The applicant Lend Lease has provided smaller versions of some of the documents on its website with a carefully-chosen range of visualisations, but for the full story and detail, you will of course have to suffer the grim trawl through the documents yourself.
As you may recall, outline planning permission for the site was granted back in 2011 - I'd written about the original plans with some enthusiasm (by my standards at least!) considering the plans to reinstate the route of the Surrey Canal as a water feature, the retention of the Victoria pub and the mix of uses on the site, with a new facility being built for tenant Ascot Cabs to retain a relatively large-scale business and employment centre.
Scroll forward a few years - Ascot Cabs presumably got bored of waiting for the developer to get moving on the project, and decided to decamp elsewhere - and new owner Land Lease began consultation on a new application.
Despite the touchy-feely marketing schmooze I was not impressed by their revised plans. Increased housing density, higher blocks, potentially triple the parking spaces and the loss of the water feature and the Victoria pub.
There was another period of 'consultation' and presumably additional negotiation and meetings with Lewisham's planners, and I have to admit to being - while I won't go as far as pleasantly surprised - unexpectedly relieved at the final outcome.
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| Final proposals - shown with Convoys in the background |
Of course I know damn well that the only reason they ramped the towers up to 30 storeys in the interim period was so that when they brought them back down to 24 storeys, in our relief we'd forget all about the fact that they were originally a maximum of 18 storeys.
Nevertheless they've still managed to shoehorn another couple of hundred dwellings (now 1,132) onto the site, by a combination of the two tallest towers having six extra stories dumped on top, and by playing around with the heights of the blocks on the rest of the site. It's not all up though, the lowest buildings have been reduced to three storeys rather than four.
I always have to allow myself a wry smile when I read the blurb that justifies the increase in height of residential blocks (aside from the obvious reason, being to make more money).
For example:
"The significance of the Surrey Canal Way is marked by raising the massing of some of the buildings along its length. The location of these buildings has been chosen to allow the greatest amount of light into the public space of the Surrey Canal Way, and so these are predominantly on the east side of the space. The diversity of building height adds character and interest to the long elevation of the canal, whilst marking it as an important space and route."
Like any casual observer at ground level would either (1) notice that these blocks were several floors higher or (2) equate that to a situation in which they consider the route to be more significantly marked with buildings of 12 storeys than of 7 storeys.
The application that has been submitted is a 'hybrid' application - as well as covering the outline planning permission for the whole site, it includes detailed design for the first two phases. This is reassuring as it suggests that the work will actually get going when/if permission is granted rather than continuing to lie derelict.
The first phases will be the side facing Grove Street (purple on the plan) and the corner of Evelyn St/Dragoon Way (hatched green). The light green area is the second phase and the red area will not be developed until they have actually managed to buy the land off the current owners!
The other bits of the application that I was happy to see had been reinstated were the intention to retain the Victoria pub on Grove Street - reportedly in a parlous state but still worth saving in my opinion - and the reinstatement of a water feature along the route of the old Surrey Canal.
The pub - which in the scheme that gained planning permission was set to be retained and restored - was potentially going to be demolished by Lend Lease. But it's now being retained and is intended to be brought back into use as a pub.
The water feature had been included in the original scheme but Lend Lease had wanted to ditch it in favour of a 'linear park' (grass, some bushes and seats) claiming all sorts of silly things about unsuitability, danger to children etc etc. One of my favourite bike rides is through Surrey Quays and along the route of the old canal, which has been restored as a shallow water feature with bridges, nesting platforms for water birds, and reeds. I had hoped that Deptford might get something along similar lines.
I'm happy that a water feature has been restored, although it's more footbath than canal, but will still offer some kind of memory of the original purpose of the alignment.
