director of residential research at Savills. “The area has never appealed to upwardly families before, but it has never had a top-quality park before. One of the big factors that drives values in the family market is proximity to green space. Stratford could eventually become like Victoria Park.”
For that to happen, though, an area needs some period panache. And there are some unsung corners of Stratford, with grand Victorian townhouses and potentially smart terraces, hidden along the leafy northern borders of West Ham Park, on streets such as Ham Park Road and Norwich Road, an area (optimistically) dubbed “little Hampstead” by one London property guide. The gracious double-fronted houses in the bucolic Woodgrange Estate, in Forest Gate, built as a Victorian suburb for the middle classes, are true uncut gems. Here a five-bedroom, 3,400sq ft home costs £700,000 (02083547788, www.keatons.com).
But will the East End retain its allure – and property values – after the Olympics? Data compiled by Savills show that property prices in the past decade have increased by 120% in Stratford, 99% in Bow, 80% in Stepney and 73% in Limehouse, but that’s mostly below the Greater London, average of 114%, and most of that growth occurred in the build-up to the Olympic announcement in 2005. In the past five years, prices in Stratford have risen by only 2%; what’s more, new development has slowed during the downturn.
“Buyers should take the long view,” says Cunningham. “The financial crisis has eliminated buy-to-let speculators. Try to picture the East End 10 years from now.”