In comparison to other similarly sized world cities, London is not very dense. With limited exceptions, such as Maida Vale, parts of Tower Hamlets and Kensington, much of the city has no more people per hectare than the satellite towns surrounding it. Arrive by train and this is only too apparent, with railways cutting through miles of two-storey Victorian terraces, only giving way to mansion blocks, high rise towers and high-density housing estates close to the heart of the city. Our housing is too thinly spread.
All land in London is a precious resource, and to sustain our capital’s economy and vitality we must use it more effectively—and more fairly.
Living in any major city—and benefiting from all the amenities and conveniences that it has to offer—comes with a moral responsibility to allow others to do the same. London’s suburbs could do much more to help provide the homes that the city so desperately needs—no more so than in those areas which benefit from good access to the public transport network, and where reliance on private car ownership diminishes. But in outer areas which have not been identified for large-scale regeneration, the process of intensification can be a tortuous one.
Obtaining permission to build even a small development of new homes is disproportionately complex, time-consuming and risky when compared to larger strategic developments.
Yet, even within existing planning policies, all the tools exist to establish
an environment where land seemingly lost to low-density housing can be
reinvigorated through a process of gradual densification.
Focusing on areas within a ten minutes’ walk of the city’s suburban train and Underground stations, there is the potential for up to a million new homes to be built, surprisingly quickly and effectively. When Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s London Plan was adopted in 2021, it set out, for the first time, housing targets that must be achieved on small sites in each London borough.
This included the City of London Corporation and two Mayoral Development Corporations. In this case, small sites were defined as anything with an area of less than 0.25 hectares—roughly a third of a standard football pitch. Accompanying these targets was guidance and policies on how such development should be encouraged through plan-making and decisions.
Although it didn’t become formal policy until 2021, Khan’s version of the Plan had first been published in draft form at the tail end of 2017. The boroughs either embraced or resisted the Plan’s ambitions largely depending upon their political persuasion at the time. Labour-run Croydon Council, on the southern edge of the Greater London area, was one of the first out of the blocks, quickly establishing a set of planning principles to be followed by applicants wishing to bring forward small-scale development in suburban areas—generally towards the southern border with Surrey.
The award-winning Suburban Design Guide was adopted in April 2019, and provided clear parameters for the transformation of large, land-hungry houses into efficient, mid-rise developments. Essentially, if developers followed the rules established by the guidance, there would be no reason for their applications to be rejected. Some examples provided within the document demonstrated how, for example, a pair of adjoining large houses
could be turned into as many as 20 to 30 new homes.
Five years on from the adoption of the guidance, which was scrapped in 2022 by the incoming Conservative mayor, there is sufficient data to demonstrate the effect.
The impact this policy had on housing delivery—and the figures are remarkable. In the four-year period between 2018 and 2021, Croydon managed to complete nearly 2,000 new homes on small sites within developments consisting of fewer than ten dwellings (noting that even this is below the London Plan’s small site threshold, which determines plot size but not the number of homes within it).
The next highest delivering borough was Barnet, which in the same period delivered around a quarter of this figure.
The Suburban Design Guide neatly illustrated how larger areas of suburban housing could be intensified incrementally, resulting in a broader mix of smaller flats, townhouses, and large family homes. This is exemplified above showing how two large homes could be replaced with a block of flats and eight townhouses. This approach is borne out by the number of homes delivered in Croydon during a relatively short period of time: around 500 per year. There are 20 outer-London boroughs including Croydon.
If the remaining 19 had managed to deliver housing on small sites at the same rate, we could have had another 25,000 homes built by now.
Suburban intensification is tricky, and alone will never be able to deliver all the homes that London needs. But experience from Croydon has demonstrated that when the right conditions are in place, it can be implemented quickly, and at scale. As the country recovers from a long period of stagnation, this is one way that we can not only build the homes we need—quickly, where they’re most needed—but also promote economic growth.
This article was originally published in the Fabian Society pamphlet “Homes for London” in April 2024