Quintain’s Wembley Park, the UK’s largest planned build-to-rent community, is set to become even bigger, with a university and an extra 1,500 homes planned.
Further land has been acquired around the site next to the national football stadium which, after a reshuffle of car parking provision, will provide a total of around 7,400 new homes.
The university is likely to be in the form of a satellite campus for a London institution in the Fulton Quarter to the north-west of the scheme, which would help boost nearby student accommodation schemes by Quintain and others.
The immediate area has a pipeline of around 6,500 student accommodation units, of which 1,800 are already built and occupied.
The masterplan has been a long time in the making and has evolved substantially in recent years.
The first iteration originally granted consent back in 2004 was for 3,727 homes. However, progress slowed during the financial crisis of 2008.
Today, around 1,000 homes have completed across the site.
Quintain – now backed by US private equity firm Lone Star following a £745m take-private deal in 2015 – plans to accelerate delivery so 5,000 homes have been built by 2024.
The flats will all be rented under its Tipi management brand. Around 3,000 homes are expected to be under construction by the end of 2017.
Residential masterplan
- 1,000 flats complete
- 4,000 consented in 2015 revised masterplan
- 900 flats in south-west area under construction
- 1,000 flats in Fulton Quarter at pre-application stage
- 500 flats planned at E05 – green car park at pre-application stage
- Total: 7,400 flats
The revised plan – new sites
Fulton Quarter (north-west)
The Fulton Quarter site was acquired for around £34.2m last year. It is made up of a retail park and the now vacant Fountain Television Studios (where X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent have previously been filmed). Quintain now envisages up to 860,000 sq ft of development, the majority made up of between 750 and 1,000 homes. The number of homes is dependent on whether 160,000 sq ft of space is given over to educational uses.
Discussions between Quintain, potential institutions and Brent Council are at a relatively early stage on whether space can be found for a university. Grid Architects, which is designing the scheme, has been tasked with designing flexible buildings which can be used to accommodate educational uses, should the discussions progress further over the coming months.
The preferred location for the university is fronting on to Olympic Way and adjacent to the College of North West London.
Car park sites (south-east)
The VDC/Careys site was acquired in 2015. Car parking was originally planned for the site in the 2015 masterplan, albeit most of it was envisaged within the E05 plot next to the stadium. However, the latest proposals will see the bulk of the coach and car parking provision (a requirement for Qutinain’s agreement with Wembley Stadium) provided at the VDC/Careys site. This frees up more land for housing within plot E05.
E05 – new residential site
Previous plans would have seen this site become a 10-storey car park providing 1,816 spaces and up to 82 coach parking spaces. With the bulk of those now provided further to the east, this site will instead provide just 77 coach spaces and 212 car parking spaces across three floors. This means Quintain will be able to build residential above, with 500 homes planned.
Now Quintain needs to get Brent’s planning committee on board. All three schemes were presented before planning committee as pre-apps on 26 April. Full applications are expected in due course.
Student housing
The transient nature of the local community looks set to be enhanced with the huge offer of student housing at Wembley Park, not only through Quintain’s masterplan but across further sites nearby.
Wembley Park has 656 beds now complete within W05, another 500 with consent in the south-west plot, and up to 970,000 sq ft in the outline consent. It is easy to see why Quintain is now planning space for a university.
A fairly generous estimate of around 400 sq ft per room for the near 1m sq ft with consent would give scope for around 2,500 units, bringing the entire purpose-built student accommodation pipeline around Wembley to nearly 6,500 units.
As the map above shows, many other student housing schemes are planned nearby, outside of Quintain’s ownership. Three developments totalling more than 1,500 units are already complete and occupied, with another 558 units currently under construction and 559 with consent.
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