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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Car parks andpublic outsourcing |
| Founded | 1931 |
| Founder | Frederick Lucas |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom[1] |
Key people | Hiroyasu Matsui - Chairman, Co-CEO and CCO, and Rob England - Co-CEO and COO |
| Owner | Park24 Development Bank of Japan |
| Website | www.ncp.co.uk |
National Car Parks (NCP) is a British private car park operator, with car parks in towns and cities and at airports,London Underground andNational Rail stations.
NCP was founded in 1931 by Colonel Frederick Lucas. In October 1948Sir Ronald Hobson, together with his business partnerSir Donald Gosling, founded Central Car Parks when the pair invested £200 in a bombsite inHolborn,Central London to create a car park. In 1959 Central Car Parks took over NCP from Anne Lucas, the widow of Colonel Lucas.[2]
Hobson and Gosling expanded the company by recognising the under-developed state of many post-World War II British cities and towns. The pair began buying vacant sites in city centres, converting them into car parks. NCP then began managing sites on behalf of third parties.
In 1998, after a flotation of the business on theLondon Stock Exchange was cancelled at a late stage, the company was bought by US-based property and travel services providerCendant for £801 million with Hobson, Gosling, and their family trusts who owned 72.5% of the National Parking Corporation taking £580 million.[3]
NCP was sold to3i in July 2005 for £555million.[4] In 2007, NCP was acquired byMacquarie European Infrastructure Fund II.[5] In 2007, the outsourced services business wasspun off intoNCP Services.[6] In August 2017, Macquarie Group sold NCP to Park24 andDevelopment Bank of Japan.[7][8]
NCP provides car parking across the UK.
Since 2010, House of Holland has booked theBrewer Street NCP to host its catwalk shows forLondon Fashion Week; previous attendees have includedAlexa Chung,Jamie Winstone andRachel Bilson.[9]
InCardiff,Evans Cycles have created the Urban Duel, aBMX racing event that takes place in NCP Dumfries Place. There are plans to host this event at other car parks around the country.[10]
Art Drive exhibited its collection of classicBMWs designed by famous artists includingAndy Warhol,David Hockney,Jeff Koons andRoy Lichtenstein at the Great Eastern Street NCP inShoreditch.[11]
As part of the Manchester International Festival, NCP arranged a live relay screening ofKenneth Branagh’s new playMacbeth with hundreds of fans turning up to the open-air screening.[12]
In the early 1990s, NCP was accused of planting spies in rival group Europarks, but Britain's then biggest industrial espionage trial ended with the full acquittal of NCP chief executive Gordon Layton.[13]
In November 2013, following the announcement thatHull was to be theUK City of Culture 2017, NCP managing director Duncan Bowins took to popular social media website Facebook and branded the city a "sh*thole" – despite the fact that his car parks took over £1 million from the city each year.[14] This "crude slur" led to Duncan Bowins winning the Award for "Most Inappropriate Use of Social Media" at theHull Daily Mail Angus Young Awards 2013.[15]
In December 2013, theCrawley News andThe Argus reported that NCP staff had been parking in the town's limiteddisabled bays for convenience.[16] An NCP spokeswoman subsequently issued a statement claiming the pair had parked there to clear leaves from the car park and that there had been nowhere else to park. However, when theCrawley News published a photo clearly showing spaces right next to the disabled bay, the firm's Head of Operations Nigel Sorenson called to apologise and admitted that the incident was "embarrassing and upsetting" for the company.[17]
Part of a car park operated by NCP inNottingham collapsed on 19 August 2017. Three vehicles were left dangling from the edge of the city centre car park from a floor roughly 50 ft (15m) above the ground, and the entrance and exit were blocked with fallen concrete.[18]
Media related toNational Car Parks at Wikimedia Commons
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