If you believe long-term, large-scale residential regeneration projects in London are withering because of a site shortage, think again – and look at council housing estates.
For while the likes of Earls Court and the Royal Albert Dock may be among the last super-large opportunities on non-residential brownfield sites, a quiet revolution is taking place involving developers, planners and local politicians of all hues.
“This is a regeneration proposal that’s a win-win for all concerned,” says Jon Milward, head of central London development at Deloitte Real Estate, and an adviser on estate regeneration to Kensington & Chelsea, Camden and Southwark councils, among others.
“This is not just regenerating areas and mixing tenures by bringing in private ownership, but helping local councils renew existing stock. This is a way of funding for councils which have estates built in the 1950s and 1960s that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean such projects are easy to pull off, there are viability issues, relocations and sometimes thorny consultations to manage.
Examples show the scale and opportunities on offer. The Lend Lease/Southwark council £3bn Heygate estate regeneration at Elephant and Castle will create 5,000 homes, including 1,625 affordable, and more units than before. Similarly, 680 homes on Barnet council’s West Hendon estate will give way to 2,000 Barratt homes. Hackney council has a multi-year 2,760-home programme, involving many cases of demolition and new homes built by what the authority calls “regeneration partners”.
The list goes on as councils, Labour and Conservative, see the private sector as the most realistic austerity-era funding source for housing renewal and meeting new home targets.
These schemes come with challenges. “It’s intensely complicated and decisions have to be taken on possession, phasing and specification. Economic viability is vital to get the involvement of a private builder or a housing association,” explains Milward.
The first challenge is to agree how to achieve the regeneration transformation.
“The default starting point is demolition and building new. With carbon-free requirements and other building regulations it’s pretty difficult to retrofit existing blocks,” says Brendan Kilpatrick, estate lead partner for regeneration architecture specialists PRP. Other compelling reasons for demolition include the fact that new build usually permits higher density, and the need to remove iconic symbols of council ownership.
“Most estates are loosely planned with large open spaces and density tends to be low even if tower blocks exist,” explains Lee Davies, director of Conran and Partners. His team are working with Rydon and A2Dominion on transforming the Green Man Lane estate in Ealing where, by 2022, the existing 464 homes will become 850-plus units – and possibly more, as the developers are talking with the local authority on including nearby sites too.
“We’re building two-to-eight storey homes, many in terraces, and density is much higher than the original. This also gives us the opportunity to change the physical perception of the estate. It’s going to be much more mixed tenure and will be only 100 metres from Crossrail, and so presents an opportunity for investment buyers too,” says Davies.
But there are exceptions to the demolition rule.
At Bow’s Crossways estate, Swan Housing RSL is renovating three 25-storey tower blocks with nearly 300 homes and building 418 new units. “The towers are close to each other and if they were knocked down, there wouldn’t be consent for as many. They’ve been stripped back to the concrete and extensively re-specified,” says PRP’s Kilpatrick.
The next obstacle, whether renovating existing or building new, is to get possession of units occupied either by long-standing tenants or right-to-buy owners.
The sensitivities are obvious; social housing tenants usually want to be rehoused nearby, while market compensation for right-to-buy owners of typically mid- to low-standard ex-council units rarely allows them to purchase mainstream private homes in the same area.
“It’s very rare to be able to renovate with residents in situ,” says Kilpatrick. This creates multiple challenges for local authorities, which must co-ordinate suitable alternative housing in phases to suit displaced residents and developers alike, and may eventually have to resort to compulsory purchase if owners refuse to accept market compensation offers.
However, the issues at this stage of estate projects tend to stretch well beyond the practicalities of planning and regeneration. Those opposed to what they claim to be the privatisation of housing and social provision see the council estate as a key battleground.
For example, Loretta Lees, a professor at King’s College London, says developments such as those on the Heygate and Aylesbury estates at Elephant and Castle, and the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in west London, serve only to displace thousands of low- and even middle-income tenants rather than benefit the overall housing needs of the capital.
“Local authorities in London must halt this process and pull back from property-led regeneration schemes that are widening inequalities,” she says. “Instead of bulldozing estates, many of which are structurally sound, and building new so-called ‘mixed income communities’ they should be looking to refurbish existing property, keeping tenants in situ and learning lessons from the failures of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Developers, however, say that quite apart from private involvement being sought by councils in an age of public sector downsizing, they are keen to work on estate projects and handle them more sensitively than they do traditional new-build schemes.
Niche developer Londonewcastle is working with United House Developments and the HARCA housing and regeneration body to turn Poplar’s Balfron Tower, E14 – a brutalist block, sister to the famous Trellick Tower in Kensington, W10 – from social to private housing.
Although the proposal has generated controversy (opponents’ websites speak of “social cleansing”) Londonewcastle chief operating officer Robert Soning says his firm is proud that such projects serve to improve living standards of existing mixed-tenure communities.
“Profits from the project will be invested in the area as part of a long-term programme, while existing tenants have been provided alternative or refurbished homes nearby, including in Carradale House next door to Balfron Tower,” he says.
Promoting that positive interpretation of estate regeneration is vital according to many, but requires a delicate balance between inviting consultation and involvement while avoiding delays and providing a platform to those ideologically opposed to any such development.
“Lambeth calls this process ‘co-production’, which probably takes the process too far. But as more estates are considered for regeneration, so consultation will begin at an earlier stage – that’s one lesson we’ve all learned so far,” says PRP’s Kilpatrick.
And there will indeed be more estates extending this trend in the near future.
“We’ll see more in zones two and three, the ‘inner’ part of outer London, as zone one has become less attractive for returns. There’s more international investment interest outside the prime central area, which will boost these regen projects further,” forecasts Deloitte’s Milward, whose firm is talking with more local authorities about new schemes.
With no thaw likely for the climate of austerity (all major parties hint they will maintain council borrowing restrictions whatever the result of the general election) the use of private means of transforming formerly public housing in the capital looks set to grow.
Homes in the dock
The masterplan for the £1bn transformation of the 35-acre Royal Albert Docks, scheduled to start this summer, majors in commercial and office development but also involves around 1,200 homes. With 1,500 homes also scheduled for the Royal Victoria Docks at nearby Silvertown, these are arguably the final large industrial spaces for potential residential development in the capital.
