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teuchter said:
Probably most people would agree that fitting some homes onto this site would be a good thing, and also that there would be such a thing as too many (ie at some point most people would say "that's too high").

What's tricky is finding the balance. Unless you genuinely believe that any amount is ok, then there does have to be some discussion about where that balance is. Just dismissing any objection as "nimbys gotta nimby" is an easy way out of actually engaging with the problem of deciding what's appropriate and how to approach that decision. Of course an absolutist "no change anywhere" is also completely unhelpful but that's rarely what's being proposed by amenity groups or others who object to stuff.

I think the Brixton Society's tweet posted above is perhaps a little alarmist. But what are the motivations for objecting? It's not usually just selfish ones. It's about trying to protect an area from harmful development that makes it a worse place for everyone who lives there...including the future residents of newly built housing.

We read all these complaints of housing provision being severely restricted by nimbys and planning rules. But anyone who's paid attention to planning policy over the last 10-20 years or so will know that restrictions on height & density have already been massively relaxed, compared to what the norms were before.

Many of these sites, 15 years ago the argument would have been about whether 4 storeys could stretch to 5. Now it's about 8 vs 10 or 15 vs 20.

The results of this change in policy have been fairly dramatic across the more outer regions of london. Some people might even enjoy the increasingly common vistas of 2-storey victorian terraces with massive high rise looming immediately behind. Maybe this relaxation of approach is fully justified by the additional housing capacity it has allowed. Myself I find it hard to come to a firm opinion. But I really don't think there is any easy answer when it comes to assessing each site. It's not as easy as dismissing any objection as NIMBYism. Unless your position is that the principle of town planning should be discarded entirely - and when you start to question the "just build more" absolutists on that, it nearly always turns out that they actually don't like the idea of a complete market driven free-for-all (and for some reason they very often have very conservative aesthetic preferences when it comes down to it). They are usually applying a simplistic solution to something they haven't actually thought through the complexities of.
Click to expand...
Briefly - Brixton Society motivation - they've spent years trying to scale down Lexadon's development on the former Diamond Merchant plumbers site and make it to the liking of Baytree Road residents.
They are hardly going to then acquiesce in a much taller development on the Tesco's site are they?
 
teuchter said:
Probably most people would agree that fitting some homes onto this site would be a good thing, and also that there would be such a thing as too many (ie at some point most people would say "that's too high").

What's tricky is finding the balance. Unless you genuinely believe that any amount is ok, then there does have to be some discussion about where that balance is. Just dismissing any objection as "nimbys gotta nimby" is an easy way out of actually engaging with the problem of deciding what's appropriate and how to approach that decision. Of course an absolutist "no change anywhere" is also completely unhelpful but that's rarely what's being proposed by amenity groups or others who object to stuff.

I think the Brixton Society's tweet posted above is perhaps a little alarmist. But what are the motivations for objecting? It's not usually just selfish ones. It's about trying to protect an area from harmful development that makes it a worse place for everyone who lives there...including the future residents of newly built housing.

We read all these complaints of housing provision being severely restricted by nimbys and planning rules. But anyone who's paid attention to planning policy over the last 10-20 years or so will know that restrictions on height & density have already been massively relaxed, compared to what the norms were before.

Many of these sites, 15 years ago the argument would have been about whether 4 storeys could stretch to 5. Now it's about 8 vs 10 or 15 vs 20.

The results of this change in policy have been fairly dramatic across the more outer regions of london. Some people might even enjoy the increasingly common vistas of 2-storey victorian terraces with massive high rise looming immediately behind. Maybe this relaxation of approach is fully justified by the additional housing capacity it has allowed. Myself I find it hard to come to a firm opinion. But I really don't think there is any easy answer when it comes to assessing each site. It's not as easy as dismissing any objection as NIMBYism. Unless your position is that the principle of town planning should be discarded entirely - and when you start to question the "just build more" absolutists on that, it nearly always turns out that they actually don't like the idea of a complete market driven free-for-all (and for some reason they very often have very conservative aesthetic preferences when it comes down to it). They are usually applying a simplistic solution to something they haven't actually thought through the complexities of.
Click to expand...
I know people who are objecting because they can live with nine stories but think that if they do not object the developer will increase it to 15. I'm not sure how rational that is.
 
