Meet Aldar – the Abu Dhabi property giant that overpaid for Tite Street and is now trying to build its way out of a bad deal.
In 2023, London Square was acquired by the Abu Dhabi-based Aldar Group – a vast real estate conglomerate, which is listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (Ticker: ALDAR:UH), with the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund as its largest shareholder. It has access to virtually limitless capital – much of it now directed towards its growing London development programme.
That buying power allows London Square to outbid competitors, even when the price defies market logic. This is exactly what happened at Tite Street: Aldar paid a premium that simply cannot be justified by current market conditions. The result is a scheme driven not by place, history or proportion, but by the need to claw back an overpayment.
London Square’s plans reflect this imbalance. Instead of a sensitive renewal that complements the extraordinary artistic and architectural character of Oscar Wilde’s “Street of Wonderful Possibilities”, they propose an oversized, overbearing block that would suffocate the very qualities that make the site special.
To justify it, London Square and Aldar have conjured a kind of phantom debate. In their planning documents and letters to residents, they give the impression of having “compromised” – as though shaving a little height here or softening a corner there might somehow balance the harm elsewhere. It’s a curious logic: we’re going to break the planning rules, just not quite as badly as we first intended – isn’t that fair enough?
Of course, this is a smokescreen for a much simpler calculation: profit set against place. The planning rules are perfectly clear – both scale and setting must be respected. You cannot claim to preserve a conservation area while chiselling away at the very qualities that make it one. That is no respect at all.
The tragedy is that few companies are as well-resourced as Aldar – and few sites demand greater restraint or imagination. Aldar could afford to champion design excellence and cultural sensitivity; instead, its approach feels tone-deaf to one of Britain’s most storied streets.
On its glossy website, London Square declares: “Wherever the location of a London Square development is, we strive to be a central pillar of the local community.” This is not what they are doing in Tite Street.
