Peter Beckwith is less well-known these days than his socialite daughter, Tamara. Twenty years ago, the Old Harrovian, now aged 67, was as well-recognised in the property industry as Gerald Ronson or Sir Stuart Lipton are today.
Since then, his company PMB Holdings has been into “provincial industrial estates and dull warehouses”, says the 46-year-old chief executive, Edward Jones. This shrewd and affable character was promoted to chief executive last May, after 12 years with the company. He has long run the property arm, which once held about £100 million of dull stock. Jones wisely sold much of it in 2006-07.
Beckwith is a major shareholder in the Ambassador Theatre Group, which owns 42 venues, including the Duke of York’s and the Ambassadors theatres in the West End. Now he is coming back to London — in the property sense. On February 28, a 100,000-square-foot development over Fenchurch Street station opens for critical inspection by property agents. The five-storey block, bought from Hines for £32.5 million, has been pared back to its skeleton state and rebuilt in the expectation of letting the space at a price “in the upper 40s” per square foot, says Jones.
We met to tour PMB’s latest acquisition. Westminster council was expected to do a deal with Soho Estates or Covent Garden specialist Shaftesbury to redevelop a hulking concrete block of publicly owned shops and offices that occupy a block between quite dodgy Berwick Street and really dodgy Hopkins Street. “Not a place you want to walk down at night,” says Jones, who won the bid to redevelop the block jointly with the council last month.
Locals will be able to see the plans being drawn up by Latitude Architects in March. “We promise to keep that Soho eclectic feel,” says Jones. A touch less eclectic than today perhaps?
