Proposed scheme upon completion in the early 2030s. Image credit Ballymore.
The scheme which consulted with the general public as Project Flourish is proposed for the land currently used as Sainsbury’s supermarket.
The area better known as Kensal Canalside is the largest brownfield site within the royal borough and forms, the area has a housing target of at least 3500 new homes with an upper limit of 5000 across four separate schemes.
The hybrid planning application submitted which will now be submitted in early 2022 rather than late 2021, will involve the construction and relocation of the large Sainsbury’s supermarket which has been in place since the early 1980s and will be relocated immediately to the southwest from 2023.
Above this will be the entire social rent housing for the scheme alongside professionally managed rental housing alongside a new public park for completion in the mid to late 2020s.
Subsequent reserved matters applications will provide for the most part housing for private sale alongside public realm improvements to the Paddington Branch Canal, and connections to an adjacent scheme that has been submitted concurrently by Berkley St William at the former North Kensington Gasworks for no more than 750 homes.
Plans for the Ballymore & Sainsbury’s joint venture are expected to deliver between 2,800 according to recent mentions on social media down to 2,600 in an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submitted to the royal borough in Autumn 2021.
Opposition to the single biggest net addition to the boroughs housing stock this side of the millennium the scheme is inevitable given the successful attempt, by the already comfortably housed to block third-revised proposals for 110 new home infill projects on the site of the Trellick Tower and Edenham estate in North Kensington.
Plans would have been split for social rent and for open market rent to subside the discounted rent units and improve visual and active travel links throughout the site.
Opposition plans spearheaded by local councilors and built environment charities will mean that a series of co-design workshops will take place over the months and years ahead, whilst over 3,000 households are on the borough’s social housing waitlist the majority to which reside outside of the local borough.
Moving onto affordable housing both schemes the Sainsburys & Ballymore joint venture as well as the Berkley St William proposal on the decommissioned Kensal Gasworks site will deliver between 3,250 and 3,550 new homes across both sites, which have been planned and consulted on an effectively concurrent basis according to public consultation docs that were published throughout 2021.
With this in mind, it is reasonable to expect 1,137 and 1,242 affordable tenured homes across both applications cumulatively, assuming the 35% affordable housing threshold is met and no shenanigans with financial visibility statements.
These affordable homes are expected split between 60% for either Social Rent, London Affordable Rent or London Living Rent with the remaining 40% for intermediate housing tenures namely Part Rent / Part Buy shared ownership.
However, consideration must be given to the stark reality that the average house price as of September 2020 is now at a stratospheric £1.3 million, meaning that said house prices are in excess of 36x of median incomes making it by far the most expensive borough in the country. This is eight times more than the mortgage would offer based on income.
By contrast, there are about 3,110 people on the housing register with over 2,731 in temporary accommodation with 75% of those residing in the meantime outside of the borough.
