The developer behind CZWG’s plans for a 68-story tower in Croydon has vowed to take advantage of planning consent before it runs out in April 2021 – but revealed the tower could be cut by five stories.
Developer Guildhouse won planning permission for One Lansdowne in 2017. The scheme features a 68-story and 41-story tower plus an 11-story podium, and contains 794 homes and 35,000 square meters of office space.
But work on site has not yet started and planning consent from Croydon Council is on the brink of expiring, having already been benefited from a six-month extension to all planning approvals which were due to lapse in 2020.
Now Guildhouse’s managing director David Hudson has said his company will sign pre-start conditions and implement planning consent – but does not expect to get building for at least another year.
He blamed the delay on Brexit and COVID-19, adding that he now expects to reduce the amount of office space within the tower and is weighing up whether to try and add more homes or two lose five stories from the taller tower.
“At the moment we have 29,000 square meters [of office space] net, but we think in the world we are going to see, it is probably too much. We will probably cut it back to some extent. But we don’t have a firm decision on how much we need to cut it back by,” he said.
“We also have to consider rates of take up [of flats]. We’ve already got 800 homes on the scheme, and I’m not sure we necessarily want to push it to a thousand.”
Hudson said Guildhouse was looking to properly start construction in 2022 and had made progress with securing funding.
But he said the construction program depended on whether Croydon Council would allow any changes to be made as an amendment to the existing planning consent, or whether they would insist on a new planning application being brought forward.
For more on this story, go to Architects’ Journal.