Londons Camden Goods Yard poised to draw New Yorkers looking for new homes abroad
A stroll through Camden Goods Yard, a mostly residential complex that’s coming into focus in London’s Camden borough, brought this New Yorker a tantalizing whiff of home.Like many Big Apple projects designed for middle- and upper-income apartment buyers, the planned seven buildings on eight acres are centered around a large gourmet supermarket, Morrisons, to open later this year.Taking another cue from Gotham, sections of the resurgent neighborhood’s main shopping drag, Camden High Street, have been turned into a pedestrian mall.A planned “Camden HighLine” down the block from the rising complex is modeled on Manhattan’s High Line Park.It will transform an unused, elevated rail line into a three-quarter-mile long public greenway.
It’s to be designed by James Corner Field Operations, the same landscape architects who created the Manhattan masterpiece.Studio units in Camden Goods Yard’s first completed apartment tower, the Regent, are even named “Manhattan” — with screens to section off the sleeping area, a setup familiar to untold numbers of New Yorkers in all five boroughs.Camden Goods Yard is the latest endeavor of the St.George division of publicly traded Berkeley Group, a developer of 110 mostly residential projects in southern England.The Camden Goods Yard project will have 643 new apartments when completed.
One building will be all-residential, while the others will include 100,000 square feet of retail and other commercial uses.Camden borough is a one-time industrial area known for its creative energy and for sprawling Camden Town Market that draws 28 million annual visitors.The district was the birthplace of literary giants John Keats and Charles Dickens.Camden Goods Yard, which is a less-than-10-minute walk from two Underground stations, seeks to exploit growing demand by US-based buyers for living spaces in southern England.
According to CBRE, three times more Americans either bought or scoped out homes in or near the British c...