Journal

Farmstead Road, Lewisham is a development of 26 affordable homes for Phoenix Community Housing designed by Metropolitan Workshop and built by Buxton.

It’s a high quality housing development that more than quadruples density but is skillfully crafted to nestle into its context. It is 100% affordable, 100% dual/triple aspect, Passivhaus certified, supported by the local community and yet it was in the planning system for 16 months!

Delivering housing on small sites is really hard. This is exactly the way we should be developing them and quality projects like this should be flying through the planning system.

Coincidentally I was recently talking to a small developer who has received planning consent for a modest development on a small site in Lewisham. There is a financial contribution to be paid for Biodiversity Net Gain. The amount of money to be paid is clear. It’s a simple calculation. But it has to be written into a S106 agreement. For this to be done the local authority lawyers need to be engaged (at the developer’s expense) to write the S106 and then the developer needs to appoint their own lawyers to review it. This will likely triple the cost of the financial contribution and delay the project, putting the much-needed new homes at risk of not being delivered.

WHY OH WHY hasn’t someone just created a simple pro-forma to sign and countersign???!!! No one benefits from this except the lawyers.

There are many reasons why it’s difficult to deliver housing in the current climate and we can argue till the cows come home about where, why and how these homes should be delivered. However we won’t get anywhere unless we streamline processes to ensure that good quality housing designed by people and organisations with the best intentions is supported.

Read my review of Farmstead Road here

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