A big block between Curtain Road and Worship Street has its permission, but the numbers, the politics and the start date are all still blurry.
LONDON, England (Ditch Pitch) – A city block that has been argued over for years now has its planning permission, and the signature that counts did not come from Hackney. Shoreditch Works, the redevelopment of the block bounded by Worship Street, Curtain Road and Scrutton Street, was approved by the Deputy Mayor for Planning, Jules Pipe, at a City Hall hearing, after Hackney’s own planning officers had recommended refusal.
What has actually been approved
According to ianVisits’ report on the approval, the scheme swaps low-rise light industrial buildings for a mix of homes and commercial buildings arranged around a new central courtyard. The plans were trimmed from the original 2024 version. Most of the buildings are six storeys, with the tallest reaching 18, and the site gets nearly an acre of new public space. A third of the new homes are to be offered at affordable rates.
The scale of the commercial side depends on who is counting. ianVisits describes roughly 80,500 square metres of commercial, residential, retail, laboratory and creative studio space in total. The planning blog Planning Geek’s write-up of the hearing gives about 65,000 square metres of office and workspace and about 4,080 square metres of retail, and says those figures come from the Architects’ Journal rather than the decision notice. It also gives 78 homes, 35 percent of them affordable according to Mr Pipe, on a site of about 1.4 hectares with 11 buildings. Those descriptions are not necessarily in conflict, since one is a grand total and the other a breakdown, but the lesson is to read the final decision documents before quoting any single number at a party.
How a borough refusal became a City Hall yes
The route is the interesting part. Hackney validated the application in March 2025, and Planning Geek reports that officers recommended refusal. ianVisits says the objection was mainly about scale. Hackney’s planning sub-committee met in February and deferred its decision, and ianVisits says councillors had provisionally backed the scheme anyway, which is a very Shoreditch way of saying yes and no on the same evening.
Then City Hall stepped in. Planning Geek says the Mayor of London called the application in on 9 March, and the public hearing was held on 7 October. At that hearing the Deputy Mayor approved it. ianVisits reports that Mr Pipe acknowledged the site sits outside the part of Hackney set aside for developments of this size, but said the scheme complies with the London Plan and has high-quality design. That is a notable pairing: a tall-ish block can be in the wrong place by the borough’s reckoning and still be in the right place by the capital’s.
Supporters and sceptics, in their own terms
The case for the scheme was made loudly, and not by neutral parties. Nicholas Boys Smith, chairman of the Create Streets organisation, wrote in a City AM column after the committee deferral that the borough had passed up a rare chance, summed up in his words as “Hackney was offered a pearl.” He argued that surveys run by his own organisation found 76 to 78 percent of respondents preferred the proposed streetscape to the current one. The surveyor and the advocate are the same outfit, which does not make the finding wrong, only worth a raised eyebrow. In an earlier column before the meeting he had floated City Hall stepping in if councillors refused, and in the later one he called on the Greater London Authority to do exactly that, which is, in the end, what happened.
The sceptical side is thinner in the sources I could find, but it is not nothing. Hackney’s officers objected mainly on scale, and Planning Geek says heritage groups objected at the borough stage. The same blog also records a caution of its own: it could not independently verify the final signed planning notices or a completed Section 106 agreement, and the documents in the City Hall pack were drafts. In plain English, the headline says approved, but the paperwork behind it had not all been checked by the people writing it up.
The joke and the serious point
I write for The London Prat, so I am professionally obliged to notice that a planning story with two sets of floorspace figures, a deferral, a call-in and a hearing is a gift. For readers who want the comedy side of London life, there is Britain’s answer to the Onion and the broader London humor news archive. The wider Bohiney Magazine network does the jokes at full volume, but here I would rather stick to what the sources say.
The serious point is that this is a lesson in who decides what gets built in Shoreditch. A borough can refuse, defer or dither, and the capital can take the question away from it. Whether you think that is a sensible safety valve for housing and workspace or a loss of local say probably depends on whether you liked the scheme to begin with. If you want a pocket-sized reminder of how English can bend under pressure, try a Cockney rhyming slang explainer, because “planning permission” is not the only phrase that means different things in different mouths.
What to watch next
Planning Geek says no start date or build programme has been confirmed, so the hoardings are not going up tomorrow. Watch for the signed decision notices, the final legal agreement and any word on the affordable housing and the courtyard. Until then, the block is a rare thing in Shoreditch: a development with a permission and no timetable.
You can read more of my Shoreditch reporting at The London Prat, and I will keep an eye on Curtain Road for whatever comes next.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/