L&Q named as partner on 11,000-home London site

L&Q has agreed a joint venture with the GLA to develop Barking Riverside, a 179-hectare brownfield site in east London.

As part of the scheme, the 70,000-home association will provide £70m of finance to build the railway extension necessary to make the scheme viable.

L&Q takes over the 51% share in the joint venture with the GLA from its previous partner, house builder Bellway Homes. Bellway continues to retain an interest in the site to deliver some of the market rented housing.

Jerome Geoghegan, group director of development and sales at L&Q, said the exact tenure split of the site has not yet been fixed. He said the intention is to build affordable housing on around a third of the site, with market rented, shared ownership and outright sale homes also included.

L&Q will first seek outline planning permission to update the masterplan, before it starts building homes out next year. It will seek to quickly scale development up to 600 homes per year and beyond.

To support the development of new homes, an extension to the existing overground railway will be built between Barking and Barking Riverside.

L&Q will put up £70m of the funding for the £263m project, which is expected to complete by 2021, with the remainder to come from City Hall and Transport for London.  

The partnership also has the option to access £55m of funding via the Homes and Communities Agency’s Large Sites Infrastructure Fund, which was announced last year.

Mr Geoghegan added: “I believe this will be our largest development scheme.

“What is new for us is to be investing to support infrastructure [the railway] in a very specific way. It’s something we thought was necessary to get the development going.”

The site of a former power station, Barking Riverside, has lain empty for more than 35 years despite commitment to development from the local authority and central government. The project was first launched in 2003, with planning permission first granted in 2007.