The man building homes near the Tube

Mr Craig was working for outsourcing contractor Capita in 2004. “My now wife and I decided that we were going to move from Bristol to London,” he says. He saw a job come up at TfL running the new Congestion Charge scheme, “which by that stage had just gone live”, he explains. “The transport elements were working. But there were some issues with the management of the call centre. And I thought, ‘I know how to run call centres.’ And I’m something of a nerd. So I was kind of interested in congestion charging, even in Bristol. And I thought I’ll apply for this job, see if I can get it and that will then be an interesting job in London.”

From there, Mr Craig has moved from role to role at TfL, working on some of the organisation’s most recognisable schemes: the first shared bikes (or, as Londoners ended up calling them, Boris Bikes); the first Low Emission Zone; transport preparations for the 2012 Olympics. Next came another project headed by Mr Craig to review and reorganise how TfL worked, bringing together the body’s hodge-podge of legal, HR and finance teams, and its property holdings.

“We struggled to find someone to head up the function because the job was seen as running TfL’s carparks,” Mr Craig says, with characteristic bluntness. “No one really wanted to do it. I certainly didn’t. But somewhat under sufferance, I said on a temporary part-time basis I would do the job, without realising then that that’d be the next 10 years of my life,” he says.

If Mr Craig undervalued the job at first, that is perhaps not surprising. “Back then we didn’t know what we owned. We didn’t know what to do with it. We were resolutely not a property company, we were a transport organisation,” he says. “For decades TfL had said, ‘If you got surplus land, you sell it to someone else.’ And having stepped into the job, [even though] I didn’t have a property background, it struck me that that was a really odd approach to take, before I knew the history of Metro-Land and everything else. And to a large extent, really, I’ve just been trying to relearn the lessons of the past.”

Metro-Land, if you have also missed this housing history lesson, was an initiative dating back to the 1880s, which saw homes built next to the Metropolitan Line, including flats above Baker Street and suburban homes.

“There are two things that matter in this job, two elements of legacy that I give a damn about. It’s what we can do in the streets of London and what we can do in the team”

But back then, Mr Craig didn’t know about this – or much about property at all. “I didn’t know about TfL’s land, I didn’t know about property. My experience was having bought and sold a house. But I knew how to ask questions. And I sat down with the team and said to them, ‘What’s the approach that we take? What do we do?’ They were generally patient with the questions I asked,” Mr Craig recalls.

Early on in the job, this came to a head. TfL was about to sell land connected to Earl’s Court Underground Station in west London. Mr Craig thought this was a mistake. “I thought, ‘This is 26 acres of west London. Why on Earth would we sell the freehold effectively of 26 acres of west London for what it’s worth now?’” Instead, he wanted TfL to participate in the likely uptick in value of that land.

TfL asked developer Capital & Counties (Capco) to bin the initial proposal of selling the land, and instead enter into a joint venture. “I can’t say that Capital were immediately enthused at the prospect of entering into a joint venture with TfL. But over the course of about 18 months, we managed to persuade them there was no other choice. We entered into a joint venture with them. And really, yes, that was driven by my desire that TfL should be involved in shaping the city. And TfL should be able to share in the proceeds,” Mr Craig says. TfL and Capco formed that joint venture in 2014, although executing the plans proved tricky and in 2019 Capco sold its interest in the joint venture to Delancey and APG. At the time of writing, the consultation was about to close on a new masterplan for the site, which projects 4,000 homes will be built, of which 35% will be affordable tenures.

To go back to 2014 and the early days of TfL’s change of direction on property, Mr Craig found that the property industry was receptive to the idea of TfL changing direction, and getting involved in developing projects in partnership, rather than just selling off land. “I got every encouragement in the world for TfL to think more creatively, more strategically about its land holdings,” he recalls.

For hundreds of years, much of London was owned by landed gentry, and their descendants still control great swathes of the capital – they are known as the ‘Great Estates’. Mr Craig started to think that TfL could function as a new great estate – but spread across the capital (most of TfL’s land is, as you might expect, concentrated around Tube stations).

But TfL as a Great Estate is rather a different prospect to, say, the Grosvenor Estate, owned by the Duke of Westminster, or the Portman Estate, which confers an estimated £2bn fortune on the 10^th Viscount Portman.

When it comes to social housing, TfL’s ambitions are significant. Until Places for London was created in 2022, TfL had a target of building at least 10,000 homes – 50% of which would be affordable.

Then came the pandemic.

During COVID-19, the number of passengers on London’s Tubes, trains and buses plummeted. So did TfL’s income. There wasn’t enough money to run the trains, let alone invest in property. Solving the crisis needed a new funding settlement from central government, and TfL’s property holdings inevitably became one of the topics of discussion. The question was, as Mr Craig so clearly puts it: “Do we have a fire sale of assets at the worst possible time? Or do we say, ‘Actually, there’s a huge commercial appetite to invest?’”