The Name Game

Remember when Midtown was a district of Manhattan? Now it’s a London marketing term: in 2010, local businesses rebranded the area encompassing Bloomsbury and Holborn by referencing the Big Apple, and some estate agents followed suit. This name game is happening across the capital: not only is the building boom rendering the skyline unrecognizable, the map could soon look unfamiliar, as developers and agents take the concept of “placemaking” literally. For every crane, it seems, there’s yet another new neighborhood moniker. Some are for new developments, some for huge masterplans, others for rebranded districts with a term spliced to them, such as “Quarter” or “Park” — and they’re all competing for buyers. Many will fail to capture the public imagination. Few residents call the area north of Oxford Street “Noho”, for example, despite a huge campaign by the Candy brothers to dub their planned development “Noho Square”. This sparked a protest group, “No to Noho”; the project was eventually christened Fitzroy Place, a nod to the historical Fitzrovia name. As for Midtown, it’s fair to say it hasn’t lingered on Londoners’ lips: a phony New Yorkiness always sticks in the craw, especially when our capital is a world-beating city in its own right. City Fringes — that’s developer speak for the areas around Shoreditch, Hackney, Haggerston, Whitechapel and the Docklands — has not caught on, either, possibly because it sounds like a dodgy hair salon. So, amid the growing band of new neighborhoods, which names will survive and trip off the tongue as naturally as Peckham and Penge, and which will go the way of Noho? Here’s our handy guide. Nine Elms Don’t expect the sylvan glades suggested by the name. Much of this area — the 500 acres of identity-crisis land straddling Vauxhall and Battersea — is bounded by dusty thoroughfares. But with Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, the US and Dutch embassies, and 20,000 homes with river views in the works, Nine Elms has the potential to be a proper place, and it doesn’t sound corporate or contrived. (A row of elms actually lined its main road centuries ago.) “It’s likely to be regarded as a fully fledged district in the not too distant future,” says Jonathan Mount, a partner at the search agency the Buying Solution. Right now, the name conjures up images of a potential London property crash in the new-build sector: insiders are warning of swathes of unsold flats abandoned by foreign investors. In time, though, it could become known as a smart area. At Embassy Gardens, a riverside development, one-bedders start at £630,000. The name will be crystallized by Nine Elms Underground station, due by 2020. A linear park from Vauxhall to Battersea has been designed to replicate New York’s High Line — yet another Manhattan transfer. nineelmslondon.com Royal Docks Once simply part of the generic Docklands, this new district really pushes the eastward envelope for those who thought that London stopped at Canary Wharf: it’s the area near the river in Newham, north of the Thames Barrier. The “royal” part is fair enough: the area takes in the Royal Albert, Royal Victoria and King George V docks, and there are a few regally named DLR stations nearby. As in the old times, the docks are mostly about business (especially with a Far Eastern bent), but a pair of developers — Ballymore, of Ireland, and the Singapore-based Oxley — are building flats and townhouses, not to mention a floating village for water-dwelling folk. The biggest hitter is Royal Wharf: 3,385 river-facing homes where you can bag a one-bedder for £395,000. londonsroyaldocks.com The Northbank It might sound like a scary football stand, but the Northbank is going to be very smart indeed — the name is yet another creation of a business improvement district (BID). The aim is to transform the venerable but vague area bounded by Trafalgar Square, in the west, and the Royal Courts of Justice, in the east, and connect it to the South Bank via the vexed Garden Bridge. It’s a kind of convenient wrapping-up of Aldwych, Temple and the Strand into one new, posh neighborhood. “The Northbank only recently entered everyday vernacular,” says Ben Babington, director of Jackson-Stops & Staff estate agency’s development consultancy. Yet he is confident that there will be a transformation hereabouts to go with the new name. It will provide a “unique blend of leisure, entertainment and a pedestrianised riverfront area”, he says — it’s certainly handy for theatreland. It’s hard to believe Babington’s claim that property prices here will be 40% cheaper than in nearby Covent Garden — it’s just a few steps away, and flats in fancy new pads such as Nineteen Buckingham Street and 190 Strand will start at about £1.4m-£1.6m. Still, it’s a catchy way to describe a nebulous pocket. thenorthbank.london Strand East It looks as though the Olympic regeneration is beginning to happen. