Richard Roy became, almost by accident, the pivotal developer on the Ladbroke estate.
Roy was a partner in the firm of Roy Blunt Duncan and Johnstone, with offices in Westminster and the City. One of the firm’s clients in the 1830s was John Whyte, who took a lease of 140 acres from Ladbroke for a doomed racecourse venture called the Hippodrome. When Whyte got into financial difficulties, John Duncan, Roy’s partner, took over Whyte’s lease and then committed himself to spending £80,000 on new houses and a further £2,000 on infrastructure in an area west of Ladbroke Grove. With the land, Duncan also inherited Whyte’s debts to his builder, William Chadwick, for building the stables and fences at the racecourse.
To cover these commitments, Duncan borrowed £6,000 from a bank (another client of the firm). In 1842 Duncan refinanced the loan by borrowing from Edmund Walker, a Master in the Chancery Court. But Duncan could not raise loans fast enough to cover his commitments and in December 1842 Duncan was declared bankrupt. The partners in Duncan’s law firm were owed £45,000 by this stage and Richard Roy, his partner, and Pearson Thompson guaranteed the debt. (Pearson Thompson and Richard Roy had jointly developed property in Cheltenham.)
A number of creditors at least had some security in the form of Duncan’s building agreement with Ladbroke. If they could only take it on and make a success of it, they might yet snatch success from disaster. They included the partners in Roy Blunt Duncan and Johnstone, Edmund Walker and William Chadwick (although in 1843 Chadwick’s place was taken by a newcomer, Charles Henry Blake, who bought Chadwick’s debt. Blake was ultimately to play a big part on the estate).
Roy had some relevant experience. He had worked with a Cheltenham landowner , Pearson Thompson, to develop Thompson’s Montpelier Estate. Roy and Thompson had also lent money to Duncan or guaranteed loans for him. So in 1842 the group of creditors appointed Roy and Thompson to manage the building agreement for them.
Roy had day-to-day control. He even moved to the Ladbroke estate in 1847. They may have used J B Papworth as their architect. He had worked on the Montpellier estate and designed a house for Roy. Many of the Cheltenham estate’s features found their way into the new development.
Roy carried out the development with great efficiency. By 1846 most the houses up to Lansdowne Crescent had been built. Ladbroke granted leases as houses were completed. These provided all the ground rent Duncan had contracted to pay to Ladbroke, so later leases were granted at a peppercorn rent. In 1842 Roy entered into a new agreement with Ladbroke to take three acres between Pottery Lane and Portland Road.
Roy did not try to do the development himself. For the most part, he used William Reynolds, an experienced builder. The usual way for a developer to deal with a builder was to agree to grant the builder a lease of the house once it was built, at a higher ground rent than the developer was paying to the freeholder. That differential was the developer's profit. A builder ran the risk. He had to bear the cost of construction and depended on being able to sell or let the property at a suitable price to recoup the cost and make his profit . For that reason, builders frequently went bust, and Reynolds was no exception. Reynolds borrowed heavily from Joseph Blunt, another of the partners of Roy is firm. But Reynolds got in over his head and in 1847, which was a time of financial uncertainty in the City, he went bankrupt.
Pearson Thompson also found himself in financial difficulties and emigrated to Australia in 1849, where he practised as a lawyer and died in 1872.
Roy however weathered all the vagaries of the property market. He died in 1873, aged 76, still living at No. 42 Clarendon Road.