How to build new neighbourhoods
On where to build housing in London.
Written by Ben Hopkinson for the Greater London Project. Ben writes about building our way to economic growth at Yes and Grow.
One thing the Labour Government and their Conservative predecessors agree on is that London needs to build more housing. Michael Gove, while Levelling Up Secretary, wanted to raise London’s housing target to nearly 100,000 homes a year and his successor Anglea Rayner is planning on setting the target to just over 80,000 homes.
Yet over the past five years, London has built fewer than 38,000 each year, less than half of the new targets. It hasn’t built more than 50,000 since the 1930s. Clearly if London is going to meet its target of much needed homes, and see the economic windfall of doing so, we need to figure out where these new homes will go.
It’s a common misconception that London is completely built over. In fact, the London Plan, created by the Mayor, marks vast swaths of London as unsuitable for new homes. Much of this is justified, as you wouldn’t want to lose London’s fantastic parks or its historic charm.
Yet there are two designations in the Plan where the arguments for effectively banning house building don’t stack up: well-connected green belt land and strategic industrial locations (SIL).
Green belt land makes up 22% of London, more than double the size of Bromley, London’s largest borough.
Just under 5% of London’s land is industrial, of which ⅔ is legally protected against building new homes under either SIL or Locally Significant Industrial Sites (LSIS) designations.
While much of this land isn’t near existing transport links, there’s a surprisingly large amount that is well-connected and would be prime locations for building new homes.
Grey areas in the green belt
Within Greater London, there are currently 3,616 hectares of green belt land within a 10 minute walk of an existing tube, rail or tram station. That’s 25 times larger than Hyde Park!
Despite the name, London’s green belt is not idyllic natural countryside. It’s a mix of warehouses, monoculture golf courses, and agricultural fields. All of this land is within the M25, and none of it is in an area of natural beauty. Losing some of the land near stations wouldn’t be an environmental disaster, in fact it would cut pollution by letting more people walk from their home to public transport, rather than forcing them to drive everywhere.
If we just built at the density of terraced housing that’s enough land for 150,000 homes, or we could build 350,000 homes with a mix of flats and houses. That would deliver ¼ of Labour’s housing target for the entire Parliament, all built on land within walking distance of current stations in the city with the most unaffordable housing in the UK.
Designating areas right next to stations as green belt land is hugely inefficient — it pushes housing much further away from transport links than it needs to be. Take Crews Hill, a station in Enfield, for example. It is almost completely surrounded by green belt, despite being just 40 minutes on the train from the City. There are 191 hectares of land within an easy walk of the station where new housing is effectively banned. That’s the equivalent of 24 O2 arenas just around one station.
And this isn’t just a housing problem – it also means the stations are underused. An interesting quirk of the land around Crews Hill is that there is one rectangle missing that isn’t classified as green belt land. This is a housing development that first appears on Ordnance Survey maps in 1938, which is also when the green belt was first introduced in London. Unsurprisingly because so few people live near Crews Hill, it is the least used station of 18 within the borough of Enfield and within the 10 least used stations in all of London. When we have already built great transport infrastructure, we need to build homes within walking distance to make the most of the links.
It’s clear that all over London, green belt land which is very close to stations is poorly used. Just five minutes walk from Tottenham Hale station is a disused service station, where new homes can’t be built because it has perversely been classified as green belt. Right next to it, on non-green belt land, a development of 505 new homes is being built as part of a regeneration project of the area, clearly indicating the housing need that exists locally.
Labour’s plans to build on parts of the green belt deemed ‘grey belt’ should allow for the development of this disused service station. But they’ll need to be bold with their plans to build, and make sure they reclassify land like this which is within walking distance of existing stations. This would have benefits for both London and for the rest of the country. One estimate suggested more than 2.1m new homes could be built near existing stations on the green belt within 45 minutes by train of five of Britain’s largest cities.
Nothing strategic about industrial land
Similar to green belt designations, Strategic Industrial Locations (SIL) designation also de facto bans the building of new homes. The policy is designed to meet London’s “industrial need,” in other words providing valuable real estate to businesses at below-market rates. This is a trade-off, meaning residential land values are three times higher on a per square metre basis than industrial land, allowing a potentially large uplift if the land was converted to housing.
In Greater London, there’s 2,096ha of SIL within walking distance of stations. That’s nearly double the size of Kensington and Chelsea or about the same size as the city of Westminster. There’s large amounts of land that new homes could be built on in the Docklands/Thames Gateway, Lea Valley, West London, and along the Wandle Valley in South London.
