...has just announced the first six sites to benefit from the "build now, pay later" scheme. There's only one in London and it's Blackwall Reach, the one with the Robin Hood Estate (here's a rant I prepared earlier) on it. Around1,600 units, nearly 700 of which will be affordable are proposed, the developers being a four way JV between Tower Hamlets B.C., the HCA, Swan and Countryside, with the land sold on a "build now, pay later" basis.
More details on Construction News.
A historical landmark site in
Sixty apartments are now released to the market at this canal-side development in Alperton. The official launch is 9 April and values range from £185,000 to £310,000. Contact Daniel's Estate Agents for further information.
Hammerson have submitted fresh plans for this major mixed-use scheme bordering the City of London to the north. A scheme mired in controversy from the outset, largely due to the exclusion of the 'Light Bar' to begin with which was then subsequently included within the plans, but also just for its sheer scale.
The differences between the previously permitted scheme and the new application is the loss of around 10,000sqm gross of B1 space, the loss of the entire hotel space (181 rooms) and the increase of 10 residential units.
Within this new application with an estimated value of £350m, there will be 243 private residential units, 56 social residential units, 76,465sqm of B1 office space and 21192sqm of mixed retail space. Hammerson are also now calling it 'Principal Place', Foster and Partners came up with the plans which will house 40,000sq ft trading floors, some of the largest in the city.
Worth noting however at the time of writing Hackney Council were stating that the status of the application was 'invalid'.
Here's a render of the previous permission.
Still not great but better...
London Newcastle have submitted plans for a site in Shoreditch, opposite the newly built Shoreditch High Street overground station and next to the Tea building. It will also be across the road and around 50 yards from the proposed 'Box Park', blog story which will house a shopping mall made out of shipping containers. The December 2010 story on the scoping opinion can be viewed here.
The development if permitted will provide 116 private residential units in total within a 22-storey twisting design. Other A1 retail and D1 community uses will also be provided. The affordable housing element is proposed to be all off-site on Fleet Street Hill, around a 5-10 minute walk away. 43 residential units are proposed here on a site bounded by railway lines to the north and south.
I was at the EG regeneration seminar yesterday. Half the day involved talks by the various speakers here's (some of) what they said:
Paul Evans, Director,
"
Brendan Jarvis, Barclays:
Introduced the phrase "colouring in" a new one on me, but it alludes to the kick-starting of regeneration by developing one scheme which will then provide the impetus for others to follow.
Julian Barwick, Director, DevSec:
"Measuring, managing and eliminating risk"
"It's the residential element that's going to make a mixed-use scheme work"
Anrew Stunell MP, Under Secretary of State:
"This parliament will finish with fewer rules and regulations than when we started"
John McCready, Head of Government Property Unity:
"The default answer to development will be yes".
Jackie Sadek, Chief
"The private sector has to be part of regeneration, it's time to step up to the plate"
"Mobilise now"
The second half of the day was spent walking around the Paddington regeneration site itself:
Back end of the Travis Perkins site. Those facades aren't real:
It's easy sometimes to think that the Paddington development is done and dusted, but there's plenty left to do. Buildings like the one below have to go:
Although some of the old stock does have a certain charm:
As do some of the modern features:
But it wasn't all outdoors, we (including LRR's very own Daniel Smith) were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to wander at will around the almost complete Building 5 (aka The Carmine Building) guided by the architect himself Mike Mossessian:
What's the Carmine like inside? This is where a shed load of pictures come in handy:
The Olympic Park is set to get the same postcode as the fictional address of BBC soap opera Eastenders. I noticed this when on the train last week going out to Ilford and Barking site visiting; now it seems the press have picked up on it too. Westfield has put a large 'Stratford E20' sign on the south side of the shopping centre which looks out over the train station and its platforms.
It's not really surprising that a new postcode has had to be formed seeing as though up to 8,000 new homes will be built in the area over the next 20 years, not to mention all the new businesses and retail units.
