Five hundred new homes, eleven thousand jobs, and a very careful sentence about affordable workspace. The Future Shoreditch Area Action Plan is either the neighbourhood’s rescue or its final chapter.
Hackney Council has published the Future Shoreditch Area Action Plan, a statutory planning document covering development across the neighbourhood all the way through to 2040, and I have spent the better part of a week reading it properly so I can tell you what is actually in it, rather than what the various developers and campaign groups are already, predictably, spinning it as. The plan identifies fifteen separate opportunity sites capable of delivering roughly five hundred new homes, with what the document itself describes as a strong emphasis on genuinely affordable tenures including social rent and London Living Rent, alongside two hundred thousand square metres of new office space and up to eleven thousand new jobs.
Those numbers, read cold, sound like the kind of thing you would expect any council to celebrate uncritically, and I have no doubt the press release writers over at the Town Hall are already drafting exactly that kind of celebration. I would gently suggest holding your applause until we see what “strong emphasis” actually cashes out to in practice, because Shoreditch has heard promises about genuinely affordable housing attached to major redevelopment schemes before, and the gap between the planning document’s language and the finished building’s actual rent roll has, historically, been the entire story.
One detail worth flagging specifically: a decision on at least one major application tied to this broader plan was postponed back in February, after councillors rejected planning officers’ initial recommendation for refusal, sending the application back for amendments specifically addressing affordable workspace and heritage concerns. That is council-speak for a genuinely contested fight happening behind closed doors, one where the balance between what gets built and who can actually afford to occupy it once it is finished remains, as of this writing, still very much unresolved.
I want to be fair to the plan’s ambitions, because not everything in it deserves the reflexive cynicism this neighbourhood has, understandably, developed after two decades of watching promises evaporate somewhere between the planning document and the ribbon cutting. Retaining a genuine emphasis on creative and small business workspace, rather than simply maximising office floorspace for whichever tech firm can pay the most, would represent a real, meaningful course correction from the pattern this area has lived through since Google first opened its Campus London back in 2012 and the rest of the tech sector followed close behind.
What I keep coming back to, walking these same streets I have covered for years now, is that Shoreditch has never actually lacked ambition or investment. What it has repeatedly lacked is a plan that protects the people and businesses already here while that investment arrives, rather than simply displacing them and calling the resulting neighbourhood a success story for whoever moves in afterward. Fifteen years from now, when this plan’s 2040 horizon finally arrives, I genuinely hope to be writing about a Shoreditch that kept its actual community intact through this process. I have, I will admit, learned to keep my expectations carefully calibrated.
I will be tracking each of these fifteen sites individually as applications come forward, because a document this size deserves more than one column’s worth of scrutiny, and this neighbourhood deserves a local press that actually reads the fine print rather than just reprinting the council’s own summary.
More from this author at Cyndi Himmelstiere, prat.uk.