Winot said:
I know people who are objecting because they can live with nine stories but think that if they do not object the developer will increase it to 15. I'm not sure how rational that is.
Click to expand...
I think that's not irrational.
Important to understand that this is not a developer proposal, it's the council setting out broadly what it would allow, should a developer seek to develop the site.
If they say 9 storeys max, then certainly any developer will try and push for a bit more. There might be others reading this who will know more than I about how these "Site Allocation Development Plans" tend to pan out in other places where they have been adopted.
Also, I don't know whether the SADP has any specific time period on it. For example, might it get reviewed in 5 or 10 years, and the decision made that it would be ok to edge it up from 9 to 11 because it's not that much extra?

This is one of the reasons I'd prefer that these decisions about height be more related to a set of general principles, with some reasoning behind them. Because then it's easier to prevent that incremental increase over time - get one thing accepted then apply for something just ever so slightly bigger, once everyone is resigned to the first version. One thing is daylight which is why I brought it up before. If we agree that there is a minimum level of daylight that anyone should expect to remain available to them when they choose to live in a certain place, then that is measurable, and a proposal either does or doesn't cross the threshold. Instead we seem to have a minimum that it turns out can be chiselled away using dubious use of recommendations made for a different purpose. In which case, what's the point of having the minimum standard in the first place. Another measurable thing is relating building height to street width. That is a logical approach with lots of precedence.
 
CH1 said:
Briefly - Brixton Society motivation - they've spent years trying to scale down Lexadon's development on the former Diamond Merchant plumbers site and make it to the liking of Baytree Road residents.
They are hardly going to then acquiesce in a much taller development on the Tesco's site are they?
Click to expand...

You can see in the proposal being discussed, the end of the building that meets Baytree Rd is scaled down to something similar to that of the Diamond Merchant one (shown at right of image).

Screenshot 2024-04-23 at 15.04.37.jpg

(What's shown here is really a building form that's entirely based on "what's the maximum we can get away with at any one location on the site". It's just my subjective view but I don't really like this approach - it generates building forms that only make sense from that point of view, and which often don't really make sense from a streetscape point of view. It's fairly established, and expected by most people, that you have taller buildings along main roads and usually the tallest at important junctions, functioning as markers of a sort. That of course would have been the intention of the original Lambeth Town Hall with its clock tower. But here we have a building that seems to be stepping up in size as it approaches Brixton centre... but then has to chicken out and drop down again because of the already established building heights approaching that corner. You can argue that's just how it has to be, in a city where we want to increase density and preserve to some extent the character and function of historic buildings. But it doesn't produce a very coherent streetscape. Some might say that this is simply inevitable and can be interesting in itself. I don't know the answer but the point is there's no simple one.)
 
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By the way, at certain points in history the houses on Porden Rd and Baytree Rd would have been CPO'd and incorporated into a wider redevelopment that wouldn't have to grapple with the inconvenience of some existing low rise housing existing within a site that's actually suitable for a generally higher-density development.
 
I do often feel a little sorry for the homeowners in Porden Road. They have tolerated a lot of shit over the years. I wonder how many would gladly accept if they were offered genuinely generous CPO compensation.
 
Rushy said:
I do often feel a little sorry for the homeowners in Porden Road. They have tolerated a lot of shit over the years. I wonder how many would gladly accept if they were offered genuinely generous CPO compensation.
Click to expand...

There are 20 houses on that road, you could buy the whole lot for less than 20 million quid, which would free up from tescos to the the town hall.

Alex
 
alex_ said:
There are 20 houses on that road, you could buy the whole lot for less than 20 million quid, which would free up from tescos to the the town hall.

Alex
Click to expand...
Having your home CPOd would be horrible. I think that if you offered less than a million per house you would get lots of ultimately expensive resistance. Offer a genuinely generous sum and it would be a lot easier. If it's in the public good, make it worthwhile.
 
Rushy said:
Having your home CPOd would be horrible. I think that if you offered less than a million per house you would get lots of ultimately expensive resistance. Offer a genuinely generous sum and it would be a lot easier. If it's in the public good, make it worthwhile.
Click to expand...

The max price on that road is <1m, but yes - totally agree.

It’d free up space for another couple of hundred flats, especially bearing in mind they could all be taller.

Alex
 
teuchter said:
I think that's not irrational.
Important to understand that this is not a developer proposal, it's the council setting out broadly what it would allow, should a developer seek to develop the site.
If they say 9 storeys max, then certainly any developer will try and push for a bit more. There might be others reading this who will know more than I about how these "Site Allocation Development Plans" tend to pan out in other places where they have been adopted.
Also, I don't know whether the SADP has any specific time period on it. For example, might it get reviewed in 5 or 10 years, and the decision made that it would be ok to edge it up from 9 to 11 because it's not that much extra?

