, “but not any more. The virus is only one of the reasons. Brexit has caused a lot of my UK assets to depreciate.” Documents filed with Companies House in December last year show ABP made a loss of £13.2m in 2020, more than 10 times as much as in 2019, and had financial liabilities of £14.5m.
Struggling to lure Chinese tenants with the onset of the pandemic, Xu launched a last-ditch plan to convert the 21 offices he had built so far into 2,000 self-contained, covid-proof micro pods. “Inside this cube, the person can do their work but also have a rest and relax,” he said. “Each cube is equipped with a multifunctional wall, including a coffee maker, a mini fridge and a day bed,” designed so that workers would never have to leave their 3m x 3m capsule.
My requests to visit the brave new pod-working future were sadly never granted, and the GLA served a final termination notice to ABP last summer. Its parent company, Dauphin Holdings, registered in the Isle of Man, took over the obligations of the agreement, but a further termination notice was served on Dauphin in March this year. ABP has now‘A chimera of a London street, lost in digital translation.’.
“We’re filming an advert for Marks & Spencer,” he tells me. “It’s an ideal location because there are never any people around. If we’re careful with the shots, we can sort of make it look like a normal place.” The eerie, film-set quality comes in part from the way it was built. In order to save time, the development was entirely designed in, so that the buildings could be made in a factory in modular components and quickly assembled on site. The flawless, computer-generated look of the brickwork comes from the fact that these are not brick walls but thin “slips” of brick stuck to 9m x 4m concrete panels, which were then barged here and hoisted into place at a rate of 10 panels per day.