The postcodes will be split into three zones - E20 1, E20 2 and E20 3. Zones 4 to 9 could be added in future decades as the site develops.
Walford, the fictional suburb of East London where EastEnders is set, was given the E20 postcode when the BBC launched the soap opera in 1985.
As coalition forces including Britain enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and attempt to protect the Libyan people from Gaddafi's regime, squatters have taken over his London home. A group calling itself "Topple the tyrants" have occupied the £10.9m house in Hampstead now for two weeks and are adamant on staying until Gaddafi leaves office in Libya.
A Bloomberg News story this morning stated that one of the squatters a 22-year-old Libyan named Naas from the opposition stronghold of Benghazi had said "We want to return this house and other assets to the Libyan people, they are the true owners. As soon as all the properties are returned to the Libyan people, I'm out of here."
The registered owner of the property is Capitana Seas Ltd., a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands that paid £10m for the house in May 2009. The Metropolitan Police consider the property to be Saif al-Islam's, Gaddafi's second oldest son and former student at the London School of Economics.
The occupied London house, a Georgian-style mansion on Winnington Close, was listed for sale in July 2009 for £12.5m, according to Zoopla, the property website. It had been available to rent for £9,750 according to London-based Glentree Estates, which was handling the property.
The Sunday Times reported yesterday that billionaire Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich has worked out how to avoid the hassle of having builders in the house while he renovates. How? Spend £25m on another property while he waits for it to complete.
Abramovich's main building project has involved buying up nine flats in two blocks in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge (below). He wants to knock them together and create an enormous £150m home, rebuilding everything from scratch except the facade. When finished, which is expected to take around 3 years to complete, the 30,000 sq ft house could be Britain's most expensive residential property.
While he and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova wait for renovation works to complete, they will have their London base in Lindsey House, a 17th Century property on Cheyne Walk. The house is made up of four separate properties with Sir Mick Jagger as their new next door neighbour.
Ballymore has received planning consent (albeit quite controversially) for their Leamouth Peninsula site. The site already benefited from a huge mixed use planning consent, however due to the viability of the scheme, they submitted a revised version in order to make it more workable in the current climate.
The main changes to the new scheme granted consent last week and the previous permission can be summarised as follows:
A reduction in the level of affordable housinng (35% to 19.6%).
A reduction in the number of residential units by 131 units.
Removal of a podium (underground car park) and the provision of 2 multi-storey car park buildings.
The omission of the former 'green bridge' connecting the site with Canning Town.
CABE in their design review of the application criticised the scheme due to the omission of the bridge. They stated that "because there is not a direct, 24-hour pedestrian connection from the peninsula to Canning Town across both Bow Creek and the DLR tracks within the proposal we are not able to support this application". As well as that Tower Hamlets also recommended to refuse the permission. They formally objected to the application in a unanimous vote due to the lack of affordable housing as well as a number of other details.
How did it get permission then? Well this part of Tower Hamlets is part of a very small portion of the borough which falls beneath the remit of The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation whom granted the scheme consent. Whether Ballymore do start on site however is a different question altogether, if at all I would bet against it being any time soon.
An alternative planning application has been approved by Wandsworth Council for the redevelopment an office building opposite Putney mainline station. The plans involve demolishing the existing building and erecting an eleven storey building to include 68 flats along with office and retail space.
Redevelopment of the site was first suggested at the start of the millenium.
I was fortunate enough to be given a guided tour around the enormous Woodberry Down regeneration program yesterday by Eduardo de Araujo, whose part of the 'Communication and Consultation Team' of Hackney Homes. This scheme is vast, walking around the site you really do appreciate the size of it and how dillapidated some of the current homes are, none of which fit the 'decent homes' standard. First mooted back in 1998 the overall completion date for the project is 2032 (yes, thirty two). Eduardo stated that funding is in place for the next 5 years in which phase 1 will be complete as well as part of phase 2. After that, sales from the early phases is hoped to progress the later phases further.
