Man of Property

"I'm a simple man," says portly Jack Cotton, 59, drawing deeply on an eight-inch Havana. "All my life I've done nothing but eat, sleep and think property." He has plenty of property to think about. As chairman of London's City Centre Properties Ltd., he owns or manages office buildings, apartments, hotels and shopping centers in 268 British cities and 13 countries, collecting $17 million a year in rents.

He is also a builder. As of last week he was deeply involved in the financing and construction of $700 million worth of buildings, ranging from a 23-story Hilton Hotel in London to a Barclays Bank in South Africa. Largest and proudest of these is the 59-story Pan Am Building, now climbing above Manhattan's Grand Central Station, for which Cotton supplied $25 million of the $100 million cost; he will manage the finished building. Cotton remembers the ground-breaking with special pride. "It was a great thrill," he says, "seeing the Union Jack flying beside the Stars and Stripes over the site of the biggest office building in the world -and knowing we'd put it there with an equal share of British money."

Cotton has been breaking ground since 1924, when he borrowed $150 from his father and opened a one-man real estate office in Birmingham. Within a decade he was putting up $4.000,000 office buildings, and by 1950 he had transformed the city's skyline so radically that residents began to call him "Mr. Birmingham" or "King Cotton" and joked about what their city used to look like "B.C." -"Before Cotton." Birmingham alone was too small for Cotton. He stretched out to London and overseas. By 1960, when he merged his City Centre Properties with Financier Charles Clore's somewhat smaller City & Central Investments Ltd. to form a $182 million firm, Cotton was easily the biggest real estate man in Europe.

With such strength, Cotton has little difficulty in borrowing from large British insurance companies. But his usual method of financing is to form "development partnerships" with outfits that have land or funds to invest (among them: Unilever, Imperial Tobacco, Oxford's Brasenose College). The partner supplies most of the capital, Cotton the knowledge. Last year he formed such a partnership with Isaac Wolfson's Great Universal Stores to rebuild many of the chain's 2,000 branches. He is now negotiating similar partnerships with Philips Electrical and Cunard.

While his men move earth and change skylines in city after city, Cotton lives the country squire's life on his Buckinghamshire estate on the Thames, gardening and admiring his art collection (Rembrandt, Renoir), in a manner appropriate for a man of property.

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