The man who mauled Westfield's monster mall

The man behind the campaign to stop Westfield's $450 million mall in Newmarket is an unlikely hero, with a dogged determination that has the Aussies on the run, finds ANNE GIBSON.

On the surface, Darryl Henry is an improbable opponent for an international retailing conglomerate such as Westfield.

A quietly spoken business executive with valuation and property management qualifications from Lincoln University and a background in supermarkets, Henry hardly seems the sort of person you would expect to be a skilful lobbyist.

But it was indeed Henry who was one of the key figures behind the group that has stopped Westfield's latest mall in its tracks.

Given to speaking slowly in partial sentences - "happy to give you what you want" - he is methodical. He sets out sentences in bullet points and arrives at meetings armed with written briefs, summaries and documents.

His relatively sparse, nondescript office on the corner of Manukau and Owens Rds in Newmarket gives away little about him. Asked about himself, he methodically writes a personal CV: "Interests: swimming, jogging, sailing." He has intentionally shed a good 10kg in the past year following a worrying medical check-up and cholesterol result.

Henry's foe over Newmarket's shopping future was formidable.

The chief of Westfield's New Zealand retailing conglomerate at the time it launched its plans was Grant Hirst, a small, dark Australian with glittering eyes. He had a strong memory of his mother working in a shop and a dogged ambition to change Newmarket.

Hirst took great pride in Westfield's strategy of buying surrounding properties to give it enough room to build New Zealand's largest mall. He played it a little like a game of Monopoly, but with real properties and high enough stakes to change the face of Newmarket entirely.

As Hirst saw it, Auckland needed a huge indoor mall because it rained a lot, meaning we needed to shop inside. His super-mall would be the answer to our dreams.

Henry attacked his opponent from two directions. First, as chairman of the Newmarket Business Association, the lobby group of retailers who rose to defend their Broadway patch against the Australian interlopers. And second, as head of rival shopping centre conglomerate Retail Holdings. More on that later.

As chairman of the Newmarket Business Association, Henry publicly blew the whistle on Westfield's proposed mall in October last year in unison with the powerful, 2000-member Newmarket Protection Society.

The society had revived itself after a victory over a Newmarket Park and ran a No Mall campaign against Westfield's proposal.

Both sides of the pressure group had excellent PR skills. The Newmarket Protection Association was led by public relations consultants Robin Bailey and Susan Buckland who both live (separately) in Middleton Rd, near the mall site. Henry also had the right instincts and professional help.

The campaign was timely. Had it not been for their opposition - which was strongly backed by the Newmarket Protection Society - Westfield's weighty documents to have its land rezoned (which had quietly been lodged for its application to Auckland City Council) could well have snuck through the system.

But with Henry around that was not going to happen. The pressure groups rallied the media, openly raising issues that struck horror into the hearts of Newmarket residents and shoppers who come from all over Auckland to strut their stuff on Broadway, undoubtedly the city's finest - and richest - shopping street.

Strategically placed between the wealthy Remuera and Parnell zones, Newmarket, once a down-at-heel strip of practical shops selling mainly meat, fish, groceries and manchester, has been jazzed up to become Auckland's main retail promenade.

A mixture of fashion and lifestyle shops is the key to its magnetism, drawing exclusive retailers such as Saks and the only branch of the city's Smith & Caughey department store.

But while part of Newmarket's appeal is that most of the shops open on to the street, it has malls, too.

Strip shops are complemented by developments such as Two Double Seven - itself undergoing expansion on to the former Levene Extreme site - as well as the boutique Rialto cinema in the middle and the larger Village cinema at the Parnell end of Broadway.

Retail specialists see the existing layout of Newmarket as a perfect "dumbbell" shape, with heavyweight retailers at either end and an offering of varied retailers in the middle. It explains why we like Newmarket and why it thrives.

As Henry and his Newmarket shop-owning backers, supported by the Newmarket Protection Society pointed out, the sheer bulk of the proposed new mall would have an appalling impact on Newmarket.

The shopping strip would lose customers and traffic congestion would increase.

Because the mall was so large, streets would need to be realigned. Westfield's application included a bid to re-route public streets and build over the railway lines, blocking the view of Rangitoto from the Newmarket motorway flyover.

The ensuing public debate was hot and furious and, overall, played into Henry's hands.

Westfield eventually buckled under the barrage of public opposition and withdrew its zoning application, saying it would reconsider its Newmarket plans. It is now in a "community consultation" phase, and has opened a room in Newmarket to seek public feedback on its plans.

Henry was surprisingly quiet in victory. On the hot day in February when I phoned to tell him Westfield had withdrawn its application, the line went silent, not because he had hung up but because he was simply struck dumb.

