7 minute read
Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide | Russell Curtis
An end to the war on the suburbs?
We should mourn the passing of Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide, says Russell Curtis
Russell Curtis is Director at RCKa architects
Announced with considerable fanfare in 2018, and becoming formal planning policy the following year, Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide SPD was London’s first—and, even now, most ambitious—attempt at encouraging London’s woefully sparse outer areas to do more to meet the city’s housing needs.
The publication made no bones about its intentions: “The evolution of the suburbs to provide homes that will meet the needs of a growing population”, the introduction to the SPD stated. It went on: “It must however be recognised that delivering approximately 10,000 homes in the suburban places of Croydon will result in an evolution of the existing character of suburban streets and that the increased density of homes can impact on the amenity of existing residents if not properly managed.”
The guide was rightly heralded as a progressive and practical attempt to deliver new homes in those places best able to accommodate them, and it was quickly celebrated as an exemplar for how to sustainably densify the city’s fringes. Croydon’s in-house Spatial Planning Team took home a Planning Award in 2019 and the guide was Highly Commended at the New London Awards the same year. (From a personal point of view, it was an important reference for our own Small Sites SPD in Lewisham, which was adopted by the council a year ago this month).
However, just three years on, Croydon’s Design Guide is no more. In May Croydon elected its first Mayor who had, in the runup to the election, promised voters that one of his first acts would be to revoke the “dreaded” SPD which he claimed has “destroyed” Croydon’s character and led to the “destruction” of homes—a peculiar claim given the huge number of dwellings it had in fact enabled in a relatively short time.
The SPD had been produced in response to Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, which was first published in draft in 2017 but not formally adopted until March 2021. The Plan enshrined the need for the boroughs to consider the importance of small sites in meeting London’s housing needs. For the first time, every London planning authority was tasked with finding ways to encourage development on sites with a total area of less than a quarter of a hectare (roughly the third of a standard football pitch), with a tenyear small-site housing target set out in unequivocal terms.
Not only was this to be a way of delivering much-needed homes, but the Plan also acknowledged the importance of nudging small-scale developers back to a market that had become dominated by a handful of volume housebuilders since the 2008 financial crash.
Inevitably, the Plan’s publication was met with hyperbolic outcry: a “war on the suburbs” is how Conservative GLA member Andrew Boff described the proposals, oddly failing to recognise that small-scale infill development tends to deliver a higher proportion of family homes than small flats; another bête noire of his.
After a robust challenge from several outer-London boroughs, Sadiq Khan was forced to dramatically reduce the small sites housing targets and blunt the "presumption in favour” that the Plan had demanded. While the earlier draft version required Croydon Council to deliver the highest absolute number of homes on small sites of any of the London planning authorities, it was then subject to the greatest net reduction, with its ten-year target reducing from 15,110 to 6,410 - a drop of nearly 60%.
Croydon is one of London’s least dense boroughs, even when its 2,300 hectares of green belt and Metropolitan Open Land are excluded from the calculation. At 65 people per hectare, it has around a third the population density of Islington. Its number of homes per hectare is broadly the same as other similarly sized outer boroughs, such as Barnet and Kingston. And, like those boroughs, it clearly can accommodate many more.
In its defence, Croydon has delivered a lot of new homes in the last decade and a half—more than any other borough—so it’s perhaps fair to argue that the council had indeed “played its part” in meeting the city's housing need. Yet the figures are misleading. Much of Croydon’s new development is concentrated in the urban centre, where clusters of tall residential towers have sprung up around East Croydon station in easy reach of central London. This is good. Less good, however, is the quality of much of this new housing. Until halted by the implementation of an Article 4 Direction, more new dwellings were created under dubious Permitted Development Rights (that allow commercial buildings to be cheaply converted to residential outside conventional planning permission) in Croydon than any other London borough— not a statistic to be proud of given the sub-standard quality and small size of many of them.
SUBURBAN DESIGN GUIDE
SUPPLEMENTARY PLANNING DOCUMENT
CROYDON COUNCIL
RIGHT: Peter Barber Architects exemplifying high quality and enjoyable design that enhances the character of the local area without replicating the exisitng pattern, scale, form or materials of the context. (Photo: Morley von Sternberg)
Until the introduction of the Suburban Design Guide, the leafier southern wards had gotten away without making much of a contribution.
Aware of the inherently risky nature of small sites, and that developers interested in taking them on are less able to absorb the cost of delayed or unpredictable planning decisions, the design guide presented a series of suburban intensification methods which, if employed, were highly likely to be nodded through. The acquisition of a pair of suburban semis - of which Croydon has many thousands - could easily lead to their replacement with a small block of flats at the front of the plot and mews houses in the rear garden. In this scenario, there could be a net gain of up to ten homes with no loss of family housing. The guide demanded that new development be no lower than three storeys—a not unreasonable request if we are to have any hope of densifying London’s laughably sparse peripheral areas.
Of course, this would inevitably mean that some areas of the borough would experience some change, but this is a small price to pay for living in this great city. There would be benefits too.
As the guide’s introduction made clear, higher housing density inevitably attracts local amenities and better social infrastructure (shops, restaurants, schools, healthcare and community facilities) that might actually mean suburbanites wouldn't need to hop into their giant SUVs quite so often.
It’s no surprise that those areas most resistant to the principle of intensification tend to lie on the city’s fringes, and often consider themselves to be residents of the home counties rather than London. The green belt itself is often declared as an unnecessary and anachronistic constraint on the capital's growth, and while there is some truth in this, we should start by turning our attention inwards a little: it is the sparsely populated “greyfields” of outer London that we need to tackle first. The citizens of the suburbs must accept that the evolution of local character is a small price to pay for easy access to everything this wonderful city has to offer—and that it is also their duty to enable others to do the same.
Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide was a valiant and progressive attempt to achieve this. We should mourn its passing. n
1.2 WHAT IS COVERED BY THIS GUIDANCE?
THIS GUIDANCE IS BROKEN DOWN INTO THREE SECTIONS: 1. Suburban Residential Development 2. Areas of Focussed Intensifcation 3. Residential Extensions and Alterations.
The table below shows where the guidance is applicable.
SUBURBAN RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT
Residential development proposals, generally under 25 homes
Mixed-use proposals, including those that would deliver more than 25 homes Not generally located in the Croydon Metropolitan Centre and District Centres* Anywhere in the borough X X
X
X X
X
Figure 2.10c: Where surrounding buildings are predominantly detached dwellings of two (2) or more storeys, new developments may be three (3) storeys with an additional foor contained within the roof space or set back from the building envelope below.
Figure 2.10d: Where surrounding buildings are predominantly single storey, new development should seek to accommodate a third storey within the roof space.
Figure 2.10e: Where surrounding buildings are semi-detached homes in a planned estate, new developments should seek to accommodate a full third storey partially contained within the roof space to ensure the characteristic scale of the buildings along the street is maintained.
Figure 2.10f: The addition of a third storey within terraced houses will only generally only be through accommodation within the roof. The acceptability of this will be based on the merit of design and the impact on street scene, given the consistent nature of continuous eaves and roof heights. A terraced house on a corner plot may seek to provide a full additional storey.
BELOW: A development of flats designed by Alison Brooks Architects within an existing residential street (Photo: Paul Riddle)
RIGHT: Overlooking distances concerning solely new development reflects the establishment of a new condition associated with new residences, rather than a loss of existing amenity through a new development
New to existing 3rd party dwelling: 18m separation New to new dwelling: 12m separation
New to host dwelling: 15m separation