This is one of the reasons I'd prefer that these decisions about height be more related to a set of general principles, with some reasoning behind them. Because then it's easier to prevent that incremental increase over time - get one thing accepted then apply for something just ever so slightly bigger, once everyone is resigned to the first version. One thing is daylight which is why I brought it up before. If we agree that there is a minimum level of daylight that anyone should expect to remain available to them when they choose to live in a certain place, then that is measurable, and a proposal either does or doesn't cross the threshold. Instead we seem to have a minimum that it turns out can be chiselled away using dubious use of recommendations made for a different purpose. In which case, what's the point of having the minimum standard in the first place. Another measurable thing is relating building height to street width. That is a logical approach with lots of precedence.
Click to expand...
This document will become part of Lambeth's plan once adopted - they are supposed to be reviewed after 5 years, but often aren't (cost, changing planning policy, if it's thought to be working well etc).

In inner London boroughs where they think there is demand, developers will definitely see any height/massing parameters as a starting point and try to push for more. Given the location of this site I can't see any other scenario here. I don't know what the situation is, but I would have thought Tesco will have been party to discussions about this and would probably have been talking to developers/architects about what's possible etc.

That said, the evidence and design modelling that Lambeth have done shows fairly clearly what the impacts are likely to be. VuCity is starting to be used quite widely in plan-making - I'm not aware of anything such as this that has gone through the whole local plan process, so it has yet to be tested by the Planning Inspectorate, but I would hope that heights and layouts etc set out in a site allocations document that has would carry more weight than otherwise.
 
teuchter said:
Probably most people would agree that fitting some homes onto this site would be a good thing, and also that there would be such a thing as too many (ie at some point most people would say "that's too high").

What's tricky is finding the balance. Unless you genuinely believe that any amount is ok, then there does have to be some discussion about where that balance is. Just dismissing any objection as "nimbys gotta nimby" is an easy way out of actually engaging with the problem of deciding what's appropriate and how to approach that decision. Of course an absolutist "no change anywhere" is also completely unhelpful but that's rarely what's being proposed by amenity groups or others who object to stuff.

I think the Brixton Society's tweet posted above is perhaps a little alarmist. But what are the motivations for objecting? It's not usually just selfish ones. It's about trying to protect an area from harmful development that makes it a worse place for everyone who lives there...including the future residents of newly built housing.

We read all these complaints of housing provision being severely restricted by nimbys and planning rules. But anyone who's paid attention to planning policy over the last 10-20 years or so will know that restrictions on height & density have already been massively relaxed, compared to what the norms were before.

Many of these sites, 15 years ago the argument would have been about whether 4 storeys could stretch to 5. Now it's about 8 vs 10 or 15 vs 20.

The results of this change in policy have been fairly dramatic across the more outer regions of london. Some people might even enjoy the increasingly common vistas of 2-storey victorian terraces with massive high rise looming immediately behind. Maybe this relaxation of approach is fully justified by the additional housing capacity it has allowed. Myself I find it hard to come to a firm opinion. But I really don't think there is any easy answer when it comes to assessing each site. It's not as easy as dismissing any objection as NIMBYism. Unless your position is that the principle of town planning should be discarded entirely - and when you start to question the "just build more" absolutists on that, it nearly always turns out that they actually don't like the idea of a complete market driven free-for-all (and for some reason they very often have very conservative aesthetic preferences when it comes down to it). They are usually applying a simplistic solution to something they haven't actually thought through the complexities of.
Click to expand...
Seriously believe that the assumption should be that no new building in zones 1 or 2 should be below 7 stories and anything lower should be justofyied. We’ve had decades of dicking around with development and not building enough density.
 
teuchter said:
By the way, at certain points in history the houses on Porden Rd and Baytree Rd would have been CPO'd and incorporated into a wider redevelopment that wouldn't have to grapple with the inconvenience of some existing low rise housing existing within a site that's actually suitable for a generally higher-density development.
Click to expand...
It’s a shame this would never happen now tbh.
 
edcraw said:
Seriously believe that the assumption should be that no new building in zones 1 or 2 should be below 7 stories and anything lower should be justofyied. We’ve had decades of dicking around with development and not building enough density.
Click to expand...
So, if I'm on a street of 2-storey houses I can knock mine down and build a 7 storey one in its place?
 
