A rippling white wall of luxury flats rises from the beach in Folkestone, the glazed bricks doing their best to gleam with summery seaside promise on an overcast day at the Kent coast. The building swells out in a broad arc towards the sea, bulging with curved bays and big balconies, as roof terraces cascade from the penthouses up top. It has the smooth white form of freshly served Mr Whippy, while dotty areas of protruding bricks add a pixelated look, like a cloud from a video game.
Shoreline Crescent is the latest evidence of Folkestone’s rapid ascent from rundown seaside town to fashionable coastal commuter hub. Marketed as “On the beach’s edge but just an hour from the capital”, these new homes come with London prices to match. While an average terrace house in Folkestone goes for £290,000, these flats range from £430,000 for a one-bed, to £1.3m for a two-bed, topping £3m for a penthouse. And it’s not a one-off. This block is the first in a battalion of similar buildings that will march all the way along the beach, rising in height until they eventually culminate in a cluster of towers around the harbour, bringing 1,000 new flats and a big shopping centre, radically changing the face of this former fishing town. Only 8% of the homes will be classed as affordable – in one of the most deprived wards in the country, where the local target is 22%.
It might sound like the steroidal speculation of an out-of-town developer, but this plan has in fact been concocted by a local philanthropist, who has spent the last two decades pumping many charitable millions into reviving the town. Sir Roger De Haan, who grew up on Clifton Crescent nearby, sold his family’s Saga holidays business for £1.3bn in 2004, and has since used his trust to build schools and sports facilities (including the world’s first multistorey skatepark), establish a triennial art festival and a bustling creative quarter in the old town. More recently, the 74-year-old has transformed the derelict harbour arm, converting the disused rail viaduct and station platforms into a walkway inspired by New York’s High Line, along with a fountain square, shipping container cafes and a public space that constantly hums with events.
Having turned Folkestone around and secured its position on lists of the top places to live, De Haan is now trying his hand as a developer. Will it be the icing on the regeneration cake, his last love letter to a town he has done so much for – or a monstrous blight on the coast, set to undo all of his good work to date?
As seaside flats go, Shoreline Crescent is more sophisticated than most. Designed by London-based architects Acme, the development is an inventive take on the classic English seaside housing type – the bay-fronted Victorian crescent – only turned inside-out to maximise the sea views, and jacked up a few storeys at either end, as if power-dressed with shoulder pads. There are nods to its neighbours, which include an assortment of similarly optimistic seafront architecture from previous eras: the creamy stuccoed range of Marine Crescent; a terrace of bay-windowed townhouses; and a colossal 1980s hotel, the Grand Burstin, which looms at the eastern edge of the beach like a concrete cruise-liner, bingo hall and all. Acme’s block could be the lovechild of all three, a crescent that has been inverted and inflated for maximum returns.
“The fun thing about bay windows,” says Acme founder Friedrich Ludewig, “is that you feel like you own the horizon.” He is standing in the first-floor living room of one of the new townhouses (yours for £2.1m), where a pair of full-height bay windows appear to bring the beach right up to the dining table. They open on to a balcony that billows its way along the length of the crescent, its underside flaring out with a stepped white concrete profile, adding a glam art-deco-ish touch (a sensibility that continues in the gold-lined lifts).
We ascend past two more floors of bedrooms to a roof terrace, separated from its neighbours by waist-high walls. “You have to be able to see France in all directions,” says Ludewig. “So if you are sunbathing topless, you need to stay low.” With its sensuous curves, sleek white finishes and voyeuristic sense of overlooking, the place gives off decidedly Ballardian vibes. You can almost picture the wealthy residents gathered on their roof decks, ice creams in hand, as some maritime calamity unfolds for their entertainment.
Out front, coastal plants emerge from the shingle, leading to a boardwalk that wiggles its way along the beach, outlining the forthcoming plots. Around the back, the building’s curved bays are inverted to form a sharply scalloped rear, where little back yards lead on to a manicured lawn, on top of sunken parking. The homes even come with cellars, adding further costs to what was already a very expensive project to build.
“I’ve spent £100m on it already,” De Haan tells me, speaking in a rare interview about the project. “I bought the land, commissioned three major masterplans, raised the level of the beach, and refurbished the harbour arm to get it into its current state. It’s had immense investment and it’s immensely challenging and high-risk. And now people criticise us for building on the beach. But it never was a beach – it was half a mile of concrete and tarmac. The order I did the work in is unusual, some might say foolish.”
Recent arrivals to Folkestone may be horrified by what looks like flats being built right on the shingle. But before the works got under way, raising the beach by 1.5 metres to mitigate flood risk, the site had been a sea of tarmac dotted with amusement arcades, a nightclub and a lorry park. Its previous owner, the funfair tycoon Jimmy Godden, won planning permission in 2005 to build a casino, multiplex cinema and apartments on the site – anathema to De Haan, who compared those plans to Benidorm and convinced Godden to sell him the site instead. De Haan had already acquired the neighbouring harbour, and had Norman Foster draw up a flashy vision for a marina, ice rink, exhibition centre and 1,400 flats, anchored by a new campus for Canterbury Christ Church University. But the 2008 financial crisis scuppered the plans. The university dropped out, Foster’s scheme was no longer viable, “and I was left with the damned harbour,” says De Haan.
