GPE’s third attempt at St Thomas Yard redevelopment set for go-ahead

GPE’s third attempt at the redevelopment of St Thomas Yard, SE1, is up for approval by Southwark Council’s planning committee on 22 July, despite the reappearance of heritage objections which stopped its previous attempts. The proposals look to redevelop the 1980s office building at 4-26 St Thomas Street, taking it back to its concrete frame to refurbish and extend it to an 11-storey building. The application highlighted this is a reduction from the 37- and 26-storeys proposed in GPE’s applications in 2018 and 2021 respectively. These applications were granted permission but later rejected by the Secretary of State on heritage grounds. The proposals would provide an uplift of 120,276 sq ft of office space near London Bridge, near to developments such as TBC.London. Occupiers in the Southwark submarket have been willing to pay record rents recently. They also include improvements to the public realm on the site around the main entrance to the building on St Thomas Street to include planting and seating, as well as a pocket garden on Kings Head Yard. Once again, however, objections have been raised by heritage bodies such as Historic England. They recognised GPE’s proposals would deliver “a more modest scale of development” but said they would nonetheless cause harm to the nearby Borough High Street Conservation area. The Conservation Area Advisory Group similarly recommended refusal due to the harm caused by the proposed building’s height and prominence, as well as its changed scale and character. But planning officers have ruled the benefits of the scheme were found to “outweigh its harms”. They wrote the proposed development would provide an additional 675 to 875 jobs on the site, alongside the jobs and training during its construction, and 10% of the office floorspace would be affordable. They also credited its sustainable retrofit approach, which GPE recently said produced a circularity score of 68% by retaining much of the existing structure on the site, as well as the public realm improvements the development would bring.