The Crown Estate has shortlisted bids for part of London’s fashionable West End.

Crown Estate, the property manager of the British monarchy, has collected a shortlist of hopeful bidders for an asset stake in around 25 per cent of Regent Street, the historic shopping strip in the trendy inner-west district of the capital.

A limited number of bidders will be part of detailed discussions ahead of the partial sale of the street according to a statement released by the management group today, although the identity of the bidders has been kept a secret. The strip in question has been part of ancestral land and property holdings that were originally exchanged by the monarchy back in 1760 for annual payments.

Several pension fund and sovereign wealth funds are believed to be vying for the area in question, which marks the second time that the Crown Estate has attempted to generate income towards a redevelopment of Regent Street worth around £750 million ($1.15 billion). An attempt to create a fund to off sell units was blocked by the corporate board in 2009 after it was labelled overly complex.

The district of Regent Street, situated between Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus, is the biggest asset for the Crown Estate, recently valued at £1.6 billion. The estate owns the freehold rights to Regent Street, which was one of London’s largest ever construction projects, completed in 1825. Since then, some of the biggest global companies have made their home on the street, which separates trendy Soho from blue-chip Mayfair, including Hamleys, Burberry and Apple.

Tesco, which sells everything from make-up and pantyhose to slippers and shower curtains, has unveiled plans to essentially build a house for you.

The largest and most successful of Britain’s supermarkets, Tesco has devised plans to build four new ‘mini villages’ in and around the capital. These new developments will offer hundreds of new homes built estate-like around a central Tesco store. The mini villages are the brainchild of Spen Hill – the design arm of the retail giant.

One such project, in the south-east London suburb of Woolwich, includes plans for a new Tesco supermarket along with a civic centre, public library and some 900 new homes. Aside from the Woolwich site, further developments are planned for Bromley-by-Bow, Dartford in Kent and Streatham.

The developments mean that UK shoppers may soon be able to buy a new Tesco home, under a Tesco mortgage and furnish it with a range of fashions from the latest Tesco catalogue. The move continues the ongoing retail dominance and success that Tesco has had in recent times – a recent survey found that on the high streets of Britain, one in every seven pounds spent at shops went to Tesco. The retail outfit now takes in an estimated £62 billion every year across 14 countries, including their clothing business which is worth £1 billion alone.

However, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a left-leaning think tank, has slammed the move, claiming that such developments would make Tesco more powerful than the UK government given the information and involvement it could have with its customers.