FEBRUARY 2025 UPDATE

The St William team attended a Development forum on the 13th February 2025, chaired by Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC). The Development forum provided an opportunity for the team to present the latest proposals and respond to questions from the community prior to a planning submission. This was the second Development forum St William have attended.

You can download a copy of the presentation shared at the Developer forum here.

You can read Q&As raised at the session here.

CONSULTATION FEEDBACK – JANUARY 2025

Thank you to everyone who has viewed the updated material, taken part in the consultation and provided feedback so far.

We undertook 7 drop-in consultation events during November and December 2024. The events took place across a range of local venues, including the Kensal Canalside Activity Centre, Dalgarno Trust Community Centre and Kensal Library, gathering written and verbal comments from as many people as possible.

Feedback from the consultation events and local meetings so far has included:

  • Support for using underutilised, brownfield land to provide new homes in the area.
  • Support for the community park proposed.
  • Support and an emphasis on the importance of our 35% affordable housing offer, with people asking for more detail in relation to the tenure and size of the homes, with a preference for large, social rented homes, seeking assurance the homes would be genuinely affordable.
  • The most common concern raised was around transport infrastructure and how the area would cope with the volume of development proposed, including in relation to the constriction period, particularly on the Harrow Road.
  • Some questioned the height of the tower, with concerns about its impact on the cemetery.
  • There were also questions in relation to how the site would be remediated, with a request for further information.
  • From our interactive display at in person events, which asked attendees to prioritise themes and identify what would have the biggest impact locally, improving safety and security emerged as a top priority from the options provided on the board.

If you have any questions or feedback for the team, you can contact us here anytime.

You can also sign up to our mailing list.

IMAGE GALLERY – JANUARY 2025

CONSULTATION 2024

Thank you to those who have provided their feedback so far.

The proposals are very similar to the scheme consulted on in 2021 in terms of the number of homes and building arrangement.

However, we have updated the design to deliver an improved housing mix, more closely aligned to local requirements and current market demand. We have also undertaken some changes to the masterplan to comply with the latest building regulations, design guidance and planning requirements.

LANDSCAPE LED DESIGN

As with all our St William sites, our approach to the Kensal Gasworks site starts with the landscape. We find that adopting a landscape-first approach is the most successful way to open up and reconnect places that have been closed to the public for decades.

St William’s aspiration is for Kensal Green Gasworks to become an extension of its surrounding green infrastructure, including Kensal Green Cemetery and the Grand Union Canal.

The development seeks to maximise the amount of high-quality open space alongside new homes, with a new publicly accessible open space at its heart, open to the community at all times.

The need for a high-quality green space was a key part of the feedback received so far.

The landscaping will be carefully developed to ensure that it is ecologically-rich and improves biodiversity on the site.

WORKING WITH NEIGHBOURING LANDOWNERS

St William is working closely with neighbouring landowners and in particular, Ballymore and Sainsbury’s, who own the land adjacent to Kensal Gasworks and are also bringing forward their site for redevelopment.

An overall masterplan will be designed to ensure a comprehensive approach and that community benefits can be maximised.

You can view Ballymore and Sainsbury’s consultation website here.

NEW HOMES

The development will contribute to the borough’s housing needs and will deliver around 790 new high-quality homes, including 35% affordable housing. The revised proposals include 148 Social Rent Homes with 68 being 3 or 4 bedroom homes. This equates to 79% of the affordable housing as Social Rent and 21% as London Living Rent by habitable room.

NEW CONNECTIONS AND PUBLIC REALM

Kensal Gasworks will provide new routes through and within the site, west to Old Oak Common and east towards Ladbroke Grove.

We know that traffic congestion is a concern locally and the development will prioritise routes for pedestrians and cyclists.

SUSTAINABILITY

St William is a responsible developer and strongly committed to creating sustainable places to live, work and enjoy. We seek to maximise the benefits our activities will bring to create a positive impact for surrounding communities.

Our approach to meeting sustainability standards on site will be exemplary. St William is part of the Berkeley Group, and is among the first businesses globally to adopt Science-Based Targets to align with the international effort to limit global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.

Our approach will also include making use of prefabricated elements and minimising construction waste. Berkeley Group has already cut emissions from our direct operations by 77% since 2019 and have completed 48 site specific embodied carbon studies to tackle high impact materials.

We will work hard to ensure that our proposals positively impact the biodiversity of the site and its surroundings, maximising the development’s biodiversity net gain and urban greening factor.

As part of the planning process we will also produce a Sustainability Statement that will focus on our approach in more detail.