Inside Hackney’s bizarre planning decision on Shoreditch Works
In the wake of ‘unprecedented’ scenes at Hackney Council’s planning committee, Nicholas Boys Smith asks ‘what next’ for London’s best new development
On 4th February one of the country’s best and most popular urban regeneration schemes came into kinetic contact with the Alice Though the Looking-Glass world of Hackney’s planning department and passed into a parallel world in which a building can simultaneously be too big and too small, too prominent and too obscure, too high and too short. It would be great satire were it not so grimly significant, comic opera where we need competent governance. Sadly, the joke’s greatest victim is London’s future growth and prosperity.
Shoreditch Works is superb urban regeneration. It would support 6,000 jobs and £150m in social value, providing the council with £10m in business rates and £20m in community infrastructure levy. Local charities and ward councillors support it. It looks lovely. It enjoys elephantine public approval. Create Streets ran three Visual Preference Surveys comparing the streets now to the proposed future. 76 to 78 per cent preferred Shoreditch Works, a support shared by all demographics of income, politics, age, race, region or sex. Labour voters and the young liked it most. This development has dream levels of approval.
Hackney’s planners loathe it.
The 130-page planners’ report into the scheme is the most unconvincing planning assessment I have read: a litany of mutually contradictory complaints, in defiance of common sense and natural justice. In Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen is able to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’. During the two hours and 34 minutes of Wednesday night’s tragi-comic meeting I counted at least six impossible, or downright silly, demands.
Officials complained that the application was rushed, even though it has been in pre-application for four years. The pre-meet with councillors was two years’ ago.
Officials complained that the proposal was vague despite having 450 plans and 9,o84 pages, over seven times as long as War and Peace.
Down the rabbit hole
Officials complained that the scheme’s largest building was both too prominent (though it dominates in only five of 49 views) and simultaneously that it was too hidden. It should, said one, be an ‘intentional landmark’ like the conservation area’s other towers whilst also being less prominent. This is down the rabbit hole stuff.
Officials complained that Shoreditch Works would set an unwelcome precedent for the surrounding conversation area even though it differs from the rest of neighbourhood having been more heavily bombed and having lost most of its Victorian buildings.
Officials complained that the development would ‘change’ the neighbourhood (self-evidently) whilst simultaneously conceding that none of the post-war buildings being demolished merited preservation.
The Planning Chair complained that because what she termed one ‘rule’ (on affordable workspace) was unmet (in itself, arguable) that the scheme was un-approvable. This misunderstands English planning. Hackney has an affordable workspace ‘policy’ not a ‘rule’. It’s possible to fail an individual policy and still be compliant on balance. This is also a trivial reason to reject such a world-beating scheme.
The GLA should end the misery and call the scheme in for the good of London and its citizens
Hackney’s councillors deserve praise. They wrestled with the least well-served planning meeting I have ever witnessed and voted in favour. However, the chair then promptly ruled that they could not actually accept the scheme and that the decision must be deferred. So, after four years, 9,084 pages and millions of pounds, the answer is ‘more delay’. With pre-election purdah coming and a possible post-election change of administration, it is not a good joke. The looking-glass is outshining reality.
Hackney was offered a pearl. And their officers have thrown it away because they don’t like the colour of the buckle on the jewel case.
The GLA should end the misery and call the scheme in for the good of London and its citizens.
Nicholas Boys Smith is the founder and chairman of Create Streets. His history of London’s streets, No Free Parking is available from Bonnier books.