News

Crisis abandons plans for major social housing experiment

Finance | Gemma Ware | 1 Nov 2007

Crisis has dropped plans to build a £60m urban village for former homeless people in East London after lawyers advised that an appeal against an earlier planning rejection was unlikely to be successful.

Proposals for the Mildmay Urban Village, which the charity and it partners proposed to build on the site of the Mildmay Mission Hospital in Shoreditch, included a new hospital, church, primary healthcare centre and over 370 affordable homes.

The plans were influenced by a US housing model where low-income families and formerly homeless people live in a community with health and support services on their doorstep. The project was kick-started by a £3.6m donation from Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour in 2003.

Despite a recommendation from Tower Hamlets planning officers and support from the Greater London Authority, the original plans were rejected by Tower Hamlets Council in October 2005 because of the design and size of the proposed 23-storey building and the impact it would have on other residential buildings.

A campaign against the proposals from local residents complained they would have been left in the shadow of the building.

Crisis and its partners, which included Genesis Housing Group, Mildmay Mission Hospital, Shoreditch Tabernacle Baptist Church and English Partnerships, had decided to appeal against the decision in a process due to begin this week.

However, in a joint statement issued last week, Crisis and its partners said the planning appeal had been withdrawn by mutual consent. “After much careful consideration, the partners have concluded that it will not be possible to deliver this ground-breaking development.”

A spokeswoman from Crisis said that the charity had been advised by lawyers that the problems around the design and local impact of the development meant the chance of a successful outcome was “significantly lower than before”.

“We had to think very carefully and couldn’t really ignore the advice, nor would it be right for us to incur any further costs relating to the appeal,” she said.

Crisis would not reveal how much the proposals, design or planning appeal for the development had cost it to date, but it confirmed it had begun fundraising for a capital appeal around the urban village.  The charity would not disclose how much had been raised so far, but said that all donors had been contacted and would be offered the chance to have their donations returned.

The regeneration partners will now put together an alternative scheme to regenerate the church and hospital. Crisis said it planned to identify opportunities in other London boroughs or elsewhere in the UK for alternative sites where it could build the experimental social housing model.

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