Meet Chris Grigg: The property outsider bidding to prove sceptics wrong as the flak rains down

In Chris Grigg’s office, there’s a prized first edition of one of the most famous military memoirs of all time: Defeat Into Victory, by Field Marshal Viscount Slim. Against the odds, Slim took command of the 14th “Forgotten Army” in the Second World War and drove the Japanese out of Burma.

“When he took over, that army group had never won a battle: after he took over they never lost,” says Grigg, a keen military historian when he’s not running one of the UK’s oldest property firms, British Land.

During eight years in charge, the chief executive has been through a few tough campaigns of his own; not least taking over in an artillery barrage.

In January 2009 the financial crisis was shredding property values, while British Land was hit by senior defections. Virtually as soon as he started, he was off cap in hand to the City to raise £740 million to rescue the balance sheet. Some assets — such as a half share in its Broadgate estate in the Square Mile — were sold for a song at the bottom of the market.

That — plus the fact that Grigg had spent virtually his entire career at Goldman Sachs and Barclays — put some noses out of joint. What was the most famous name in property doing being run by a banker?

The company traces its origins back 161 years, set up to help people buy small land plots in an era when only landowners were allowed to vote. But its modern incarnation was established in 1970 by Sir John Ritblat — the grand old man of the property world — who eventually stepped down as chairman in 2006.

Sir John cast a long shadow when the previous British Land chief, Stephen Hester, was called away to serve Queen and country running Royal Bank of Scotland. Grigg was left fire-fighting as an industry novice.

The 58-year-old, whose offices are adorned with the Roy Lichtenstein prints he cheerfully plundered from British Land’s art collection, claims the critical noises-off never really bothered him. That doesn’t stop him easing in the stiletto.

“John had his own time here, John made mistakes and John in the end was eased out by the investors.”

On the criticism of his early tenure, Grigg says he “never really found it bothering me”, but he pointedly adds of Sir John: “You’d hear from an investor that he’d rung up [another] investor and said ‘they shouldn’t have done that’ — that was a bit irritating. It was his company in his own mind even when he only had a very small say, and he did build it up, so I could always quite understand that.”

For the record, Sir John, who will turn 82 at the beginning of next month, bridles at that, saying: “I had been there 37 years and I retired. The shareholders didn’t want me to go. I was certainly not eased out and I left on a wave of success with the share price at an all-time high of around £17.” Today they’re trading at barely a third of that, and at a big discount to the company’s £13.9 billion in offices and retail sites up and down the country. Sir John, it is fair to say, is not Grigg’s greatest fan.

Grigg himself says: “You can’t wake in the morning in any senior job and go ‘Oh my God, am I going to get it all wrong’ because you’ll go mad or melt down.”

But according to an ex-Goldman Sachs colleague, Grigg gets more than his share of stick “because he’s not part of the Mafia who’ve been doing it for their whole career”. That means whatever he does gets “twice as much scrutiny”.

He may not be steeped in property — he admits that himself — but the British Land boss was smart enough to make it from a Southampton grammar school to gain a first in Economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met his wife.

Someone who knows him from those days says he’s quick-witted and possessed of a sharp tongue “able to cut someone dead when he wants to”. Another property analyst rather sniffily says “he talks with the bond trader’s gift of the gab”. But you don’t get to be a Goldman partner — once working opposite a young Mark Carney — without confidence and ability.

And in person, Grigg is charm personified and enjoys the cut and thrust. As for the “property person” jibes, he argues: “There’s plenty of evidence that Goldman has been a good training ground for a whole bunch of people. A lot of people have gone on from there to a bunch of whole other things.”

He left Goldman after 20 years in 2005 for Barclays (“I was very clear that I had had enough of being an investment banker”), although he’s still very active on the GS alumni circuit and uses the bank for the odd financing deal.

He rose high enough at Barclays to run their commercial bank and be involved in the failed bid for ABN Amro in 2007, although he wasn’t involved in any of the bank’s controversial cash-raising during the crisis which recently put former chief executive John Varley and others in the dock (“I dodged a bullet I didn’t even know about”).

Grigg, who realised he wasn’t going to get the top job, was in the market for a move and to boot he had a “slightly strange boss at the time”. That was Frits Seegers, whom he didn’t get on with and who was restructured out a year later. “That’s probably a slightly polite way of putting it,” says Grigg, who can’t resist another little dig.

His British Land is an “inclusive” beast, far different from the old culture he found when he joined.

“When I got here there was one woman on the board and not a single woman on the executive committee. It was disproportionate even below that level, most of the women here were very junior, that’s just not true any more.”

Apart from Broadgate, he’s mostly steered British Land away from the City — selling the Cheesegrater this year for £1.15 billion although a large Lego miniature remains in reception — as the company concentrates on campuses such as Paddington, Regent’s Place and its masterplan for Canada Water.

Following the Cheesegrater sale, he’s just launched a £300 million share buyback to snap up his discounted stock, effectively investing in his own portfolio, because he can’t find anything else to buy at a price he likes.

He defends the strategy as locking in sale gains: “If we can sell an asset above valuation and buy back shares at 25% to 30% below then that is a very good asset allocation.”

He made the decision to press ahead with the Cheesegrater back in 2010, although the site was assembled and planning permission gained under previous management.

The chances of his launching his own statement building to rival the Lord Rogers-designed trophy look pretty slim, though. “To do that large a chunk of speculative development would be — bold — in today’s environment… All in all we are more likely to do deals which are either completely or substantially pre-let. That’s a function of where values are and where the risks are.”

London isn’t going to “sink into the Thames” but at the same time Brexit means that “nobody knows quite what’s going to happen. Clearly the Government doesn’t know what is going to happen over the next two years, it doesn’t appear they know what is going to happen tomorrow”.

But the father of five stresses the need to keep things in perspective. “I’ve been through some dark days in investment banking, I’ve seen people fired by the dozen, and I’ve done my fair share of it. But what is really important in times of uncertainty is to make sure you’re keeping your eye on the longer term as well as the shorter term.”

That could go for Grigg himself, who despite the sniping declares that “I really like this industry and I really like this job”.

Like Slim, he sounds like he has a few more skirmishes left in him yet, even when the flak gets heavy.