Royal Wharf, London

The Royal Wharf development in the Royal Docks is a joint venture between Ballymore Group and Singapore listed Oxley Holdings. It includes 3,385 residential units, home to nearly 10,000 residents, provides a new primary school, leisure facilities and 100,000 sq. ft of retail and commercial spaces and completed around 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic.

We were commissioned by Oxley Holdings with a brief to analyse why the vacancy rate of the commercial and retail spaces was extremely high, collaborate with a highly specialist multi-disciplinary team of advisors to evaluate and identify ground floor spaces that could be converted into residential units, and then re-evaluate the ground floor offering within the context of the masterplan, creating a new placemaking strategy, focussed on a mixed-use retail vision, and then support the team in a planning application to the London Borough of Newham.

We devised a layered research approach to understand the dynamics of this very high-quality neighbourhood; all residential units had been successfully sold, most residents had moved in and yet had virtually no amenity to rely on. It was critical to understand this in the context of the local area, and the wider Royal Docks area, and the demographic data driving this, understand to what extent, research had been undertaken ahead of development to service the needs of the future community. We commissioned the UK’s leading research agency, and tailored a brief specifically designed for this location, benchmarking the masterplan against similar Thameside developments across London, comparing the retail provision per capita, researching the demographic make-up of the residents and wider community, gaining a full understanding of their ages, and behaviours and preferences as consumers, enabling a full gap-analysis of what was missing, therefore what was required; the how and who. In addition to the research and agency, we provided essential specialist advice on the ground floor spaces to the technical teams targeting spaces to convert to residential use; through IP mapping (phone data), live data every hour throughout the day, every day, populated heat maps, showing ‘cold’ locations and retail spaces that were never going to work or be functional, showing there was an oversupply.

Through data-led reasoning and reporting we were able to justify a reduction of 47% of the retail spaces originally built, with a new retail vision and strategy focussed on the main streets and intersections at the heart of the masterplan.

Advisory, Masterplan, Research, Data, Vision & Strategy, Mixed-Use Agency.