Terrifying loss of accommodation from industrial areas in London

[adapted from an email chain from Professor Mark Brearley]

There is now substantial loss of accommodation ongoing from industrial areas in London, due to the permitted development liberalisation. Industrial areas are not immune to this strip-out.

The below are excerpts from The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015:

B1 offices

Class O – offices to dwellinghouses
Permitted development
O. Development consisting of a change of use of a building and any land within its curtilage from a use falling within Class B1(a) (offices) of the Schedule to the Use Classes Order, to a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of that Schedule.

B8 storage

 Permitted development P. Development consisting of a change of use of a building and any land within its curtilage from a use falling within Class B8 (storage or distribution centre) of the Schedule to the Use Classes Order to a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of that Schedule.

Most industrial buildings can be presented as B1(a) or B8 if an owner needs to (in order to, for example, get away with conversion to residential). I assume that very few industrial buildings in a city like London will have clear planning status, pinning them a particular one of those anyway-semi-meaningless B use classes. So it all blurs around, and the result is that most industrial accommodation, everywhere, is now triply at risk. At risk from Local Plans that fail to designate for policy protection, at risk from ad-hoc planning decisions that disregard policy, at risk from permitted development that goes around planning.

The image is of is an example, a building currently being converted to residential in one of the Old Kent Road industrial areas, I believe via permitted development. The same is happening in the nearby Parkhouse Street industrial area, against what even the gung-ho local planners would have allowed through planning application. The same is happening all over town, such as in the Lower Sydenham industrial area where a building, with a very unfortunate relationship to assorted fairly rough industrial uses such as a concrete batching plant, is turning residential.

Grim.

We are Londoners, we don’t want a suburbanised city.

Hackbridge industry is now nearly all evicted and the accommodation demolished. More housing estates coming soon. When Mark Brearley was at the GLA he tried valiantly to argue for a more subtle and mixed future, a more urban future, but to no avail... here's what's happening now: