Lambeth council planning committee tonight (14 September) approved a development that would replace the Norris waste facility on Shakespeare Road just north of Railton Road with 218 flats in towers up to 11 storeys high.
However, there is no guarantee that the scheme will ever be built.
Approval was granted unanimously, but the development can only go ahead if the waste capacity it would remove is replaced somewhere else in the borough of Lambeth.
The replacement waste facility would also have to be completed and ready to operate before any work could begin at Shakespeare Road.
The applicant for planning permission was the developer Urban & Provincial.
It was also the applicant in plans for a hugely unpopular major waste reprocessing facility at Windsor Grove in West Norwood.
These plans would have enabled the Shakespeare Road development to go ahead, but Lambeth council’s planning committee rejected them.
Urban & Provincial has indicated that it intends to appeal against this decision, but has not yet done so.
The committee agreed to allow the developers four years – as opposed to the usual three – before the planning permission runs out.
This reflects concern that creating new waste plants in the borough may not be easy, given the level of opposition to the Windsor Grove scheme.
Councillors on the planning committee expressed concern that the Friends of Brockwell Park (FOBP) had not been formally consulted about the plans.
The development’s 11-storey tower, 56 metres high, would be visible from Brockwell Park, affecting its famous views of central London.
However, councillors decided not to hold up their decision. They accepted that concerns likely to be expressed by FOBP had already been addressed by council officers in thoir report to the committee. Both the Brixton Society and the Herne Hill Society oppose the plans, describing them as “over-development”.
Councillors accepted that other nearby developments, either completed or awaiting completion, also have large towers.
The nearby redeveloped Guinness Partnership Loughborough Park estate has 13-storey towers.
Councillors were sceptical about forecasts that the many hundreds of new inhabitants of the new Shakespeare Road flats would only result in two extra passengers per rush hour train from local stations and one extra passenger on the single-deck 322 bus that runs down Railton Road.
They were assured by officers that the forecasts were based on standard methods and had been reviewed by external consultants and Transport for London.
