2,500 homes coming at Lewisham shopping centre?
The owner of Lewisham shopping centre Landsec has unveiled a new consultation on plans to rebuild the site.
It’s around six months late and one of the least informative consultations I’ve seen.
It’s mostly a lot of buzzwords and phrases thrown around with next to no detail on how many homes are planned, building heights, total shops space and much else.
However, if we look at financial results revealed by the company today we can see that 2,500 homes could be built:
In the consultation for the public, the only real detail is more walking links through the site which was a given.
Amusingly it raises the Bakerloo Line (yep, the project with no funding) and states:
“Hyper connected to central London (Bakerloo Line) and the South East.
Well, it has the DLR and Southeastern.
The best case scenario if funding was approved in recent years was a 2030 opening. Now with no funding and no sign of any funding, 2035 would be seen as a great result.
The consultation site is so lacking in any sort of real detail – especially considering this follows the first round in early 2020 – that I keep thinking I’m missing clicking on the relevant pages.
Click here to view and comment.
Agree the consultation is incredibly vague and actually feels determined to not give anything concrete away in terms of their plans. Housing is hardly mentioned, despite it seemingly being one of the main drivers of the redevelopment. It’s not a massive site so I assume any new towers would need to be of significant scale to reach 2,500 homes. I wonder if the briefing sessions being held within the shopping centre itself will give anything further away (I doubt it – probably just posters of what’s on the website).
Does that table indicate the shopping centre will actually be smaller once the redevelopment takes place? ie going from 330,000 to 235,000 sq ft?
London is quickly turning into one boring, closed, sameish sleeping residential block.
Please god may the plan be to actually demolish the hideous building and surrounding drab units such as that on Lewis Grove. But from the access route map I’m beginning to think they’ll just be applying lipstick to the pig
One of the last interesting locations in Lewisham, both socially and architecturally. Why do you people always want everything the same according to the latest redeveloper brainwash?
You think the town centre, and the shopping centre specifically, is architecturally interesting?
I agree, and it’s inverted too. Public transport was designed to bring people into towns and the City but town centres and the City are becoming more residential, with jobs moving outside of London. If you don’t have a retail or service job there’s a good chance you’ll need a car or bike to get to work, or will do in the future. Sadiq is so committed to the 2-state solution he’s modelling it in London and the north/south circular is the green line.
Town centres are reverting to the norm seen in other developed nations and how London was until the deliberate govt policy of depopulating London for new towns post war. That was revered from the 90s on.
🤔 The consultation is hidden behind a sign up page. Don’t think I’ll bother because whatever we say, we will get what LandSec and Lewisham council wanted in the first place.
Completely agree that there is a disappointing lack of detail. I feel they are asking the same questions they asked a year ago. Why bother with the consultation last time if they weren’t going to start actually doing some design work!
Out of curiosity I wonder why the table says they own 100% but are at the ‘site assembly stage’? Presumably if they still need to purchase properties to assemble the site it means they don’t own it 100%. For instance the building where ‘Sparrow’ restaurant is – seems like it is part of the development site, but wonder if landscape own it yet.
More than double the number of homes than the Lewisham gateway site which is 8+ buildings up to 24 storeys I think. So agree with SB that 2500 units sounds like they are going to be v tall – probably why they don’t mention heights anywhere in their ‘consultation’
MJ>Presumably if they still need to purchase properties to assemble the site
Could be that they own the freehold to everything but not leases(e.g. paying tenants to end leases early). Could be that there are restrictions on use of the land or protected buildings/features that need…unprotecting. Some utilities have a right to exist in certain places despite not owning the land they are on/under, and recorded accessways to utilities may be in the way of a housing block, and they need to work out how to reroute them and who owns the places they want to reroute it through. That 4 inch water pipe running across the back of someones garden might need to be dug up and replaced with a 36 inch pipe, etc.