New Neighbours….

I’ve been reading about the recently announced Santiago Calatrava designed centerpiece of the Greenwich peninsular development, now named somewhat prosaically as Peninsular Place…

The beautifully crafted image below shows not only the magnificence of the River Thames meandering its way peacefully along, but if you look carefully you can also see our little flat, just over the river at the bottom of the Isle of Dogs…

And then if you look again at the Peninsular itself, you will see what looks like thousands and thousands of new homes, in fact 15,720 new homes. Now, I don’t consider myself to be a nimby, far from it. I’m an Architect after all, involved in some pretty large residential and mixed use development schemes across London. We need homes, we need tens of thousands of affordable new homes going forward (the general feeling is about 200 thousand by the year 2020) so developments like this are both exciting and necessary…

And yet, and yet…

Is the image below really what we think future residential ares of London should look like? My partner quite rightly points out that this could be Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or Dubai… not saying that’s bad for them, but there’s not much that speaks of London about these rather ungainly shapes.. Calatrava is without doubt a gifted architect, but this to me looks very much misplaced, out of scale and borrowed from somewhere with an altogether different climate…

And as for affordability, only 200 of the first phase of 800 new homes will be affordable, so whilst at 25% that’s an improvement on the average 10% that Boris managed, its still much lower than the 40% that good old Ken insisted on and the likely 60 to 70% that we really need if the upcoming generations are to have any hope of home ownership..

And then of course there’s the definition of affordability itself.. One beds over here on the Island are between £350K and £500K at the moment, and I can’t help but wonder how much similar homes will cost in 5 years time when they start to become available, probably not very affordable for your average Londoner…

Finally as you watch the video, try and image what the Jubilee Line will be like first thing on a Monday morning once its complete…