Perhaps the nicest part of SW1, especially at night, is Smith Square and the Georgian and neo-Georgian streets around it. Gas-lit and quiet, it’s a charming backwater, steps away from the mayhem of Parliament: an actual Westminster village. Now, inevitably, there is a plan to ruin it.
Asif Aziz, one of London’s most controversial property developers, wants to open a 652-room hotel on the square, a conversion of a 1920s office building which runs between it and Millbank. According to the planning documents, up to 1,332 people a night will stay there, making perhaps 3,000 movements in and out, not counting staff or visitors.
Aziz, no stranger to grievance politics, claims he was ‘shut out of the [UK] property market because of the colour of my skin and dim view of my faith’. In fact, he bought his first UK property at the age of 16 and has enjoyed great success in Britain in the decades since. His main vehicle, Criterion Capital, now owns large parts of the West End around Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.
Local residents are appalled
The Times asked whether he was ‘the meanest landlord in Britain’ after he threatened some of his business tenants during Covid with winding-up petitions unless they paid their rents in full. He claims to be ‘tough but fair’ and denies issuing demands to anyone ‘who has not got a strong balance sheet’. Aziz has also been accused of involvement in closing more than two dozen pubs, although his lawyers insist that he is not personally responsible for closing down any pubs.
Most of the rooms in Aziz’s new Westminster hotel will actually be windowless ‘cocoons’ aimed at the bottom of the budget market and costing, if his similar Piccadilly Circus operation is any guide, as little as £33 a night. Aziz’s daughter, Halima, who heads his hotel division, admits that ‘we are technically classified as a hostel’. The guest entrance will be on the Millbank side but because there’s nowhere to stop there, Ubers and taxis will come through and drop off on the side streets. And because the rooms are not spaces to hang out, many of the guests, no doubt, will end up spending their summer evenings in Smith Square.
Local residents – who, I should say, do not include me – are appalled and Westminster council, under its previous Labour leadership, rejected the plans, saying it was wrong to have ‘large, intensively used hotels in predominantly residential or mixed areas’. Now Aziz is appealing to the planning inspectorate. Anyone, not just Westminster villagers, who values Smith Square as it is can submit objections here until 11.59 p.m. this coming Monday.
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