The Start Advisory directors’ involvement in Brent Cross Town covers everything from the early masterplanning and delivery phases through to ongoing strategic advice today.

Key areas of input include:

• Land acquisition and assembly: We negotiated the deals needed to acquire all the land interests across BXT, and worked with LBB to secure three Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for land that could not otherwise be acquired by agreement. In total all land and interests were secured for a sum considerably below the original estimate. The process was inevitably complex, given the number of interest and with strong resistance in some quarters. A successful defence by the team against both a Judicial Review application and a High Court appeal  shows both how robust the applied acquisition strategies were and how confident the JV was of the scheme in general. We also took care of cleaning up land titles of historic rights and other title anomalies.

• Commercial restructuring: We offered essential support to help the JV the renegotemajor commercial agreements within the wider Brent Cross Cricklewood framework, decoupling  BXT from contractual interdependencies that linked the scheme to other adjacent developments that were stalled and consequently hindering progress. This helped “unlock the scheme”, and enable the JV to confidently move forward with its development on its own terms.