He wanted time to think and would talk later. In other words he was so taken aback by the success of what he had unleashed that he was genuinely without words. Hardly the victorious lobbyist.

Why the curious reaction? Probably because Henry had so much to gain by Westfield's backdown.

Which brings us to Henry's second hat - that of general manager of Retail Holdings, a multimillion-dollar property investment company that specialises in shopping centres.

Henry has worked for the company, which has been owed by businessmen Haydn and Mark Staples, for about 16 years. Haydn Staples is a former business partner of David Nathan and together they founded the Paulls and Dress For Less retailing chains.

But Staples sold out in 1996, before the stores - along with the associated Hero shops - went into receivership in 1998, concentrating his efforts and cash into Retail Holdings.

Today Retail Holdings has interests in Mission Bay and a strategic stake in Newmarket, right on Broadway, where it owns the $20 million-plus Two Double Five, a multi-level shopping/office block on one corner of Morrow St (Two Double Seven is on the other - see the aerial photograph) which feeds traffic from Broadway towards the Gillies Ave motorway interchange.

Tenants include Sony, the Body Shop, Just Jeans and Dymocks. Even more interesting, the property is almost diagonally opposite Westfield's proposed mall.

So Retail Holdings - and Henry - has a vested interest in stopping Westfield.

And, although Henry is not singing it from the rooftops, he is happy to own up about it: "If we didn't have a vested interest, I wouldn't be on the NBA."

But it gets trickier. One of Retail Holdings' other slightly indirect business connections is with Westfield itself, through the sale of its Queensgate shopping mall in Lower Hutt. The buyer was St Lukes Group, which took over Westfield here.

In 1993, when Retail Holdings wanted to expand Queensgate, Henry was extremely positive about the impact a large shopping mall would have on the surrounding township and its strip retail precinct.

"Connecting to existing strong pedestrian connections is the best possible way of achieving successful integration," he said in evidence at a hearing on the expansion.

In Newmarket he took a different stance. Westfield's mall would ruin the strip shopping on Broadway and integration between the strip and the mall was not possible, he proclaimed.

He also made sure that everyone got the message loud and clear. His campaign was slick, helped by a specialist property public relations firm backed by expensive legal advice, a fact he plays down. These consultants worked for Retail Holdings, not the NBA, he says. He wants no mention made of them.

So was it the anonymous consultants who helped swing public opinion?

Perhaps, although the PR supremos did what paid and skilful consultants do best - turned around and praised the client's part in the process, particularly Henry's analytical skill.

According to his PR team, it was Henry's ability to deduce exactly what Westfield planned that clinched their case. In particular, they mention his analysis of Westfield's proposal to build a five-level airbridge spanning Nuffield St, pointing out that the graphics used in the planning application minimised its impact.

"It was Henry who spotted exactly how large this feature would be and blew the whistle," said the consultants.

But what about Westfield? How much did a strategic change in guard there influence the backdown and subsequent touchy-feely move towards community consultation?

Unfortunately for Hirst, who had driven the mall for Westfield, he was recalled to Australia before the Newmarket deal was clinched.

The quiet, tall, fair-headed and mild-mannered John Widdup, who replaced him at the beginning of this year, was different. Widdup had been brought up in Zimbabwe, moved to South Africa and eventually to Australia.

Where Hirst was all hard edge, excitement, quickness and buzz, Widdup is laidback, quiet, considered, slow-walking. His first move was to withdraw Westfield's Newmarket plans, saying it was time to ask the people what they wanted.

Looking back, it was possibly a brilliant strategy. Why fight a battle Westfield was sure to loose?

On the other hand, Westfield's stumble obviously played right into Henry's hands. What Widdup cannot possibly have known was that the seemingly gobsmacked Henry, who had been lost for words when he heard that Westfield was retrenching, had - or was forming - a new strategy.

This week, a good three months before Westfield is expected to apply to the Auckland City Council to have its land rezoned so it can move ahead with its plans for the mall and submit its resource consent application, Henry lodged a plan to triple the size of a shop in his own Retail Holdings mall at Two Double Five on Broadway.

And, in an act of marvellous finesse, he convinced the Auckland City Council to proceed on a non-notified basis, meaning neither his neighbours nor surrounding landowners need be asked for their opinion of the development.

As a final irony, the application involves a pedestrian flyover - the very thing Henry objected to in Westfield's application.

And where do Newmarket shoppers stand in all of this?

This once down-at-heel strip of shops that gradually transformed itself is in danger as the locally based Henry and one of the world's largest mall development companies fight over their buying power like lions over some dead meat.

www.myproperty.co.nz

Links

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