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Abstract

With his twirling bushy grey beard, his embroidered kaftan-type hat and yellow shirt, Giris Rabinovitch is the unlikeliest of property developers.

I have interviewed smart-suited, tie-and-collar developers and one or two developers with a keen social conscience.

But I have never met a property man like Mr Rabinovitch.


As we talked for an hour at his Islington office the conversation kept on returning to the question of “ethics”, and it was clear that somehow he feels he manages to combine his deep-rooted principles with the hard-headed business decisions he has to make to satisfy his board. To him, they need not be in conflict but can run alongside each other in parallel lines.

His grandparents – “simple working people” – had fled from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia in the 1890s to Canada. It was in his 30s that he moved into property development.

But in all his years in property development he had always believed that to be true to himself and his beliefs, the need to apply an “ethical” approach to any project was paramount.

He kept on returning to the question of ethics, something that isn’t usually part of the lexicon used by developers and property investors.

He feels his Islington Square project – the biggest development Upper Street has seen in decades – exemplifies his belief.

It will completely transform a huge area of nearly 500,000 square feet encompassing the old Post Office in Upper Street, stretching back to embrace the historic Royal Mail sorting office now lavishly converted into warehouse apartments, and topped with a “green” roof. In the centre of the Edwardian sorting office is an open space that has been redesigned as a kind of Zen garden of peace and meditation by the well-known designer Peter Chan.

There is a kind of new Covent Garden look about the project with its 263 new homes, 108 serviced apartments, retail and leisure facilities including a luxury Lounge Odeon cinema and a health club with a gymnasium, two swimming pools and fitness studios.

The cinema will have six screens with no more than 40 seats where visitors can order food and drinks.

A project of that size takes years to piece together, he explained, as properties had to be acquired and brought into the design imagined for the area. Properties in Upper Street were first bought in 2003 as a springboard for the project.

Where does ethics come into the reckoning?

A development of this kind that provides flats must include “affordable” homes, stressed Mr Rabinovitch.

Workers in London need homes to live in. Obviously, they cannot afford to pay the sort of prices now being fetched in the capital for family homes so a developer has a responsibility to provide affordable homes. For Mr Rabinovitch this was an “ethical question”.

Mr Rabinovitch stressed that in talks with Islington planners he had been only too keen to accept that 50 per cent of flats in the new Islington Square site – 94 altogether – would either be let at affordable rents or released on a part-owned basis.

These flats will be provided by the Family Mosaic housing association.

The design and “master plan” of Islington Square is the brainchild of the award-winning architect Piers Gough. Too many projects of this size are filled with box-like constructions. But this approach is eschewed in Islington Square where sweeping curved buildings bring an elegant mosaic touch to what will become another “town centre” in the borough.

The complex – expected to be completed by the end of next year – has been developed by the Sager Group of which Mr Rabinovitch is the chief executive in association with Cain Hoy.

http://www.islingtonsquare.com/brochures