The first part of phase 1, known as 'Kick Start 1', the 'Old School site' is progressing well, the social units here have a completion date of May 12. After completion they will then be transferred over from Hackney Homes to Genesis who will become the housing association. The rest of the site, to be private including the 27-storey tower is expected to complete towards the end of 2012.
Kick Start 2 has also now very recently started; this site will provide just social housing with 160 social rented and 60 shared ownership units.
In total 4,600 homes are planned. The following three buildings below, all of which are within the Woodberry Down estate have something in common, any ideas?... (answer below)
Health centre, Springpark Drive
Social housing block, Seven Sisters Road
Woodberry Down primary school
Any ideas? well they have all attempted to be listed, two successfully. Only the social housing block wasn't the other two were. I know, bonkers isn't it?
Incidentally another phase of the scheme has been granted permission through reserved matters. This phase known as 1b&2 will provide 724 residential units in total with a mix of
469 private units, 109 social rented units and 146 shared ownership units. This now means that around half of the total number of units planned have full planning permission.
Here's a colourful sight, looks quite jolly doesn't it? It isn't...
...this is the Cross Bones Graveyard...
...and on the website this is how they describe it:
"Next time you're in The Borough, take a stroll down Redcross Way, the tranquil back-street running parallel to Borough High Street. Close to the junction with Union Street, you'll see a vacant plot of land, enclosed by London Underground boards on which someone has chalked a skull and crossbones and the words: "Touch For Love". The rusty iron gate is adorned with a bronze plaque, ivy, ribbons, flowers, feathers and other curious totems.
This is Cross Bones, an unconsecrated graveyard going back to medieval times. The Tudor historian John Stow refers to it as a burial ground for 'single women' - a euphemism for the prostitutes who worked in Bankside's legalised brothels or 'stews'.
In the 1990s, the Museum of London archaeologists conducted a partial excavation of the site, removing some 148 skeletons. By their own estimate, these represented less than 1% of the total."
I've long known about this site but it came to my attention again recently when I spotted it in the Estates Gazette, for sale, it seems, as part of a larger site collectively known as Landmark Court (contact Drivers Jonas Deloitte for details). Most Friends of Cross Bones do not object to an appropriate development on the northern part of the site, provided due respect is shown to the most sensitive area, the Cross Bones graveyard itself.
Right at the start of 2009 I blogged about the Aldgate East Station site. In October 2008 it looked like this:
If you were to go down there today, it'll look exactly the same. This was one of the first major developments to halt as a result of the credit crunch. The collapse of the Icelandic bank Landisbanki in this instance. I was in Iceland (the country, not the supermarket) over the weekend (despite the ash-cloud) and for a supposedly bankrupt country it appears, on the surface at least, to be doing rather well.
Although the restaurants seemed a little empty and the Harpa, Reykjavik's new 28,000 sq m concert hall and conference centre is about a year behind schedule and still not finished when I passed last Friday:
And then there's the roads in the city centre which haven't seen a gritter in a very long time:
But this is not a country whose value can be measured solely by how many Krona it's got in the bank, the real wealth is in the countryside. This is what I saw in the space of 12 hours:
Glacial waterfalls:
Boiling geysers:
The American/Euroasian tectonic plate meeting point:
...err big trucks, lots of them:
...and, despite all the negative predictions, the Aurora Borealis:
...over 50 miles up but you felt you could touch them.
A small development has been released to the market in South Hackney, within the Victoria Park Conservation Area. In 2007 the original developer, Croft Homes, sold the scheme at an early stage to a private investor, who held on to it until very recently. The scheme, Park Apartments, is still under construction, and selling agent Thompson Currie estimates a Spring 2012 completion. All 14 apartments have been released to the market with three units already sold/reserved. Prices range between £260,000 for a one-bed ground floor flat and £436,800 for a three-bed unit on the top floor. £/sq ft values range from £446 up to £581.
