Sir Christopher Benson
Deft boardroom operator who drove Docklands development and was the first chairman of Crossrail
SIR CHRISTOPHER BENSON, who has died aged 90, was chairman of London Docklands Development Corporation and Crossrail, among a multiplicity of boardroom roles after a first career in commercial property.
One profile called Benson “a professional careerist, a man who changes hat with ease, gliding in his blue Bentley from one meeting to another, polite but firm and perfectly briefed”. Tact and conciliation were his hallmarks, though as one counterpart put it, “people are surprised at how deep he can dig his toes in”.
He made his name as a managing director, and chairman from 1988 to 1993, of the commercial property developer MEPC, where he worked in a volatile partnership with the more flamboyant David Davies, until the latter left in 1983 to run Hong Kong Land.
Davies, according to Benson, “was much brighter than me, but I was streetwise. He always wanted his own way and will show it; I want my own way and have learnt not to show it.”
The high point of Benson’s later solo leadership of MEPC was the hostile acquisition in 1987 for £518 million – the largest deal of its kind at that time – of Oldham Estates, the creation of the developer Harry Hyams which included the controversial Centre Point block at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road.
Benson was by then also deeply involved in Docklands, where he was chairman from 1984 to 1988 of the development corporation established by Michael Heseltine – as an environment minister with a passion for regeneration – at the start of the Thatcher era. New building fuelled by grants and tax breaks advanced apace in what the LDDC vice chair and former Labour politician Bob Mellish had previously called “eight and a half square miles of dereliction and desolation”; part of Benson’s role was to engage with the largely Left-wing and often hostile leadership of affected boroughs and to spotlight the best interests of their residents.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Benson begged Tory ministerial support for the underfunded and somewhat ramshackle Docklands Light Railway. He also negotiated lease arrangements for the multi-billion-pound development of Canary Wharf, eventually to be realised by the Reichmann brothers from Canada.
“I think we all blinked four times when we actually had the drawings uncovered for us,” Benson recalled. “It was a shock because it was so huge… and it really could transform the whole of the East End.”
His successful LDDC tenure prompted one cartoonist to suggest dropping “Docklands” from the corporation’s name and letting Benson “run the whole damned thing”. With several subsequent public roles under his belt, he was a natural candidate to be the first chairman, from 2001 to 2004, of Cross London Rail Links, the joint venture of Transport for London and the Strategic Rail Authority established to advance the Crossrail (now Elizabeth Line) project from the drawing board.
The structure was a curious one, with three voting directors from each shareholder but no vote for the chair: Benson thought to ask for a referee’s whistle. But progress was achieved in the form of an agreed “business case” and a first cost estimate of £7 billion at 2002 prices, plus £3 billion for contingencies; the final cost when the line at last opened in 2022 was closer to £19 billion – but Benson was proud to hold Ticket No 001 entitling him to be the first passenger.
Christopher John Benson was born in rural Staffordshire on July 20 1933 to Charles Benson, a dentist, and his wife Katie, née Bishton, a nurse who was later matron of a fever hospital. In 1939 the family moved to Worcester, where Christopher attended the King’s School and, in his own words, chiefly “played rugby and truant”.
He was also a boxer, swimmer and diving champion and it was one of his teachers who suggested he might be suited for the Royal Navy. At 13 – having muffed the entrance for Dartmouth and sworn “it was the last thing I would ever fail” – he joined the training ship HMS Worcester, alongside Cutty Sark at Greenwich, and went on to sail the world as a cadet with Union Castle line before joining the Royal Navy for national service in 1951.
A career as a naval officer might have followed but for a terrible accident in late 1953 on the Fleet Air Arm base at Lossiemouth where he was a midshipman: a crash in his open MG sports car resulted in facial injuries so severe that his own mother initially failed to recognise him in his hospital bed.
It was his good fortune to be fully repaired over the following two years by the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies; Benson was later a patron of Changing Faces, a charity which supports people with visible differences to their face or body.
Having recuperated, he found new direction as an articled clerk with a Worcester firm of chartered surveyors and agricultural auctioneers – and developed a liking for livestock auctioneering. Unexpected ownership of an unsold lot of half a dozen pigs led to a backyard pigrearing enterprise with his sister, and later in life to livestock farming in his own right.
His next professional move was in town centre property with the Arndale group, best known for its shopping centres, and from there to his own successful venture, Dolphin Developments, with sites across south-west England. In 1971 he folded Dolphin into the Law Land Co and in 1973 he moved to MEPC – where his first challenge, with Davies, was to persuade banks to back the company through the property crash of that winter.
Benson was also at various times chairman of Boots, Sun Alliance, the engineer Costain and the chemical manufacturer Albright & Wilson. A rare offer refused was the chairmanship of Harrods after the Knightsbridge store (part of the House of Fraser group where Benson was a director) fell into the hands of Mohamed Fayed.
Invited to discuss the chair proposition at the Egyptian tycoon’s Park Lane office, Benson’s attention was drawn by his host to the young women serving lunch. “No knickers,” Fayed announced. “Take your pick.” “I think I’m in the wrong place,” Benson responded as he left.
But he took pride in the remarkable number of other appointments in his CV, in and out of the business world. They included the chairmanship of the Housing Corporation, the Funding Agency for Schools, the Civic Trust, the Coram charities and the British-australia Society; the presidency of the British Property Federation, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the National Deaf Children’s Society; membership of the Royal Opera House board and past mastership of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen.
A long-time fundraiser for Salisbury Cathedral, he was appointed a lay canon in 2000 and he and his wife funded a new baptismal font designed by William Pye in 2008.
He was knighted in 1988, served as high sheriff of Wiltshire in 2002 and became a deputy lieutenant of Greater London in 2005. For recreation he flew helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.
He married, in 1960, Josephine (Jo) Bundy, whom he met when she was the youngest city councillor of Salisbury, where she was later mayor; though apolitical, he claimed to have joined the local Young Conservatives just to see more of her. Jo died in 2022 and he is survived by their two sons.