(Nov 27): A £10 billion redevelopment plan to build thousands of homes in London’s affluent Earls Court neighbourhood got partial approval from local authorities, more than a decade after the site first secured planning permission.
The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham has signed off on the 44-acre project, which proposes to build 4,000 homes as part of the redevelopment, according to a statement on Thursday from the Earls Court Development Company (ECDC). The site will also be home to leisure and cultural venues, as well as 2.5 million sq ft of workspaces.
The project still needs to get a green light from the neighboring Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea since it straddles both the districts.
The ECDC is a joint venture between Delancey Real Estate Partners, Dutch pension provider APG Asset Management and Transport for London’s property company, Places for London. The first phase of the redevelopment targets to deliver 1,300 of those homes by 2030.
The Earls Court redevelopment, once the site of a major exhibition centre that was demolished in 2015, has endured a long history of local opposition combined with a downturn in the city’s residential market.
Delancey and APG bought the site for £425 million in 2019 from CapCo, a real estate investment trust that’s now known as Shaftesbury Capital plc following a merger. CapCo had secured permission to build 7,500 homes in 2012 from both Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham councils.
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While CapCo cleared the existing buildings from the site, its construction plans that included increasing the number of homes to 10,000 collided with the reality of a downturn in London’s upscale housing market by then. The project suffered another blow after the Labour party, which opposed the redevelopment, took control of the Hammermsith & Fulham council from the Tories.
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