I was at the NLA's Nine Elms conference a few days ago chaired by the EG's erstwhile editor, Peter Bill, who described the atmosphere as being "like Docklands in 1983". Among the speakers were, Sir Simon Milton (Deputy Mayor); Baroness Brenda Dean (Chairman, Covent Garden Market); Sean Ellis (St James MD), Robert Tincknell (Treasury Holdings MD), David Laycock (Ballymore) and Alex Williams standing in for Michele Dix (TFL MD).
All in all quite an interesting day, the main thrust of which can be condensed into these headlines:
1. How is the £58m funding gap going to be repaid? No clear answer forthcoming on this one.
2. The Northern Line Extension (NLE) is crucial, as Alex Williams put it:
"No NLE without the development, no development without the NLE"
3.What's the level of AH going to be? Looks like 40% in parts but 15% on the majority of the site.
4. CLS Holdings' plans to pedestrianise the Vauxhall gyratory system. Sounds impossible? Not if you create walkways in the sky it's not.
5. Permeability, buildings have got to have plenty of that say the architects.
Speaking of architects, the STARchitect Rafael Vinoly, designer of the new Power Station was also there (albeit very briefly) his entrance and exit punctuated 5 minutes before and after by the low throbbing hum of helicopter rotor blades.
Super-prime, super-successful residential property developer brothers Christian and Nick Candy, of One Hyde Park and Chelsea Barracks fame, have set up a new property finance company in a joint venture with Mortgage Centre IFA.
The company will offer short-term loans to individuals and developers, predominantly within the prime postcodes of London. Liz Locke, star of the most recent series of 'The Apprentice' has been appointed Business Development Director at the new firm named 'Omni Capital'.
The Omni Capital website states that the loans provided will typically range from £50,000 up to £5m, with short-term lending periods from 3 to 12 months.
Liz - who famously received an apology and admission of regret from Lord Sugar following her premature boardroom departure, has a wealth of finance experience having previously worked at large global investment banks as well as investing and developing property of her own in the north-west of England.
The plans down at the site adjacent to Lambeth College (strangely not in Lambeth but Southwark) right next to Tower Bridge and the GLA building have been pottering about now for a while. This blog has kept up to speed with them over the past couple of years, see here, mainly due to its prominent location and its chequered history.
The new plans by Berkeley Homes designed by Squire and Partners, which replaced the Ian Ritchie proposals are due to go before a Southwark planning committee next week. The big difference between these and the old plans is the inclusion of 6,500sq ft of 'cultural' use space. The proposals will look like this, which I don't have too much of a problem with, although CABE weren't too endearing of it however, saying that the cultural element of the scheme lacked expression. They are probably right.
What I do however have a problem with though is this; the social element fronting Tower Bridge Road.
In my opinion this is so unimaginatively dull it is offensive. Lying next to Tower Bridge, an iconic grade 1 listed structure and across the river from the Tower of London, a world heritage site you would have thought the developers and architects could have come up with something fit for its location. This design has 'budget' written all over it, Southwark planners should be able to have the muscle and leverage to go back to the applicant and order re-designs, something which will unfortunately never happen. To the contrary, the application is due to be heard next Tuesday, (8th March) and goes with the recommendation to grant planning permission.
The London residential market is closely monitored by EGi’s team of dedicated experts, from the planning and construction pipeline to sales and pricing, we cover the whole of the capital, all 33 boroughs.
Don’t miss an opportunity, find pre-planning, stalled and oven ready sites.
Residential Update – August 2012
We take a look at the inner boroughs at the mid-year point from the applications and permissions in the planning pipeline, the starts and completions in the construction pipeline and ending with a flavour of the sales and pricing situation.
Red Book Executive Summary – May 2012
An in-depth review of the current state of the London residential development market across all 33 London boroughs from planning and construction pipeline to sales and pricing.