He turned to Terry Farrell, an architect with a reputation for devising realistic regeneration plans in times of recession. Farrell drew up a more in-keeping, seasidey place of pitch-roofed blocks and little houses, a world away from Foster’s glass slabs. Having secured planning permission in 2013, De Haan hoped to sell the site to a developer. “But that proved to be difficult,” he says. “So I decided to get together a team from the development industry and do it myself.”
Such is the chequered backdrop to what is now emerging on the beach. But there was another twist. When De Haan invited architects to submit designs for the first building, the plucky firm Acme decided the whole masterplan needed a rethink, and persuaded their client to head back to the drawing board. Again.
“The Farrell plan looked like a piece of generic suburbia on the beach,” says Ludewig. “It had lots of little streets and surface parking, and only about 20% of the homes had a great view.” He wooed De Haan with his inventive plan for a row of curvaceous crescents, each increasing in size as they snake their way along the beachfront, mirroring Marine Crescent to create a kind of circus (and blocking some of the existing homes’ sea views in the process).
“We looked at the Georgian crescents of Bath,” says Ludewig, “and Brunswick Square in Brighton, where the fronts of the buildings are corrugated to make more sea views. If you work with larger shapes, you can create a sense of publicness in front, a space that feels like it’s for everyone.”
But not everyone in Folkestone feels like it’s for them. At a recent consultation event, where the latest proposals for the harbour were presented, the plans were met with fury. Many local people have resigned themselves to the forthcoming buildings along the beachfront, which were granted permission in 2015, but the latest plans for a cluster of 12-storey blocks around the harbour arm – currently a car park – have sparked outrage.
“It’s as if they’re plonking a great big Westfield shopping centre on the seafront,” says Folkestone-based artist Charlotte Chapman. “If people wanted that, they’d move to Stratford. It’s so strange for the man who’s done so much to improve the area to want to create this weird, hellish abyss.” Since witnessing other people’s responses to the plans, Chapman has started a “Block the blocks” campaign with photographer Lee Walker, collecting local opinions and putting up posters around town. “It’s like supercharged gentrification,” says Walker. “Folkestone already feels like two towns, and this is only going to make the divide bigger.”
Debbie Convery, who was born in Folkestone and runs a pet shop on the high street, agrees. “It looks like Wembley,” she says. “Just a pile of flats and shops that will completely block the view of the sea, not to mention increase congestion, sewage overflow problems, and doctors’ waiting lists. It’s just so out of scale and character with the rest of the town. And it’s only going to take footfall away from the shops in the struggling town centre.”
The designs are the work of a young firm called A Is for Architecture, founded by former Acme employees in 2021, and they mark a departure from the white, neo-deco language of Shoreline Crescent. Instead, they take the form of lumpen blocks with highly sculpted profiles, lopsided towers that have been sliced and carved with wonky abandon, rendered in earthy shades of pink, brown and terracotta, referencing the nearby cliffs. Local people have not held back, comparing the designs to termite mounds, doner kebabs, “something out of The Flintstones”, and piles of poo.
“People are appalled,” says Georgina Baker, who started a petition that has more than 7,000 signatures. “There has been no proper public discussion, and now the architects are saying they’re going to carry on regardless.”
Duarte Lobo Antunes, founder of A Is for Architecture, was taken aback by the intensity of the reaction. “It was brutal,” he says. “The planners and design review panel had been very encouraging, so it came as quite a surprise. But we are very open to feedback, so we’re looking at where we can shave off some height and make some of the streets a bit wider, as well as rethink some of the colours and materials.”
The size and form of the development aside, the question of why only 8% of the homes will be affordable remains. This figure was agreed in the 2013 Farrell plan, but in the eyes of housing viability expert Bob Colenutt, it represents a gross failure. In England’s Faustian planning system, the amount of funding for affordable homes is guided by a project’s “residual valuation”, which is the difference between the gross development value (GDV) and its total costs (which includes the developer’s profit, usually at least 20%). In 2012, De Haan’s consultants estimated a GDV of up to £253m, and total costs of £194m, leaving a residual value of £59m – arguably more than enough to fund 30% affordable housing, even at that time.
Since then, thanks to rising house prices, Colenutt estimates that the gross development value is around double what was predicted in 2012, while construction costs have risen by around half. If this is the case, the residual value is significantly higher than originally thought, and the project should be eminently capable of delivering a lot more affordable housing, while still remaining viable. When assessing long-term regeneration projects like this, it is common practice for councils to include a review clause, so that the number of affordable homes can be increased if a project turns out to be more profitable than forecast. But Folkestone & Hythe council failed to include such a clause, no doubt thrilled by the prospect of any investment during a time of recession.
How can De Haan possibly justify such a low number of affordable homes? “It’s the viability,” he insists. “If we don’t work to normal commercial disciplines, I think we would lose an awful lot of money. It would have the potential to be an absolute disaster.” The viability report, however, remains confidential.
It seems that De Haan has ended up in a position that he never imagined, nor indeed desired, when he first acquired Folkestone’s harbour in the hope of bequeathing a university to the town. He is no stranger to tearing up plans and starting from scratch. It’s not too late to rethink the future of Folkestone’s harbour, before he undermines the very work he has done to make it so appealing.
