Thompson and Hepburn examine the financial architecture through which regeneration is made to pay for itself, using Hattersley in Greater Manchester as a detailed institutional case. The study’s strongest insight is that land value capture is neither inherently public nor automatically progressive: its political effect depends on ownership, contractual design, temporal horizon and the territorial scale at which value is retained or redistributed. Hattersley’s collaboration agreement temporarily prevented land banking by licensing development without transferring land to the housebuilder during construction, while channelling private returns into public improvements. Yet the authors show that such arrangements remain exposed to property-market volatility and can sacrifice long-term public control by monetising future value too early. Their method triangulates documentary analysis, interviews, focus groups and field observation to reconstruct the business model as a transcalar institutional network. The bridge to financialisation studies is exact: regeneration finance is spatial governance, and the distribution of future urban value is inseparable from the ownership structures that organise it.