SEPTEMBER 3rd UPDATE: The Woolwich Central development, which this blog post of June 25th covered, has now been declared the winner of Building Design’s 2014 Carbuncle Cup, as covered by the Guardian, the BBC’s One Show (3 minutes thirty seconds in), Radio Four’s Today Programme (3 hours, 43 minutes in) and many other national media.
When I am chatting with friends and the conversation turns to new development in Greenwich, I freeze. Between 2006 and 2010 I was chair of Greenwich Council’s Planning Board – the committee of councillors that makes decisions on all the big applications – so if we’re talking a new building in the borough there’s a fair chance I was somehow involved in granting it planning permission.
All big developments take several years to go from drawing board to construction, and the credit crunch often made the process even longer than usual. So several schemes that were going through the planning process during my time as chair have only recently been built.
Some of them – the new Thomas Tallis School, the Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, the exemplary new housing development at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, and the new homes and a health and leisure centre being built on the old hospital site in East Greenwich – I can look at with pride.
But there were a few more controversial developments, among them the Woolwich Central development of 960 homes and an 80,000 sq ft Tesco, which opened in November 2012 and which has just been nominated for Building Design magazine’s 2014 Carbuncle Cup. I chaired the Planning Board meeting at which the plans were approved in 2007.
This is the third time in four years that a Greenwich building has been nominated – the restoration of the Cutty Sark, with the controversial glass box around its hull, won the Carbuncle Cup in 2012. The Woolwich Centre, a council office block adjacent to Tesco (which I will come back to later) was nominated in 2011. This probably says more about the amount of development going on in Greenwich that it does about the council’s ability to assess planning applications (in a London borough where there’s been a lot built in the last few years, a few carbuncle nominations are bound to come up).
In Greenwich the Chair of the Planning Board has some influence behind the scenes and can get plans amended before they come to the Board for a decision. In this case I can plead some mitigation: the plans were already well-evolved by the time I became chair in May 2006, and it turned out there was little scope to change them before they came to a board meeting in January 2007 for decision. But as I was intimately involved in the evolution of the Woolwich Central development over those eight months, I hope I can cast some light on how and why it got planning permission, and what lessons we can learn. Continue reading →
What’s the average annual household income in London? And what about the average property price? The answers – average household income was £38,688 in 2011 (the last year for which the ONS has statistics) and the average property price, even after years of runaway inflation, is no higher than £514,000 – may surprise.
Alex Grant 