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| Water feature restored as footbath |
Another change that makes sense is that the building adjacent to the old canal bridge on Evelyn Street has been repositioned and its footprint changed from a linear block to a 'y' shape. I continue to hold out hope that some day, the route under the canal bridge on Evelyn Street could be restored as a cycle and pedestrian link, which would make utter sense and provide a safe and easy link across this busy road. With the pedestrian link set to be restored under the Oxestalls Road bridge, this route could make the site properly permeable and would also provide excellent walking and cycling connections towards Canada Water and in the opposite direction to Deptford, New Cross and Surrey Canal Road.
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| Plan of the site showing y-shaped block in bottom left corner |
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| Rendering of the y-shaped block which is intended to house retail, offices and cafes |
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| Evelyn St is over the wall on the right; the Y-building on the left |
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| Public realm (The Yard) around the Y-building |
The renderings of the main blocks are pretty muted and quite calming (although I do think the balconies shown on the renders below seem awfully over-done and very ugly from below, which is after all where most people see them from)
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| Rearing blocks over Dragoon Road |
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| View from Pepys Park across Grove St |
As is the norm with developers renderings, they don't tend to show neighbouring properties in any great detail, if at all, since they want to eliminate any real idea of scale. On the picture above you can just about see the two/three-storey houses along the east edge of Pepys Park on Leeway on the bottom left if you click to enlarge the picture.
As usual the plans also make the development look very green - but although there's a lot of green space shown, the vast majority of this is provided as 'semi-private' space. That means podium parks built at second or third floor level on top of the private residents parking, and only accessible to residents. At street level you'll be looking at buildings.
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| The purple bits are all the 'semi-private' (residents-only) parks |
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| View from Grove Street with Riverside Youth Club in the centre |
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| View from Deptford Park |
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| View along Evelyn Street |
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| View from Grove Street near Sayes Court Park |
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| View across Pepys Park now |
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| View across Pepys Park after phase one |
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| View across Pepys Park with whole development shown |
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| View from the north side of the river showing Convoys Wharf towers - the proposed Wharves development is behind it outlined in colour |
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| View from Greenwich foreshore showing Convoys Wharf towers |
It's a shame the other more responsible employers no longer remain although presumably the developer expects them to be replaced by retail jobs, offices etc.
As with so many developments now, the biggest scandal is the very poor ratio of anything approaching 'affordable' housing, not to mention the 'viability' conditions that underwrite everything that's proposed by the developer. In this case the developer is proposing up to 237 units, which is about 21% - while this might be better than other developments nearby, such as Convoys Wharf, there's still time for it to be revised downwards over the period of the work, as it's all conditional on the 'subject to viability' clause.
Here's how it works:
- Each council has a set target for 'affordable' homes which is worked out depending on its own particular circumstances (in Lewisham's case this is 50% 'affordable' with 70% social/affordable rent and 30% 'intermediate')
- Developer submits a confidential viability report which almost inevitably claims that it 'can't afford' to provide the target number on this site.
- Developer proposes a lower number of units.
- Council generally has to agree.
This excellent article by Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian last week takes a look at the arguments that developers use to back up their case - in figures that are rarely seen by anyone except council officers and those councillors who sit on planning committees (and not always the latter).
It's in the developers' interest to make a generous estimation of their costs, while being cautious on the sale value of the properties (or omitting to account for rising sale values over the period of the build, which could be up to 10 years or more). The figures often build in a healthy profit margin for the developer of up to 25%. As Wainwright points out, these are all perfectly legal.
In some cases the viability figures are challenged - not always by the councils, sometimes it's left to pressure groups or individuals to do so - and after a number of high-profile cases it seems that councils are now starting to investigate ways in which they can force developers to increase the percentage of 'affordable' units they include.
You don't have to read far into the article to see a familiar name - Lend Lease, the developer of the Wharves, is also behind the Heygate estate's transformation into 'Elephant Park'. While much of the sorry story relating to Heygate seems to be down to the council's ineptitude/lack of due diligence, the article examines whether the figures in the developer's viability statement stack up to anything of substance. It makes an interesting read, not least in the context of the potential for the Wharves.
