A Shoreditch local journalist reads about France’s school money permanently in transit and asks whether Hackney’s growth plan will deliver its promised homes and jobs, or just more paperwork
A Plan With Big Numbers
Earlier this year, Hackney Council published the Future Shoreditch Area Action Plan, a long-term blueprint for the neighbourhood that the council says could create up to 11,000 jobs over fifteen years. The Hackney Citizen covered it under the headline new Shoreditch growth plan could create up to 11,000 jobs. The plan envisages around 200,000 square metres of office floorspace, about 15,600 square metres of retail and community space and around 500 more homes across fifteen potential redevelopment sites, with developers asked to aim for half of new homes to be affordable.
The consultation ran from 3 March to 7 April, after which the plan goes to the Planning Inspectorate for independent examination. With City Hall having just approved the Shoreditch Works scheme against Hackney officers’ advice, it seems a good moment to ask what the plan actually promises and whether it can deliver.
The Key Rules
The plan contains some of the toughest local planning policies in London. It proposes a general ban on buildings created solely for office use, so that new developments include a mix of uses. It wants ten per cent of new office space to be affordable. It restricts tall buildings, defined as thirty metres or higher, to specific zones or designated opportunity sites. It proposes banning the conversion of homes into short-term holiday lets. It limits new night-time venues and large retail spaces to areas such as Old Street, Shoreditch High Street and Curtain Road, and requires developers building next to existing clubs to deal with noise.
Taken together, these are the rules of a borough that has watched Shoreditch change at extraordinary speed and wants to slow some of that change down without stopping growth entirely.
Money In Transit
The London Prat this week ran a piece on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money permanently in transit, about a state that spends more than half its economy while students still march about overcrowded classrooms. The money, the ministry insists, exists. It is simply in transit. I read it and thought about every regeneration plan I have covered in East London. The jobs, the homes and the community space are always real on paper. Whether they arrive is another matter.
Local plans are not budgets, of course. They set rules rather than spend money. But they share the same weakness as the French ministry in the Prat piece. Their success depends on many other actors, developers, investors, City Hall, the Planning Inspectorate, doing what the plan hopes. Shoreditch Works has already shown how quickly that can change. A borough can write a careful plan. A developer can ask the Mayor to step in. A deputy mayor can decide that the benefits outweigh the harm.
The Short-Term Let Question
The proposed ban on converting homes into holiday lets will be popular with many residents. Shoreditch is one of the most visited parts of East London, and the pressure from short-term letting has been felt for years in buildings where neighbours change every weekend and wheeled suitcases rattle down the stairs at three in the morning. Enforcement is the challenge. London has had a limit on short-term letting in the past, but residents and councils have long argued that it is hard to police. A new local rule will only be as strong as the council’s capacity to check it.
Who The Plan Is For
The fundamental question in Shoreditch is who the neighbourhood is for. In the 1990s and 2000s, cheap warehouse space drew artists, designers and small businesses. Their presence made the area fashionable. Fashion drew money. Money drew offices, hotels and members’ clubs. The original artists, in many cases, moved further east. The Future Shoreditch plan is, at heart, an attempt to keep a place for the kind of small, creative, local enterprises that made the area what it is, through affordable workspace and limits on office-only buildings.
Whether ten per cent affordable workspace is enough is a fair question. Whether it will be achieved, given that Shoreditch Works was approved at just over five per cent, is a sharper one. The plan sets an ambition. The first big test has already fallen short of it.
What Residents Can Do
The formal consultation has closed, but the examination stage still matters, and residents can follow it through the council’s consultation pages and local press. Planning decisions in Shoreditch are made in public meetings, and residents can register to speak. It is unglamorous, slow and often frustrating. It is also one of the few ways ordinary people shape the buildings they will live beside for decades. You can follow my coverage on my author page.
A Plan Meets A Pavement
Walk down Curtain Road and you can still find the businesses the plan is trying to protect: a print shop, a framer, a small studio above a cafe, each one a survivor of two decades of rising rents. The Future Shoreditch plan is, in a sense, written for them. It is a very good plan for a neighbourhood that is disappearing, and a very good plan for one that might yet survive, if the rules hold. The simplest support anyone can give in the meantime costs nothing in policy terms. Use them. Affordable workspace, in the end, starts with paying the people already in it.