Tue 4 Sep 2007
... with Matthew Biddle
Providing homes to suit demanding environments and even more demanding clientele is just part of an average day's work for Matthew Biddle. Michael Dineen meets the man heading up niche developer Berkeley First.
Imagine being at the helm of a company responsible for erecting a high-rise 2.8 metres from the screaming M4 flyover in West London.It's the stuff of a developer's favourite nightmare, isn't it?
But wait! There's more: the site is in a very confined location, measuring just 4.7 acres, and these are hard by the equally screaming Great West Road in heaving Brentford.
Furthermore it is all next door to a primary school and a Grade II listed building, and the client's requirement is for you to provide 839 student rooms, 221 apartments and 130,000 square feet for teaching and, just so that the students don't starve to death, 3,000 square feet of retail space.
Any more orders? Yes, don't hang about; we want it in time for the students to move in at the beginning of the academic year.
Logistically the delivery of materials to the site was always going to be fraught with problems, so in the very early stages decisions had to be made about how to build the high-rise accommodation blocks.
In the event the method chosen was modular - complete apartments, ready for occupation would be winched into place in the steel framework.
The only trouble with this was that the clients, Thames Valley University, needed so much of this accommodation that the high-rise would have to rise to 17 storeys - no fewer than eight storeys higher than anybody had ever built such a modular construction in Europe. A Euro record.
Of course, Matthew Biddle, managing director of Berkeley First was not the sole creator of this vast structural conundrum. But he was in charge of it from its inception and, incidentally, he was working with a parcel of abandoned real estate that nobody had known what to do with for the past 12 years.
It's enough to turn a man grey - but he seemed to be thriving on it when he showed me the finished product recently. His demeanour is cheerful unruffled patience, and I guess these personal attributes stand him in good stead when he's faced with a collection of no-nonsense professionals including the architects Carey Jones, structural engineers, Caledonian, council planners, Hounslow and the clients, Thames Valley University - all of them with their pennyworth ready for the utterance.
Yes, a lot of pre-planning was necessary before the Paragon scheme, as it was known, became a blend of structural, material, logistical, engineering, design and not least human considerations ready for committal to a drawing board.
It was Berkeley First in the firing line - in the persons of Biddle and his building director Robin Lackey - from the very beginning of this vast scheme.
Berkeley First? It is the smallest company in the Berkeley Homes Group, and it didn't have that name when Matthew joined as managing director in 2002. It first established itself as a niche market outfit providing accommodation for students under the name Berkeley College Homes.
Biddle was recruited to broaden the company scope, a task he seems to me to be undertaking with unruffled relish.
The Paragon job, costing around £100 million, would be most people's idea of a flagship operation, and as the dust was settling at Brentford I asked him what he proposed to do for an encore.
Plans for this are well advanced, he told me. Another urban renewal scheme at Gillingham in Kent, 20 acres near the Medway where no fewer than 800 residential apartments, 600 student bedrooms, a hotel, cafŽ and bars are projected over the next seven years - recycling what was once an unsightly and noisome paint factory.
It is significant that the number of flats exceeds the number of student units here. Berkeley First retains its interest in the student niche, but it is also taking this opportunity to develop another niche - a slot to be filled by "young professionals".
These are the forgotten legions of kids earning £50,000 but who still can't afford a foot on the property ladder.
The attractions of Kent grow by the month. Land prices there are still reasonable by London standards. The rail links between jobs in the capital and the Kent countryside are improving thanks to the Eurotunnel rail tracks, and Kent itself is opening up almost like a new department of France, as Champagne vintners colonise land north of La Manche.
So, as an encore, the Gillingham operation for Matthew Biddle and his team, promises to be rather bigger than the main event.
Journey times into the splendid new St Pancras station are expected to be down to 40 minutes - thus bringing a large new sector of open-market customers on to Berkeley First's sales ledgers. And this is a move nearer to the traditional Berkeley Group market.
Returning to the Paragon enterprise, the scheme's 221 apartments are accommodation for key workers, many of whom will have got permanent jobs on the site after training there. Also there are some shared-ownership homes.
It is complex mix, which presents a challenge to Matthew Biddle. But that suits him, I believe, for not long after he got his degree in construction management at Portsmouth in 1990 he began looking for ways to broaden his horizons.
This he did by reading for a masters' degree in property development at South Bank University, working for the next three years by the light of midnight oil and, nobly for a young man who likes his rugger, at weekends too.
Not forgetting the day job with Capita Symonds - whose clients were also helping him broaden those horizons. Indeed one of them, UNITE, the national organisation responsible for student accommodation, spotted Matthew's potential and offered him his first directorate.
As Group Investment Director for nearly a decade he was in full view of the ever-watchful Berkeley talent scouts - and the rest, as they say, is history.
A final word about that screaming M4: a discovery he explained as we strolled on a strangely restful recreation patio in the sky on top of a high-rise, is that noise there rises at 45 degrees from the flyover - thus neatly missing the development!
It was true. You could see London's traffic, but you could hardly hear its mighty roar.
First published in Show House Magazine September 2007.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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