Interview with Allen Duff (part 1)
Allen describes his education and career before appointment as a commercial surveyor in the MKDC Estates department in 1970; his background was commercial development, but for the first six months he and other surveyors were engaged in buying land. He then worked on developing the Brunel Centre, Bletchley and was allocated to the CMK team in 1973, initially to deal with shopping, but he says: ‘…of course, once you’re involved you end up with being involved with the whole centre’. He describes his role in the team: ‘We had to fund virtually the whole of Central Milton Keynes with private finance, so that was my job’. He goes into some detail as to how the overall size of CMK was calculated, the technical constraints involved, how many jobs should be generated in the centre and how much shopping would be required. Fortunately Post Office pension fund were looking for retail investment and ‘were very happy with a million square feet’.
The first major retailer attracted was John Lewis (JL). Allen talks in detail of the negotiations with JL’s representative Harry Legg: ‘Harry was the mastermind’. After the death of Alan Ashton in 1977, Allen became Commercial Director and took over responsibility for completion of the agreement with the Post Office; during this same period, he says: ‘we signed up JL…we signed up British Home Stores, C&A and Habitat’. He describes how they attracted retailers to the centre, he recalls it as: ‘not very difficult’ once the JL thing had been established, because ‘they respected JL’. He discusses the levels of rent needed, the ‘tenant mix’, and talks of difficult discussions with food retailers. He describes how the distribution of the shops in the centre affects pedestrian flow and servicing; in his view the architects and engineers did a ‘terrific job’ in designing the first-floor level servicing. He remembers the great success of the shopping building: ‘John Lewis would be bringing … coach loads coming from halfway round the country. … some entrepreneurial coach owner (from Kings Lynn) sold trips to Milton Keynes for a day’s shopping and every week he was full up.’
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