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is maturing nicely, and various improvements and developments are being made: there’s Manhattan Loft Gardens, a luxury hotel/flats scheme by the Clerkenwell pioneer Harry Handelsman; the London College of Fashion intends to move here; and there are plans for eastern outposts of the V&A, Sadler’s Wells and even the Smithsonian, all part of the cultural hub known as Olympicopolis. It really trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Adding to this heady mix is Strand East, a 26-acre development on River Lee wasteland from Inter Ikea’s LandProp subsidiary. East of the A12 and south of the Olympic Park, opposite Bromley-by-Bow and near Three Mills Island, it will have 1,200 homes, workspaces and a designer hotel. Perhaps the name comes from its waterfront setting, but it’s hard to see it becoming part of the London lexicon, owing to potential confusion with the actual Strand. strandeast.com Fish Island Village A short walk from Strand East is Fish Island. It isn’t actually an island, more an industrial backwater of Bow that fronts onto the River Lee and the Hertford Union Canal — and, though you might see anglers trying their luck, you probably wouldn’t eat sushi from these waters. Still, the narrowboats, towpaths, bridges and riverfront cafe lend an islandy feel. The area is also dotted with Brit Art studios, and all the hipster fun of Hackney Wick, aka Berlin-by-Bow, is just across the bridge. Existing schemes include the faux-gritty Iron Works and Omega Works. Next up is Neptune Wharf, 578 flats being developed by the Peabody housing association, which is also constructing live-work spaces this year in a scheme called Fish Island Village. The name is not some developers’ concoction, but a longstanding local nickname that refers to the area’s street names: Bream, Roach, Smeed. As soon as you add Village to the name, though, all the local grit is gone. peabody.org.uk/fish-island The Ram Quarter If you’ve ever been into a Young’s pub, you may have had a “Ram Rod and Special”: a heady mix of strong ales. So it’s fitting that the company’s mascot should have given its muscular name to this redevelopment of its former brewery off Wandsworth High Street, next to the River Wandle. The eight-acre site will include 661 homes, as well as shops, cafes and restaurants. In the usual nod to heritage, there’ll be a brewing museum, too, and properties will start at £490,000. The locals have yet to overhear the aspirational buggy-pushers of leafy Wandsworth refer to meeting up at the Ram. theramquarter.com Silvertown Quays For years, this was a postindustrial wasteland — so scary that Stanley Kubrick used it as a location for his Vietnam flick Full Metal Jacket. On the first night of the Blitz, Tate & Lyle’s sugar refinery, a soap factory and the Silvertown Rubber Works were badly damaged by bombing. Now Sir Stuart Lipton, the developer who created Broadgate Circle, near Liverpool Street station, has unveiled plans to turn it into a new east London neighborhood. Silvertown Quays — note the watery cachet — will have 3,000 homes, a piazza (a courtyard with wafty plants and possibly a water feature), offices and a riverside area. From 2018, Crossrail will stop at Custom House. The centerpiece is Millennium Mills, an old flour mill that’s destined to be (of course) a tech hub. The Silvertown name is historical — it came from Samuel Winkworth Silver’s Victorian rubber factory — and it is catching on with the wider public. Even though it harks back to the past, it has a vaguely futuristic air that suits this shiny, brave new world of far east London. silvertownlondon.com Greenwich Peninsula That silly exhibition in the Millennium Dome is best forgotten, but the tent now known as the O2, along with the adjacent North Greenwich Tube station, is the focus of a huge growth zone. The aim is to lure young professionals away from tourist-central, grown-up Greenwich to the fresh riverside peninsula. There are plans to build 15,000 homes and all kinds of cultural and sporting infrastructure for the new arrivals. And it’s not as bleak as it was: it already has a golf driving range, an art gallery, Ravensbourne art college, foodie destinations (Stevie Parle’s Craft and a Yalla Yalla pop-up) and a cinema. A film studio and a theatre on the jetty are in the pipeline, as well as avant-garde glass towers galore: 500 people have already moved in. You can pick up a one-bedder for £460,000. Props to the developers for sticking with a respectable, straightforward name that tells you where you are. Residents can say it without inviting ridicule or baffled looks (see Midtown, Noho, Hallsville Quarter). greenwichpeninsula.co.uk Old Oak The quaint, bucolic-sounding Old Oak Park is actually a bleak 46-acre site, home to the largest used-car dealership in the world, Cargiant, and a slew of railway yards. It will soon be part of Britain’s largest regeneration site: Cargiant is moving, and the £1bn project will create 24,000 homes over the next three decades, 7,000 of them on the Old Oak Park site, in a no man’s land between North Acton, East Acton, Willesden Junction and Kensal Rise. Everything about this development sings new and shiny, apart from the gnarly name. To be fair, there is some green