It's pretty reasonable to be worried about intensification next door or the like but equally it seems pretty reasonable to conclude intensification is big part of the solution to building more housing in city centres.

London being a pretty low density / rise residential city it is inevitable that this changes.

So where do we intsenify? Lewisham station now looks pretty different from 15 years ago for one, as Vauxhall and Nine Elms etc etc. Why should Brixton be different?

(I will admit that aesthetically I do like Brixton as is, whilst also liking towers)
 
edcraw said:
It’s a shame this would never happen now tbh.
Click to expand...

In the olden days this happened because it was council led, I strongly suspect anyone getting CPO’ed these days would get a very raw deal.

But the value which could be created CPOing some of these sites could be enormous, if it was shared fairly - and remember an extra 100 flats is worth over 200k in council tax to Lambeth per year so they are already a winner, with the people loosing their houses it could work. It won’t, so fuck that shit.

Eventually the prison will close, and whoever owns the windmill estate will be very interested in that opportunity.

Alex
 
edcraw said:
Not what I said was it.
Click to expand...
You said new buildings but how do you define "new buildings"? Almost every site in London has had something on it previously.

So if you make a blanket proposal like minimum 7 storeys for new buildings you have to make all sorts of qualifications about what counts as a new building...and justify the underlying logic that you are using. And then you have to ask what advantages this approach has over what we currently have.

My point being that these kind of prescriptive rules are never as easy to implement as it might appear.

We actually already have something called Permitted Development that works a bit like that. The rules seem nice and simple at first sight but interpreting them in practice often isn't. Some cases end up getting decided in court, on the basis of legal interpretations rather than taking a sensible view about the specifics of a particular site (which is what the planning process attempts to do, imperfectly).
 
I was persuaded to go to the Herne Hill Hustings yesterday.
Unfortunately they held this is the ground floor amenity space beneath the main Baptist Chapel where public meetings have been held in the past.
The PA seemed a bit of a lash-up - possibly the same ghastly speakers they use at the Tate Library, with a mix of wearable telephone operator style wireless microphone for the presenter and a traditional podium mike for the candidate presentation.
For me it started off badly. The presenter wanted people to turn to their neighbour and say something for a minute or so - though what one was supposed to discuss was not clear to me.
The only candidate whose speech I could hear clearly was Chris French, the Lib Dem. Whether his voice was nicely pitched, or maybe he just was used to using a microphone who can say. Sorry Reform, Tories, Labour and Green and anyone else who was there, but I failed to note because although the presenter was energetic he was certainly not clearly audible (to me).

When the audience questions came it seems that the candidates were answering sans microphone seated in a row at the table at the front.
Couldn't hear a dickie bird so I left the meeting.

Yes - I did put my SpecSavers hearing aids in - and changed the batteries. But even they could not remedy the acoustic challenges of the Herne Hill Baptist church hall, with amateur PA only partly used.

Is there a thread for deaf/and/or hard of hearing?
Apart for Deaf Awareness Week 2016 and the rather odd thread "Friendships between deaf and hearing people" last used in 2017.
 
snowy_again said:
Clovis Salmon / Sam the Wheels got an OBE yesterday
Click to expand...
Blimey. Good for him and all that but I've never quite understood what they get handed out for. My mate's mum was a dinner lady and she got one which seemed odd, but if it makes them happy, more power to their elbow.
 
Sam got his for his film-making and contribution to the community.
www.theguardian.com

‘I went wherever there was fighting’: how Sam the Wheels filmed Brixton ablaze

From the tumult of the uprisings to everyday scenes, Clovis Salmon’s jerky camera captured Black British life. As his work hits the big screen, we meet the 94-year-old known as Sam the Wheels
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

More generally it can be for charity work, contribution or sheer longevity in a job (probably the dinner lady example). Anyone can be nominated. I'd rather more of that than the political gongs that are handed out for donations to political parties or party advisors.
 
editor said:
Blimey. Good for him and all that but I've never quite understood what they get handed out for. ...
Click to expand...

Order of the British Empire​

Civil Division

Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood​

St. James’s Palace, London SW1
30 December 2023
THE KING has been graciously pleased to give orders for the following promotions in, and appointments to, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire:
O.B.E.
To be Ordinary Officers of the Civil Division of the said Most Excellent Order:

Clovis Constantine SALMON​

Documentary Filmmaker
For services to Culture and to the Black Community.
 
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