SIL land near stations would be enough for more than 100,000 new homes at just terraced house density, or with a mix of flats and houses, more than 250,000 homes.
Yet this wouldn’t mean that there would be no industrial land for businesses. Land swaps could allow new opportunities for industries to be better located. Most SILs are currently located around rivers or canals because historically this was the easiest way to ship goods and power mills.
The River Wandle, which flows from Carshalton and Croydon to the Thames at Wandsworth, used to have 68 mills along its length, which manufactured textiles, paper, and tobacco. These mills are long gone, but industry remains clustered on the same sites around the Wandle Valley. Now however, the warehouses have no need to be by the river or the Tramlink stops nearby. The Mayor should remove the SIL designation along the Wandle Valley and encourage industrial land swaps so the warehouses can be closer to the strategic road network, which is far more beneficial for modern industry than a historic riverside setting. With a regeneration project funded by the uplift from the new homes, Londoners could once again enjoy living near a restored River Wandle and the natural benefits of doing so.
Like the River Wandle, the Park Royal Industrial Area provides a great opportunity to build new homes on SIL land near public transport. Park Royal is so big that it could be an entirely new neighbourhood of London. It’s a vast collection of single-storey warehouses surrounded by 11 underground stations and the Acton Mainline Station on the Elizabeth line, but prevented from development into housing because of its SIL designation. Already well-connected, it will be even better suited to housing when the HS2 station at Old Oak Common opens nearby.
Park Royal has 338 hectares of land within walking distance of a tube station, more than double the size of Hyde Park. If this was built to Parisian densities, there could be 135,000 new homes with easy access to good quality jobs. Park Royal could be a beautiful and well-connected new neighbourhood for Londoners, if the Mayor removed the SIL designation and let the existing Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation permit gentle-density building in the area.
Redesignating under-used green belt and SIL land near rail stations won’t fix everything with London’s housing market, and more work on estate renewal and suburban intensification should also happen. But it’s clear that a lot of London’s land is being poorly used because new homes are effectively banned there. And this has consequences – the failure to build more than 50,000 homes in a year since the 1930s has driven the median house price up to 15 times the median income in some boroughs, taking home ownership out of reach for too many Londoners. Building on well-connected green belt and SIL land is the best way to start fixing the capital’s housing shortage.
Community notes
Great to see the development of a car park next to Cockfosters underground station has been authorised to go ahead, with 350 new homes.
It’s a sad week for many Londoners reading the findings of the final report by the Grenfell Inquiry this week, and hopefully the start of justice for some who lost friends and loved ones. It is a good reason to re-up this piece from 2017 by Robert Colvile, on previous research which shows how few people really want to live in tower blocks, and how dangerous they are for worsening a wide range of people’s life outcomes. It’s a failure of our housing system that we’ve not been able to accommodate people living in these places better.
Write for us: we’re amazed at the response we’ve had, and we’d like to start posting more than once a week. If you think of anything you want to write about London, please get in touch with us at founders@greaterlondon.co to discuss your idea.
We hope you have a great(er) week,
Joe and the GLP team
 | A guest post by
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An here is Ben Hopkinson again on another blog, busy person ;)
I live at the southern edge of Greater London, bounded by the first (unofficial) green belt, the lands bought by the City of London corporation on the North Downs back in the 1880s when they had the foresight to see, whilst they were stimulating (and financing) massive rail expansion and the housing to go alongside it, that they needed to buy and protect the land at the edge of the hills to prevent lter building.
This area (Purley and south) had been a massive house building success in recent years under opening up of planning restrictions by Croydon council (yes, they had some successes). In an area with many (typically) 1930s or old individual homes (including bungalows), many of which with only one or two older retired folk living in them, the council allowed developers to buy those plots for development land value (typically more than the house on the land), then put (typically) 6-9 flats of various sizes. This was replicated literally hundreds of times (and yes, quite a lot of NIMBY objections filed to applications), with the result that this area exceeded housing targets and yes, house prices for housing units of that size have not increased like they have in the rest of London.
In the 'burbs, then, giving permission to increase density on existing built streets is one more way to go.
Do you think there's scope for pushing for the current NPPF changes to include land near train stations in their definition of Grey Belt?
I suggested this in my response to the consultation (and plan to write to my MP). It seems like it would be both quick and incredibly useful, but I haven't seen anyone else suggest that as the legal mechanism. Do you have a view on whether that could happen?