Selling the Family Silver: The Brand Equity of Place

“Oxford Street is Oxford Street”

This was the response to my question at the Westminster Property Association event on the redevelopment of Oxford Street. I asked whether we should also be focusing on the relevance of Oxford Street as much as we are investing into its performance metrics. Whether we should be treating it as a place rather than only infrastructure. If Oxford Street is the ultimate asset, how are we repositioning it?

A panellist’s answer equivalent to a mic drop. Except it isn’t.

Not because it is wrong. Oxford Street remains one of the most recognisable retail destinations in the world. But because it is tantamount to a retail brand saying:

“We were fashionable in 1995.”

Brands do not live indefinitely off accumulated relevance; they continually create new reasons to matter.

Why should places be any different?

This raises bigger questions about how we view place, how we shape place, and the role place plays in property development. A place, or rather the brand equity of a place, is something accrued over years. It is something we inherit and, like any heirloom, something we risk squandering if we take it for granted.

Much of the value of real estate is borrowed from the reputation, desirability and relevance of the place around it; yet, we often treat place as an inexhaustible asset rather than something that requires continual renewal. Place is the biggest strategic asset in the performance of real estate; but it is also like a natural resource that can be depleted if we harvest it faster than we replenish it.

And when places fall out of fashion, eventually the numbers follow and viability may not stack up anymore.

Oxford Street may be Oxford Street to the generation making many of the decisions about its future. But does the Oxford Street brand carry the same weight for younger people who never experienced Topshop at its peak or made the annual pilgrimage to see the Christmas lights?

For the West End to thrive, we should all be concerned with the relevance of Oxford Street as much as we are with its infrastructure, arguably more so. Far more so.

We have become too obsessed with performance that we risk losing sight of what sparks performance in the first place. Footfall, public realm, retail standards and Grade-A specifications are necessary but not sufficient conditions.

Because if Oxford Street offers the same brands, the same retail formats and the same public realm ambitions as places such as Westfield, Battersea Power Station and Coal Drops Yard, what is the reason to choose it?

People do not choose places the way planners and property professionals evaluate them. In fact, even planners and property professionals themselves do not make choices this way. They do not compare floor areas, footfall statistics or transport capacity. They choose places because of what those places signal about who they are, who they aspire to be, and the communities they wish to belong to. Choice is emotional as much as it is rational.

Topshop attracted people from the four corners of the globe, let alone the country, not because it occupied a column-free white box that was “fit for modern retail”, nor because it benefited from a pedestrianised street. It attracted people because it occupied a place in culture. Topshop became a destination because it meant something.

The most successful developers understand that place is not a backdrop to performance. Place is often the source of it.

When I was involved in 80 Charlotte Street, a commercial workplace scheme for Derwent London in 2016, we were advised by Simon Silver to watch Peter York's Hipster Handbook. Silver understood that we needed to understand the people shaping demand rather than design to our own worldview.

The lesson was less about hipsters and more about the fact that culture often arrives before the market data. The places that remain relevant tend to be those that understand cultural change before everyone else. And this has commercial implications in property.

Treat Oxford Street as infrastructure and keep wondering why it is the sick man of London.

Treat it as a place and watch it (and the assets around it) prosper.