British Land’s £3.3bn plans for its 53-acre Canada Water development have been given the green light by Southwark Council despite some objections from local residents and nearby landlord Canary Wharf Group over the impact of the scheme on public transport.
Chair of Southwark’s planning committee and councillor Martin Seaton said towards the end of the hearing: “On balance this is an excellent scheme. One that will enhance the community.
“I’m more than convinced from the evidence we’ve heard that the regular reviews will allow us to now continue to improve the scheme.
“This is the starting point of a scheme that will may be last long after I’m a councillor.
“The cautionary tone is that the viability model we’re using is not fit for purpose for large, complex schemes and others elsewhere need to think about this so we can make decisions and allow companies like BL to make schemes that are viable.”
CWG had called for the application to be refused or deferred until British Land had committed to contributing £200m to the Jubilee Line to negate the impact of its scheme on the tube line, which it believes will make congestion worse.
In response to the claims made in the previous committee hearing by CWG a representative for British Land said at the committee meeting: “I wouldn’t like to say you were mis-lead, but the person who spoke last week was very selective in sites that he chose.
“The example of Battersea […] it didn’t have any transport connections so they had to provide the northern line as that was the only way they were going to deliver anything on that site likewise Canary Wharf you may recall back in the 80s when their wasn’t the Jubilee Line the only way of opening up that site to development was to provide the infrastructure.
“We are now benefitting from that infrastructure, but what is apparent from the sign off from TfL is that they are confident that the package we have put together mitigates the impact from the development and there is no need for British Land to buy more trains for the Jubilee Line.
“There is also a colleague behind me, Roger Madelin, who led on the Kings Cross project for many years and he has assured me that the contribution there was £5m to transport infrastructure.
“It isn’t the case that all these major opportunities have to provide hundreds of millions of pounds.”
British Land is to pay £90m in S106 funding and £60m in CIL payments of which £33m is towards transport.
A representative from Transport for London at the committee meeting said that with its already committed plans to increase the number trains operating on the Jubilee line and overground line per hour and British Land’s contributions it was projecting that the public transport in Canada Water “will get no worse” because of the development.
The REIT’s scheme at Canada Water will deliver more than 7m sq ft over a range of uses including a minimum of 2,000 homes, of which 35% will be affordable across. The £700m first phase for which detailed planning was achieved along with the outline masterplan will include 265 new homes across a variety of tenures, 20,645 sq ft of retail space, 409,975 sq ft of workspace and a new leisure centre, in buildings ranging up to 35 storeys.
