Whiteleys’ new owners reveal £1bn masterplan for Queensway

An ambitious £1 billion plan to turn Bayswater’s scruffy Queensway into a “Covent Garden of the West” by 2020 was revealed today.

The backers of the scheme have secretly bought dozens of properties along the street — including the Queens ice rink — since the start of the year.

They hope to create a shopping and eating out “village” modelled on London’s great family estates such as the Grosvenor in Mayfair and Belgravia.

An unnamed Brunei family are providing most of the financing with the rest coming from Dutch property fund Meyer Bergman. They have spent more than £500 million buying 75 per cent of the buildings in the street. Property entrepreneur Johnny Sandelson has brokered the deals, including the key purchase of the struggling Whiteleys shopping centre for £115 million last week. It was sold by Standard Life, which has owned it since the mid-Eighties. Markus Maijer, chief executive of Meyer Bergman, said: “We are thinking of designing the shops facing Queensway so that they have entrances directed onto the widened pavements, and the restaurants also having pavement tables,” he said. “The building is very large and has two floors of offices above the shops. We have calculated that the office space could be converted into 100 to 150 generously sized apartments, and possibly a boutique hotel of some 80 bedrooms as well.”

Whiteleys was one of London’s most luxurious stores when it opened in 1911 but Queensway is now best known for its cultural mix with large Greek, Arab, Chinese and Indian communities. One commentator said: “This quarter of a mile strip does a better job for international relations than any United Nations convention.”

Dixon Jones Architects have been hired to draw up a masterplan expected to take six years to complete. If approved by Westminster council Queensway will get wider pavements and part-pedestrianised side roads.