space amid the industrial grime: Kensal Rise cemetery, Wormwood Scrubs Park and more than a mile of canal frontage. The first launch here is urban and funky: the world’s largest co-living block, by the Collective, will be ready to move into in May. Aimed at young professionals, it includes a gym, a spa, private dining rooms, a cinema, workspaces, a library and a “disco laundrette”. Rents for one-bedroom “twodios” (studio flats that share a kitchen) start at £250 a week, all in. thecollective.co.uk; oldoakpark.co.uk Colindale Gardens Colindale’s newspaper library put this north London suburb on the map until it tragically moved to Yorkshire in 2013. Now the all-night Tube should generate renewed interest for young buyers priced out of the inner zones. The developer Redrow is converting the former Metropolitan Police training centre into 2,900 homes. The first tranche of 135 units will be ready in spring next year, with one-bedders available from £335,000. Redrow has stuck the word Gardens on the end to add a touch of class to this humdrum ’hood, but we miss the library and its anoraky connotations. redrow.co.uk/colindale Hallsville Quarter Canning Town has always suffered from its unlovely name. The new sobriquet goes some way to poshing it up, but it sounds a bit grand for this scruffy patch of the deep East End, which remains among the most deprived 5% of areas nationwide. At least for now. It’s part of a huge £600m regeneration project, with the promise of up to 10,000 homes, thousands of new jobs and two improved town centres. Schemes include the butch-sounding East City Point, where one-bedders start at £350,000 (eastcitypoint.com). This patch was known as Hallsville in the 19th century, before becoming Canning Town, most likely after Charles Canning, a Victorian governor-general of India. Yet ditching names can be tricky, as Prince learnt to his cost: this might end up as The Area Formerly Known as Canning Town. hallsvillequarter.co.uk Tech City Once a characterless, traffic-laden thoroughfare between Angel and Old Street Tubes, City Road is now a kind of Chicago lakeside — an astonishing array of blocks and towers compete with one another, prompting craned necks at ground level and bemusement in the older generation. As the extension of Silicon Roundabout, it’s being called Tech City by some, including Piers Clanford, director of Berkeley Homes (North East London), who describes it as “London’s most sought-after village.” The glass skyscrapers do feel a bit techy, but it’s more like a cluster than a city. As for being a village, it doesn’t feel like that beneath the glittering towers: there’s no green space, charming little shop or WI, just concrete 21st-century edge. You’ll have to rise above it in your Foster + Partners pad at 250 City Road, where prices start at £850,000. berkeleygroup.co.uk Elephant Park Elephant and Castle has long been the butt of jokes, on account of its bizarre name, brutalist shopping centre and confounding roundabout system. But its Zone 1 location gave it a bit of kudos, and it’s now undergoing a £3bn transformation with 3,000 new homes, branded as Elephant Park. Not uncontroversially, some of the development uses the old Heygate and Aylesbury local-authority estates — the elephant in the room, you might say. In this context, the “Park” just sounds pretentious, almost like a satirical take on rapid gentrification. A one-bedder at South Gardens starts at £380,000. elephantpark.co.uk Albert Embankment Claimed to be London’s “last central riverside regeneration area”, the Albert Embankment is actually a lovely stretch of river with views of Tate Britain, and those Victorian lamps that have featured in so many films: one recalls David Bowie in Absolute Beginners. It’s certainly not new, but it has hitherto lacked a discernible identity, and residents. That will change with the advent of 433 homes from St James, as well as starchitect developments such as the Corniche, by Foster + Partners, and Merano Residences, by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Ritzy flats will start at £2.15m: your neighbours will include MI6 and Jeffrey Archer. albertembankment.net Identity parade There’s a lot at stake in naming a development. So it’s perhaps just as well that district branders can make use of a few useful formulae. First, trawl the site’s history: was there a water meadow, a castle or a historic figure? Perhaps a former use of the land will lend the requisite sense of heritage: sheep grazed here, or steel was manufactured. Once you have the first bit, choose a developer-approved neighborhood description: Park (there are trees here, no, really); Quarter (let’s pretend we are all young creatives in Paris); Village (target the young marrieds — one day, this will be as nice as Hampstead); Works or Factory (once there was a foundry here — you could be Jennifer Beals in Flashdance); Docks (you want to live by the Thames, but in a gritty, mockney way); Quays (you enjoy sunny, buzzy river life); or Harbour (you own a yacht, or rather would love to). This article originally appeared on The Sunday Times.