Maccreanor Lavington London estate expansion gets go-ahead

Maccreanor Lavington has received planning consent for its designs for 91 new affordable homes in north LondonIslington Council’s planning committee has approved the City of London Corporation development of four residential buildings, each between four and seven storeys high, to expand the York Way Estate in Islington.The project, which attracted grant funding from the Greater London Authority, will involve the demolition of an existing community centre and multi-use games area to provide 17 studios, 25 one-bedroom apartments, 21 two-bedroom, 25 three-bedroom and three four-bedroom units. All the homes will be for social rent. The scheme will also deliver a new community centre and an estate office, with Erect Architecture designing new play spaces and landscaping improvements. In a committee report, Islington council planning officers acknowledged that the proposed development would result in ‘some adverse impacts in terms of loss of daylight and sunlight on neighbouring residential properties’ but that these were outweighed by the overall benefits of the scheme. The report added that the ‘well-designed’ buildings were considered to ‘mediate successfully between the architecture of the existing estate and the built-form of the surrounding streetscape’. The primary material will be contrasting brickwork, with precast inset corner balconies a visual reference to the banding of existing estate buildings.Built in 1969, the 2ha York Way Estate, next to Caledonian Park, currently comprises four residential blocks separated by grassland and hardstanding: three nine-storey slab blocks and a fourth four-storey building. These provide 275 homes of different sizes and tenures.The design team worked with residents to gauge their concerns and aspirations for the new development.Ruby Sayed, chair of the City of London Corporation’s community and children’s services committee, said the social housing scheme would ‘go some way towards addressing the lack of truly affordable homes in the capital’.