John Whittaker: The Infrastructure King
From acquiring the Manchester Ship Canal to building the Trafford Centre and 'MediaCityUK'. John Whittaker's Peel Group dominates the North West.
While many property developers focus on individual buildings, John Whittaker focuses on macro-infrastructure. As the intensely private chairman of the Peel Group, Whittaker has fundamentally reshaped the geography and economy of North West England.
Buying the Canal
In the 1980s, Whittaker fought a bitter hostile takeover battle to acquire the Manchester Ship Canal Company. He wasn't interested in the dying canal freight business; he wanted the thousands of acres of strategic wasteland that the company owned along the canal's banks.
On a massive patch of this land in Dumplington, he fought a decade-long planning battle to build the Trafford Centre, one of the UK's most opulent shopping malls, eventually selling it for £1.6 billion. Further up the canal in Salford Quays, he developed a derelict dockland into 'MediaCityUK', successfully convincing the BBC to relocate entire departments out of London. Whittaker's strategy proves the immense value of acquiring distressed legacy infrastructure for its underlying land bank.