At the weekend MHCLG published a draft working paper setting out plans for a “brownfield passport”, with the intention of finding ways to make the intensification of urban areas easier.
This is long overdue. The planning system is disproportionately complex for small-scale development, and this is one of the primary reasons why the country has witnessed a collapse in the SME developer market in recent decades. In London, Barratt Homes currently builds one in ten of the city’s new homes—this is not a healthy state of affairs. I have written elsewhere about the need to provide greater certainty for small developers who are less financially resilient than their corporate counterparts.
Importantly, the document recognises the woefully low density of many of our towns and cities:
Given our relatively low densities, there is scope in many areas for increases. While such increases should take account of local character, existing character should not be used to block sensible changes which make the most of an area’s potential, and which can create sustainable, well-designed and productive places to live and work.
This is an encouraging acknowledgement, as for too long, “character” has been used as a means to refuse new homes. The draft NPPF which was published in June helpfully removes paragraph 130, which requires LPAs to refuse applications which are “wholly out of character with the existing area”. Combined with a national policy which sets out parameters for intensification, this could be powerful indeed.
Policy could, for example, say that development should be of at least four storeys fronting principal streets in settlements which have a high level of accessibility, and/or set acceptable density ranges that allow for suitable forms of intensification.
We know from previous experience that liberal design codes can be difficult for existing communities to accept. An example of this is in Croydon, where a suburban intensification policy was so hated that a new mayor was voted in just to scrap it, despite delivering nearly 2,000 new homes in a three-year period. The reason for the disgust at the Croydon policy was because it concentrated new homes in a relatively small area, and the pace of change was rapid.
How might a similarly ambitious policy, set at national rather than local level, provide certainty to small developers whilst delivering high-density development in sustainable locations? The following paragraph from the document is intriguing:
[W]e are keen to explore how this might be done – for example, whether densification in some areas should focus on corner plots and those adjoining them rather than whole streets, or linking densification opportunities to accessibility.
This makes a lot of sense. Corner developments tend to be better suited to intensification as they are less likely to overshadow or overlook adjoining gardens. They can act as wayfinding devices at key road intersections, helping bring clarity and legibility to suburban areas. And they can help provide non-residential uses such as small shops at ground floor level.
We included a specific design code for corner plots in our Small Sites SPD for Lewisham Council.
In this example a single corner dwelling is replaced with a small block of flats—four storeys in height, as it happens, as the document suggests—and provides six new homes. As Lewisham was keen not to see a net loss of family-size dwellings, this includes a pair of duplex flats with rear gardens.
In outlying areas there are even more opportunities for intensification. This lovely scheme by architects Harp & Harp replaces a sprawling family home on a corner plot with no less than seven family homes. Repeating this on each of the remaining three corners of the block would result in an increase of some 24 homes; that’s almost doubling the density, with no discernible detriment to character (I’d argue a significant improvement).
Here’s another striking example by OB Architects that we included as a case study in the Lewisham SPD. It replaced a single family house on a corner plot close to South Croydon station with an attractive four-storey apartment block containing eight new homes. We should be doing this on every suburban corner.
So, how many of these opportunities exist? With support from MHCLG’s PropTech Round 4 funding, I’ve been developing an AI tool that can identify and characterise different types of small development plot. I’ll be writing about this more in due course, but one of the powerful features of this is that it can find combinations of different site types. For each site it assesses, the AI determines a “ranking” according to the confidence in its prediction. So, it may think that a site has a 60% chance of being an “infill” type, but also a 30% chance of being a “semi-detached” type (it could be both, of course), reducing the percentage confidence each time until it has accumulated five predictions.
Searching for sites which fit both the “corner” (ranking first or second) and “detached” categories (again, ranked first or second), for instance, reveals approximately 320 properties in Croydon which could be intensified in this way—that’s a potential net increase of around 2,000 homes. Croydon’s small sites target in the current London Plan is 6,410 homes, so this would deliver nearly a third of this total alone—as well as concentrating low-rise intensification in those areas best suited to accommodate it.
There are fewer of these sites—around 150—in Lewisham, partly because it’s a smaller borough, but also lacks the large areas of suburban development. Even so, there’s plenty of potential: take the example below, a stone’s throw from Grove Park station. My suburban intensification study suggests that this neighbourhood has a prevailing density of some 16 dwellings per hectare (dph). This is a dreadful figure for somewhere with such good access to public transport and a Public Transport Accessibility Level of 4.
A development here could increase the number of homes on the site from one to fifteen or so, but as we know, local politics means that “character” inevitably takes precedence over additional homes. We cannot, therefore, rely on local policy to take the bold steps needed to intensify our suburbs: the only solution is to introduce a strategic policy that removes the potential for political interference and starts to deliver the homes we desperately need.
A national brownfield passport would be a great place to start.