VESTEY THAMES LAND GRAB

On a sunny day an observer standing on the deck of the Discovery' looks across the Thames at a gleaming ribbon of south bank development.

The vista begins with squat white bulk of the Festival Hall and rising opposite it on the other side of Waterloo Bridge, the National Theatre.

Adjacent the distinctive, almost television-shaped, windows of the London Weekend Centre stare like great black eyes from a new multi-storey white tower.

The vista ends in the network of girders and concrete piles at the feet of Blackfriars bridge which builders are transforming into a 30-storey office block, a 750-bed hotel, flats and a shopping precinct.

Slap in the middle of this otherwise futuristic panorama is an untidy, derelict looking huddle of warehouses-owned by the Vestey Organization.

In the rectangle formed by Waterloo Blackfriars bridges, the Thames and StamStreet only the central area occupied by these buildings remains to be redeveloped.

Many of the 87 workers at Vestey's Nelson's Wharf cold due to be closed in November, claim their jobs are being sacrificed on the altar of property speculation.

They argue that even if the present store cannot be modernized it would cost under Elm to put up a completely new depot on the same site.

Why, they ask, doesn't Vestey do this, unless he is thinking of the profits to be made a a result of the south bank redevelopment.

In the central area of the rectangle, from Hathields to Coin Street, Vestey is certainly in a dominating position.

With Gabriel's Wharf, Nelson's Wharf, Stamford Whart and the old Eldorado ice cream factory either leased or owned, the Organization controls two-thirds of the site.

The land, on both sides of Upper Ground, falls into about six blocks-four controlled by Vestey, by Greater London Council and the sixth by at least 12 different owners, including a bank.

The planning authority is the GLC and they will only grant the whole site-not individual plots.

In other words the hoped-for profits from redevelopment cannot be realized until all the existing businesses in the area are wound up and the parties reach joint agreement on new investment.

Most of the site is either already disused the threshold of it. The closure of Vestey's last waterside cold store at Nelson's Wharf leaves a row of near derelict early 20th-century warehouses along the south bank.

Vestey's Duchy Street cold store - the old Eldorado ice cream factory-has been shut for two years and a fifth portion of the site has been converted into a temporary car park.

This leaves the hotchpotch of properties sandwiched in the corner between Broadway and Hatfields still to be sorted out.

The development speculators expect that investment anywhere in the rectangle between the two Thames bridges would be highly profitable. has been The whole area designed a 'West End Zone' which in the eyes of the GLC planners means that only West End-style developments will be allowed there.

Plans now well advanced in the two wing segments of the rectangle show clearly what this means.

The massive HatfieldsRennie Street development is being undertaken by the King's Reach Consortium dominated by Sainsbury's and the International Publishing CorporaThe Vestey Organization controlled only one tiny part of this area at Hanbury's Wharf-once a cold store-but Vestey is not involved in the consortium, In place of the jungle of century-old warehouses and offices the consortium are raising 200 West-End type flats-let at appropriate rents—350,000 sq ft of office space-rent £6 a sq ft plus-a shopping precinct with restaurants, cafes two pubs and a 750-room hotel for the Spanish-based Melia • second hotel is plannec for the river side of Door Street on land leased by the GLC from the old Princes Meadow Estate of the Duchy of Cornwall.

Cultural buildings are not profitable and the National Theatre is likely to be the only one in the rectangle - rising rapidly in the Waterloo BridgeCoin Street area controlled by the GLC.

The London Weekend Television Centre is a moneyspinner as far as rents to the council are concerned and other offices are planned, including the possibility of one for Reuters news agency on the site currently occupied by the 'Evening News'-between the National Theatre and London Weekend.

The commercial development by the King's Reach Consortium is expected to pay for itself and the GLC hopes that rents from offices will subsidize buildings like the National Theatre.

Donald ( All this development either prestige or highly profitable-the one thing the GLC will not allow is more warehouses or industrial premises. For businessmen like Vestey the arguments for new investment in the area far outweigh those for keeping open obsolete and therefore costly cold stores, even though dozens of men will be made redundant. As it happens the Vestey hand has not had to be forced to close down the riverside cold stores.

The redevelopment of the south bank has coincided with the revolutionary technological changes in the docks industry based on containerization.

Beginning in the early 19th century, warehouses spread COOK CANNED FOODS the whole pattern of goods storage and in the last three years alone over 4} miles of river-front warehouses have become derelict in Bermondland in the centre of the three segments between Waterloo and Blackfriars.

Rents are related to the value of the development on -STAMFORD WHARF IN'S WHARF