Lynch bags approval for contest-winning Hackney council housing

Lynch Architects has won unanimous approval for a 73-home scheme in Hoxton, London N1, part of Hackney Council’s ambitious social housing supply programmeIt has been more than three years since the practice won the project to redevelop the empty car park plot on the corner of Murray Grove and East Road in the 1960s Fairbank Estate.The 2017 brief for the site next to the 18-storey Thaxted Court tower originally called for 60 homes. According to Lynch’s competition-winning plans, these were to be housed in a pair of eight-storey blocks. The project had been due to complete by the end of 2020.However, the scale of the scheme, which sits above the national rail line running to the nearby Old Street station, was expanded to include a third residential building. The larger plans now also include filling in the sunken area around the tower and wider public realm works.Half of the new homes will be for social rent or shared ownership. Council tenants already living on the estate will get first priority for the proposed 28 social rent homes with a further nine shared ownership homes earmarked for local families living or working in Hackney and ‘unable to get on the housing ladder’.The council said the remainder will be put on the open market to help pay for the development ‘in the absence of government funding’.The approved plans at the Fairbank Estate form are part of the local authority’s direct delivery housebuilding drive to build hundreds of new homes on council-owned land and infill sites.Lynch Architects won the Thaxted Court job following a competition in which more than 50 practices submitted expressions of interests. It is understood the firm was selected ahead of a shortlist which included Duggan Morris Architects, DSDHA and Sergison Bates.Other practices working with the council on building around 700 homes on more than a dozen sites include Hackney-based Al-Jawad Pike, Ash Sakula and Surman Weston.Lynch Architects is working with Muf art/architecture and Robert Bray Associates on the Fairbank Estates plans.Construction is due to start on site in autumn 2021 with working completing in 2024.