Name: Who Owns London's (Privately Owned) Public Spaces?
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T17:54:16.000Z
Duration: 19 min 30 s
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So there's King's Cross, Camden, Paddington, Nine Elms, Earl's Court, Canary Wharf, of course.

She's a professor, journalist and author.

Her work looks at the intersection between architecture, democracy and cities.

And the map we're looking at is one of London.

The red dots are privately owned public spaces, or POPs, in the UK capital.

In big cities around the world, the number of POPs has been multiplying.

This map was made in 2017 by British news organisation The Guardian and GIGL, London's environmental records centre.

It shows parts of the city that have been transformed into privately owned public spaces over the past 40 years.

These spaces have popped up across the country, usually in areas in need of regeneration.

The end result is generally pristine and safe open spaces, policed by private security firms.

But sceptics like Minton say they worry that that comes at the expense of accessibility and inclusiveness.

They're owned by a single owner who has complete control over the entire area.

They're not run by democratically elected local authorities.

Urban public spaces matter more now than ever.

By 2050, around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities.

So who decides what these public spaces look like and who benefits from them?

They're part of a wider trend of urban regeneration.

If you walk along the south bank of the Thames, you're going from publicly owned land to privately owned land.

And you're going from one to the other, and you don't even know it.

They vary from the really quite significant in size.

But you also get smaller, little so-called infield developments, which are also privately owned.

A marker is always that they have bollards surrounding them.

Let's go back to the map we looked at earlier.

The majority of these privately owned public spaces are owned by property developers, followed by real estate investment trusts, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds.

Holding the most privately owned square footage in London is Canary Wharf Group Investment Holdings, with 128 acres in Canary Wharf alone, including offices, restaurants and retail.

The group is owned by real estate company Brookfield Property Partners and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority.

A 40-minute stoop journey north is Camden Market and its redeveloped Hawley Wharf, which grew from a couple of market stands in the 1970s to attracting 28 million visitors per year.

It is the property of Israeli billionaire Ted Esagy and his company Labtech.

The King's Cross area is owned by a limited partnership, King's Cross Central, created specifically for the regeneration project.

Partners include developer Argent and Australia's biggest superannuation fund, Australian Super.

King's Cross Central, at 67 acres, is one of the largest pops in London.

The space opened to the public after 15 years of redevelopment.

A mixed-use structure with offices, shops, apartments, bars and restaurants, as well as an almost two-acre square featuring fountains and canal-side steps.

There's all sorts of pops, privately owned public spaces, that go back a very long way.

Some are owned by the church or owned by universities or owned by private corporations.

He's an architect and professor at University College London.

His work focuses on planning and urban design.

Typically, they are pieces of brownfield land, bits of railway land, bits of ex-industrial land, ports which were never open to the public and have become open to the public through the redevelopment.

And this redevelopment of public spaces is generally praised for its positive economic impact on a national scale.

Analysis for the UK's Department for Communities and Local Government on the value of urban regeneration found that the benefit-cost ratio of investment in such open space and public realm projects ranged between 2.7 and 0.9 to 1.

If you're able to find the finances to invest in a place and transform it completely from underutilised to a really thriving place where shops, businesses want to locate, where new housing, which is going to be at full occupancy, obviously your economic impact is going to be there.

She's an economist at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies.

Those pedestrianised centres that we see in our cities with lots of shops, often in some parts you've got independent small businesses as well that are getting lots of footfall.

That's certainly a positive of some of the spaces that were previously closed off to the public and then investors come in, made those spaces viable where they wouldn't be and created more community facilities and business facilities for people to enjoy and for places to thrive.

We have this assumption that streets and public places are public.

They've always been public and yet when I delved into the history I realised that the streets and public spaces of the city haven't always been public.

That's what makes London different from many other major cities.

Carmona says London was built by private interests and while London today enjoys over 100,000 acres of public land, that wasn't always the case.

What my research shows is that many of these spaces were never publicly owned in the first place.

So you could say the reverse rather than the privatisation.

We've actually had a publicisation of private space and there's a lot of new spaces that have been created over the last 20 years by the public sector.

It's not only the private sector that is creating them but the private sector are creating a lot of new spaces and I think that's where the worry comes along.

Unlike traditional public spaces ruled by the law of the land, the rules in pubs can vary from location to location and they're not always easy to find.

In Battersea Power Station, for instance, the developer specifies on its website that commercial photographs aren't allowed and there have been reports that in some pubs rough sleeping is forbidden too.

In 2011, anti-capitalist movement Occupy London set up camp outside the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square, a private space owned by Japanese developer Mitsubishi Estate.

They always have private security, they always have CCTV and they always restrict access and behaviour.

And to my mind, they invariably create a much more sterile feel to the city.

These places aren't for lingering and hanging out, they're for going somewhere, sitting in a cafe, buying an expensive cup of coffee.

They're certainly not for groups to just spend a considerable amount of time and just watching the world go by.

What we started to see in the 80s was this drive to see city space as a place to get the maximum profit.

This model has become the standard template for all new development everywhere in the city.

The concept of privately owned public spaces originated in the United States in the 1960s, following the rezoning of New York City.

As its population, commercial activities and skyscrapers multiplied, the city needed to redefine land according to its usage.

The programme allowed developers to increase floor area and build higher structures in exchange for open-air plazas, arcades and other publicly accessible spaces.

This chart shows the massive rise in privately owned public spaces through the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

And while growth slowed down in the 1990s, the number of pops in New York City continued to go up.

Privately owned public space is very much an American model.

What we've seen over the last 40 years or so is the importation of one policy after another, directly brought to the UK from the US.

This model enabled London's local councils to kill two birds with one stone.

One, they got to benefit from new facilities at a cheaper price.

It also meant tightly budgeted councils could instead shift their expenditure to other areas in need of funding, like adult care provisions, public schools or waste collection.

Between 1981 and 1993, the creation of 13 urban development corporations across the country led to the regeneration of several British landmarks.

One pound invested by local government in these UDCs leveraged about £3.5 from the private sector.

For the London Docklands Development Corporation, which benefited from a £1.86bn grant, this resulted in more than £7.5bn of private investment.

The rise of privately owned public space really is part of the change from an industrial to a post-industrial economy.

And the shorthand for it really is regeneration.

Today, regeneration projects are very popular.

A 2019 survey by the City of London found that people are generally happy about privately owned public spaces, citing that they were well looked after and very safe.

You can see the difference in how our cities have been transformed.

New skilled jobs have been created, that's been a major change.

And productivity has increased as a result, economic productivity, so there's more gross value added GVA being created each year.

There are also a lot more university students than ever before and graduates are increasingly retained in our city economies as well.

So a huge amount of wealth is created in our economy each year.

Economic growth shows us this, having doubled in recent decades.

And these regenerated city centres are then highlighted as examples for other places to aspire to.

But I think it's important to show the balance here and we can't ignore the massive inequalities in our city economies.

Urban regeneration projects are often large-scale and include housing, public space and retail areas.

Take Elephant Park in South London, for example.

A lot of consideration is given to the relationship between the residential that sits around us and the amenity and the public amenity spaces that sit within the ground plane as such.

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Who Owns London's (Privately Owned) Public Spaces?

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