BACKGROUND

The Developer’s Plans

Here’s the history…

Dukeminster, on behalf of the developer Hackney Walk Ltd, brought initial plans to a pre-planning meeting of Hackney Council in October 2019. They proposed to develop the site in two phases. Firstly to build on the western end of the car park providing a new smaller Tesco supermarket, parking, and retail on ground and first floors. Once completed the existing Tesco building would be demolished and replaced with buildings of mixed use with retail units, offices and residential units above. The buildings would be between four and nineteen stories high.

Overall the development would be 75,000 sqm: 20,000 sqm would be office space, 10,500 sqm retail and there would be 450 residential units. Subsequent briefings put the number of residential units at 515 and then 561. Although preliminary these plans were in keeping with the Hackney Council Hackney Central Area Action Plan 2012 which identified 55 Morning Lane as a site for redevelopment and exempted it from building height restrictions applied to the rest of the borough.

You can find a version of the developer’s plans at their webpage here. There you can read summaries of their public consultation held in 2019 which only involved 138 people are where no specific proposals were presented. This was an inadequate basis for a planning application and they never came back to talk to more Hackney residents. The developers produced no images of how their plans will look in relation to the surrounding area so we produced some and you can see them below.

Our first community consultation

In Autumn 2020 we carried out our own consultation of what people do and do not want to see on the site. We reached 1384 people, more than 10 times the number reached by the developer’s in their ‘consultation’.

On 22nd November 2020 we held a public meeting to get feedback on the results of the survey before publishing these. The meeting was attended by about 70 people and had three guest speakers: Philip Glanville, Mayor of Hackney, Ayo Mansaray, researcher on gentrification at King’s College London, and Alice Bennett, Co-Coordinator of Hackney Green Party.

We recorded the presentation on the survey findings given by MOPS campaigners here: MOPS introduction

We recorded the 5 minute talks on the draft report given by guest speakers here: Speakers

We recorded the discussion here: Plenary

You can also read the full report of our findings here: Report

The Council’s deal with the developer collapses

In March 2022, the five-year deal between Hackney Council and developer Hackney Walk Ltd ended without any plan for the site. We do not know why the deal collapsed because the Council have refused to share any information on grounds of “commercial confidentiality”. In September 2023, they appointed an officer to project manage the site.

In order to inform what happens next, we did a second community consultation asking people what sort of public housing and shopping they want to see on 55 Morning Lane. Later this month, we’ll be publishing our findings from this research based on the views of over 1200 people who use the site.

The importance of social housing is clear in this report from Shelter on the London housing crisis which identifies that the only way to address growing homelessness is to build council housing. The Pretty Vacant report by Action on Empty Homes identifies the problem as how housing has become a financial asset for the super-rich rather than a place for people to live. There are now 57,000 families in temporary accommodation in London – some will spend years there. There are 25,000 long-term empty homes in London, 46,000 so-called ‘second homes’ and over 70,000 properties rented out via Airbnb. In 2016, 100 billion pounds of illicit money was laundered via the London property market.

At the last meeting we had with the former Mayor of Hackney Phil Glanville, on 16 June 2023, he committed to a minimum of 164 social-rent council homes out of projected 450 properties. This 36% was an advance on his previous position which was that it would be challenging to build 30% affordable housing there. Despite what we are told are worsening conditions for such developments, viability seems a mobile and pliable target. Following Phil Glanville’s resignation, there is a Hackney Mayoral byelection on 9 November. We will be asking all the candidates about their plans for 55 Morning Lane.