Best affordable housing development – £5-10m

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Cookley Works is a flagship brownfield regeneration scheme located in Brierley Hill, Dudley, delivered by 50,000-home landlord Platform Housing Group in collaboration with Lovell Partnerships.

 

Built on a five-acre site once occupied by the historic Cookley Ironworks, the land lay derelict for 14 years before being transformed into a thriving residential community of 71 homes: 37 at affordable rent and 34 for shared ownership.

 

Viability challenges are common on brownfield sites, but Platform Housing Group and Lovell worked tirelessly to unlock this land. Early investigations revealed significant contamination that required extensive remediation.

 

Lovell secured targeted brownfield funding from the West Midlands Combined Authority to enable this process, bringing the site into use and aligning with its brownfield-first policy. The site also helped to inform national housing policy, when Homes England paid a visit to improve its understanding of real-world delays and challenges, and took the insights it gathered back to Westminster.

 

Cookley Works is an exemplary affordable housing development that addresses urgent housing need and overcomes brownfield constraints, all while delivering high-quality design and building a lasting community.

 

The judges said:

“This scheme has been brought forward on a long-term vacant site which needed considerable remediation. [It was] very popular with local residents, [and provided] shared ownership homes that were quickly purchased”