Restrict building in Thames Gateway to give London its own Lake District, says top architect

At the Royal Town Planning Institute’s annual lecture on Thursday, Sir Terry Farrell said developing fewer urban areas and preserving green space could make the Gateway as desirable as the Lake District.

His plan would involve landscaping outlying areas of the Gateway and concentrating most of the housebuilding in already built-up areas.

Just 10% of the Gateway’s 200,000 homes would be built in rural areas.

Housebuilders should focus their attention on places where infrastructure, such as railways, already exist, said Farrell, who argued that “landscaping is much cheaper than railways”.

He said: “London is deprived in the sense that every other city has a national park on its doorstep. London is 120 miles from its nearest national park. My feeling is that [the Gateway] could be a national park of the future.”

He is planning to consult 10 or 12 people from leading Thames Gateway organisations and hopes to move the idea forward after next year’s general election.

However, he admitted that persuading housebuilders and residents to accept more high-density schemes in the capital would be a problem. “The reason we don’t build in London is planning difficulties,” he said.

“There is a slow process of consent in places where other people live, so housebuilders propose to build in areas where there aren’t any other people.

“Also, I think the English have a perception that if it is high-density then it is sub-standard and housebuilders play up to that.”

Neale Coleman, policy adviser to London mayor Ken Livingstone, said short-term plans for the Gateway were not dissimilar to Farrell’s proposal: “It makes sense, initially, to put additional housing in existing town centres where there is access to public transport.”

But he said in the longer term, housebuilding would need to take place on large new sites with no existing towns, such as Barking Reach.

But Rainham Park nature reserve would be protected from further development and made more accessible, he added.

Earlier this year, John Redwood, Conservative MP for Wokingham in Berkshire, proposed creating an entire city as part of the Gateway development.