The billion-pound hole where Chelsea Barracks used to be

Ross Clark says it’s not so much the Prince of Wales who has put the mockers on this controversial Qatari-backed development, but the grim economics of the credit crunch

Gordon Brown is well known for his bad timing in selling off half the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market in 1999. But with the sale of the Chelsea Barracks site in 2007 the government could not have timed it better, picking up nearly £1 billion at the peak of the property boom, just before the credit crunch and before the intervention of the Prince of Wales sent the scheme into a tailspin of litigation and anti-royal fury.

In May this year, following Prince Charles’s criticism of the scheme, Qatari Diar, the property development arm of the Qatari royal family, withdrew its application for glass and steel apartment blocks designed by Richard Rogers — architect of the Millennium Dome, adviser on ‘urbanism’ to former London mayor Ken Livingstone, peer of the realm and prince of the New Labour cultural elite.