Don't hold your breath for Earl's Court revamp

Amid the tightly packed streets on the map of west London lies a half-empty box, bisected north-south by the District line spur to Olympia, and partially filled with a ragged triangle that represents the Earls Court exhibition centre. This is the site of London's next mega-development.

A "vision statement" for these 70 acres was this week being presented to three interested parties by Joe Berridge of US planners Urban Strategies. His statement talked of levelling the exhibition centre, bulldozing hundreds of council houses and boarding over the tracks.

From this cleared land will rise a huge mixed development of 15 million square feet of new homes, shops and offices to provide a fresh heart for this dowdy but well-connected part of west London. That, at least, is the vision revealed tomorrow in Estates Gazette.

The interested parties are developer Capital & Counties, which holds a 50% stake in Earls Court; Transport for London, which owns the tracks and sidings that divide the site, and Hammersmith and Fulham council, which owns the public housing to the west of the tracks.

Each party owns 23 acres of land on the site bounded by the roaring Cromwell Road to the north, the choked Warwick Road to the east, and Lillie and North End roads to the south and west. Each has good reasons for promoting the vision.

C&C obviously wants to make a few bob, well, many millions. TfL is ( probably) happy to go along if it can make money from its land, and modernise tracks and repair yards. But the prime mover behind this grand design is Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

Capital & Counties last July bought a 50% stake in Earls Court fromproperty entrepreneurs Anthony Lyons and David Coffer, who had tried and failed to get a casino into the 1930s building. The idea now was to work up plans for a seven-million square-foot redevelopment on their own 23 acres.

But just after C&C exchanged contracts, Hammersmith council asked if the developer would be interested in producing a single master plan for the whole 70 acres, to include its council housing and the land owned by TfL. This was because Conservative council leader Stephen Greenhaugh was interested in redeveloping the council blocks that lie to the west of North End Road.

OK, said C&C, perhaps courageously. It now has the unenviable job of pulling the plans together - and paying for them. Urban Strategies was hired. American architect KPF is on the job. Discussions have taken place with Berkeley Homes.

The Greater London Authority has been alerted. The borough of Kensington and Chelsea, responsible for part of the site, is aware of what is happening.

Don't hold your breath, though. The Olympic volleyball competition is due to take place in Earls Court in 2012. That puts a block on much happening for at least four years. Then there is TfL, whose procrastination has broken the will to live of more than one developer.