Costing £3 billion, the King’s Cross scheme is widely regarded as a blueprint for successful regeneration. “People who live and work there are passionate about it,” Robert Evans, former partner at the scheme’s developer, Argent (now Related Argent), says. As the government enters into an era of mass housebuilding and new towns, they could learn a lot from studying King’s Cross. What is the secret of its success?

Mixed-use works miracles

To create a safe and healthy neighbourhood with a sense of place you need “street life”, as the urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Street life comes from mixing together buildings and spaces with different uses, rather than zoning areas according to business or residential.

The new King’s Cross has it all. It’s centred on Central Saint Martins art school, which occupies a Victorian warehouse and faces Granary Square, a public meeting place. The estate has almost 1,750 homes, about 100 shops and restaurants, 4.25 million sq ft of offices with capacity for 30,000 workers, ten parks, five squares, two primary schools, a leisure centre, a library, an art gallery, two cinemas, a museum and an Islamic centre.

This means King’s Cross is hopping at all times: weekdays, evenings, weekends. The decision to invite Central Saint Martins to occupy the central building — it opened in 2011 — was a crucial move. It introduced footfall (5,000 students and staff) and cultural credibility.

Tech companies (Google and Meta) and record companies (Universal and Sony Music) followed. Related Argent curates the shops, a mix of chains, boutiques and start-ups (“the best of the British high street and side street”).

Before the regeneration, the public had no reason to venture north of Regent’s Canal. “A system of routes was established to draw and invite people towards the north by bringing activities, which were never there and mixing those activities to such an extent that it’s not just a mixed-use development, it’s an intensely mixed-use development,” the architect Demetri Porphyrios, one of the master planners, says.

How do you create a sense of place?

It’s not the buildings that make King’s Cross, but the spaces in between them, according to the architect and master planner Bob Allies, a co-founder of Allies and Morrison.

Whereas most developers would cram sites with buildings, at King’s Cross 40 per cent of the site is public realm and the star of the show is Granary Square, where a fountain with 1,080 jets attracts children in summer. It’s so popular with families that they put down beach towels at 7.30am. “It’s like an inner-city beach,” Morwenna Hall, the executive director at Related Argent, says.

Other public spaces include Coal Drops Yard, which includes shops, boutiques and markets; an amphitheatre overlooking Regent’s Canal; a park built underneath a Victorian gasholder; Bagley Walk, which is an elevated path by the canal, and Jellicoe Park, which is an Islamic garden. Four hundred trees were planted.

“When you go to cities that you like, you like those cities because of the public open spaces,” Porphyrios says. “They are what remains in the memory of the visitor.”

But too much open space wouldn’t work either. “It’s about variety — trying to get the yin and yang of the city,” Evans says. “The tight street that opens into a big space: serendipity and surprise. That’s what people delight in.”

“Open spaces don’t feel open unless you have spaces that feel more intimate,” Hall adds. Indeed, “the station buildings were placed close together to create an intensity and atmosphere you wouldn’t find in a business park,” Allies says.

There are 20 new streets and some are designed as continuations of old streets in surrounding neighbourhoods, so the estate doesn’t feel cut off from the city as is the case at the fortress-like Barbican. The Boulevard, one of the widest pedestrian streets in London, was designed to direct people arriving at King’s Cross station to Granary Square, and two new bridges were built over the canal.

To prevent people from getting lost, the planners provided a trail of what Hall calls “breadcrumbs”: landmarks, vantage points and signs. As a result of these touches, the new scheme feels like it’s always been there — part of the city, rather than a gated community.

What’s so special about the architecture?

The site has more than 20 historical buildings, which provided instant character. For the 56 new buildings, the developers hired 30 architects to create a sense of variety, so that it felt like a natural, evolving city rather than a monolithic development.

The planners didn’t impose design codes but asked the architects to respect neighbouring buildings and refrain from showing off. The only rules were in the height and scale of the buildings — they wanted short city blocks to create a “human city”.

What can planners learn?

Planning took six years of consultation with residents and Camden council. Argent was granted planning permission in 2006 with a masterplan that was “flexible and resilient”, rather than giving specific uses and sizes for each building at the outset. This approach allowed the developer to adapt to changing economic conditions and demand, thus preventing the difficulties that Canary Wharf now faces with its glut of offices.

Although a one-bedroom flat in King’s Cross can now cost more than £800,000, 40 per cent of the homes on the site are affordable housing, better than many London schemes.

How can we create more King’s Crosses?

Related Argent says the project was privately funded, including the £500 million in infrastructure, although the UK Homes and Communities Agency provided £42 million for social housing. The government also ended up funding much of High Speed 1, the rail link to St Pancras station that kick-started the regeneration. The think tank Centre for Cities estimates the government spent £800 million overhauling King’s Cross station.

To create more King’s Crosses, we need more master developers (who do infrastructure-led developments), Evans says. “And we need the state in some way. We need new-town corporations. We did these things better when we built new towns through a public-sector backed vehicle. And we need to encourage more private capital to do it.”

The key to the success of King’s Cross is the “patient capital” model (investors who park their money for the long haul), according to Hall. King’s Cross is backed by the pension fund AustralianSuper and clients of the investment manager Federated Hermes.

“We’ve made a lot of decisions that financially do not make sense if you look at them over a two to five-year period,” Hall says. “Our business model is to deliver the public realm as early as we can. It’s important to create a sense of place. You have to find investors who are going to be patient and wait for those returns. Institutional capital are looking for long-term income to support their pension funds and we get a better return from placemaking.”

The problem with the development model in place now is that housebuilders have become land speculators, says Ben Bolgar, senior director of the King’s Foundation, which helped build Poundbury. “It’s a short-term investment cycle — quick in and out — so it produces rubbish. The returns for King’s Cross, Poundbury [in Dorset] and the great estates are over the longer term, so it makes sense to invest in the quality of the place from workspace to public realm.”

To encourage long-term, patient capital, we need to provide tax incentives for landowners to stick around as master developers and stewards while development takes place — to make holding land as attractive as selling it at the beginning, according to Bolgar. If you sell up front, you lose quality control and developers will sacrifice the public realm to make quick cash. If they hold on and produce a quality development, land values and rents can attract a premium.

Hall says: “Mixed-use is important for the vibrancy of a place. It’s where people want to be. Businesses want to be in a place where they can secure the best talent. Talent wants to be in a place where things are going on. That mixture enables new places to thrive and contribute to the wider economy.”

Watch: the regeneration of King’s Cross