All this week, City A.M. has been making the case that London’s future prosperity depends on new buildings. But what about the future that might have been? From rock stars objecting to affordable housing to jumping spiders blocking rollercoasters, vested interests are too often allowed to get in the way of potentially transformative new developments. Here are 10 of the worst offenders.
One Battersea Bridge
Mick Jagger once sang “I can’t get no satisfaction” and that’s exactly how 3,600 households who are on the waiting list for social housing in Wandsworth feel.
Yet the Rolling Stones frontman has signed a petition demanding a project that would provide 142 new homes, 45 of which would be affordable, be scrapped in its entirety.
One Battersea Bridge would regenerate land that is 93 per cent brownfield, providing a community space, riverside restaurant and offices.
But Chelsea residents including Jagger, Eric Clapton and Felicity Kendall have objected on the basis it would ruin their view from the other side of the river. So much for Gimme Shelter.
ITV Studios
The redevelopment of ITV’s abandoned studios on the Southbank has been through a planning hokey cokey.
It was called in for review by one Conservative communities secretary, approved by another and is now the sorry subject of a High Court challenge.
The whole debacle has proved so arduous that the developer, Lendlease, last month decided to pull out of the UK construction market altogether saying the expected returns on their ventures were “too far in the future”.
The future of this potential £700m investment is now in doubt.
HS2
The final boss of failed infrastructure projects. Initially conceived as a Y-shaped route connecting Manchester and Leeds to Birmingham and on to London, HS2 was meant to bring Britain’s railways up to speed with those of our European counterparts.
Some went as far as to dream of fast trains all the way from Edinburgh to Paris. But it went off track, in part because it was supposed to pass through the constituencies of so many Tory MPs who were fearful of angry voters. Former Chancellor George Osborne was accused of helping secure a £600m ‘dog leg’ detour around the leafier parts of his patch in Tatton.
Costs spiralled from an initial estimate of £37.5bn to over £100bn and plans were scaled back, first with the cancellation of the Leeds leg and then the Manchester branch last year.
The remaining London to Birmingham section is forecast to cost £53bn. At £396m per mile, this will make it the most expensive of any completed above-ground railway project in the world. For context, that is more than eight times the cost per mile of the new French high-speed line from Tours to Bordeaux. Will it ever make it to central London? Unclear. With funding for a tunnel to Euston yet to be secured, there’s a possibility that it could terminate at Old Oak Common.
If the sad, amputated remains of HS2 ever do reach completion the effect will be to shave a pathetic 20 minutes off journey times to Birmingham. Trainspotting nerds will tell you it’s not the speed, it’s the capacity that really matters, but the only thing those responsible are full of is excuses.
Stag Brewery in Richmond
Sadiq Khan threw out plans for a £1.5bn redevelopment of a historic brewery in Richmond on the basis that 30 per cent affordable housing was not enough.
But in 2023 the council approved a redesign with just 7.5 per cent affordable housing – that’s in one of the most expensive boroughs not just in London, but the world. Just five days after consent was granted, the plans were once again thrown into disarray by changes to fire safety regulations.
The Stratford Sphere
Many Londoners bid good riddance to Madison Square Garden Entertainment Company when it withdrew plans for a giant, LED-emblazoned concert sphere in Stratford.
Madison Square Garden Group abandons London Sphere due to ‘political football’
While supporters claimed it could have brought £2.5bn and 1,200 jobs to the capital, residents were justifiably concerned about the prospect of having to install blackout blinds and being plagued by loud music late into the night. It’s a poor reflection on our planning system, though, that this eyesore was first proposed in 2018, at the same time as an identical one in Las Vegas, but was only finally rejected after America’s one was up and running.
The Aylesham Centre
Locals have objected to plans currently underway to redevelop the unlovely Aylesham shopping centre and Morrison’s supermarket in Peckham on the basis that 850 new homes is “too many” and that 65 per cent will be “unaffordable” – never mind that London needs to build 66,000 homes every year, or that 35 per cent affordable housing is well above the 10 per cent minimum.
But perhaps the most Peckham possible complaint is that the 20-storey building could block the view of the City from the rooftop bar Frank’s Cafe.
All of West London
In 2022 the Greater London Authority shocked developers by warning that they might be unable to build anything at all in Hillingdon, Ealing or Houslow until 2035 due to lack of capacity in the electricity grid. Progress has since been made, but as of March this year, there are 4,000 houses in the development pipeline that currently do not have an electricity connection.
London Resort
PY Gerbeau, the colourful French businessman behind Euro Disney and the Millenium Dome, pulled out of plans for a theme park on the Swanscombe peninsula in 2022.
The £2.5bn scheme would have included roller coasters and entertainment venues connected via Ebbsfleet to Britain’s only high speed rail link to London. But plans were held up when Natural England declared the area a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
And what made this former chalk quarry so precious? Apparently, it’s home to both “common lizards” and rare jumping spiders. Zut alors!
The Lower Thames Crossing
The dubious honour of the longest planning application in British history belongs to the Lower Thames Crossing.
This essential project will relieve pressure on Dartford, the only route across the Thames east of Greater London, which carries 45,000 more vehicles than it can cope with on its busiest days. It was first proposed in the late 2000s yet spades are still yet to broach ground.
That’s despite £300m already being spent on the planning application – more than it cost Norway to build the longest road tunnel in the world. If all 360,000 documents comprising the planning application were laid end-to-end, they would stretch 66 miles, five times longer than the road itself.
Heathograd
It may feel like a thoroughly modern malaise, but Britain’s building failure goes back decades. In the 70s, the Tory government proposed a new airport built on reclaimed land in the Thames Estuary at Maplin Sands. Prime Minister Ted Heath promoted it with talk of a ‘new jet city’ and hovercraft to ferry passengers to London.
Dubbed ‘Heathograd’, presumably in reference to Soviet projects that were superficially futuristic but immiserated their citizens, the idea was mocked even then.
But it’s less funny when you consider that, had it been built, there’d now be no need for a third runway at Heathrow and we could build millions more well-connected homes in west London. Instead, unshaven environmentalists organised to protect the beauty of the Essex mudflats, citing threats to ‘cockle pickers’ and ‘Brent geese’ to prevent its construction.
A similar idea, dubbed ‘Boris Island’ was revived by another Tory with a fondness for vanity projects, Boris Johnson. But like his sulky predecessor, Johnson was ultimately thwarted.
Alys Denby is opinion and features editor of City A.M.