Hackney: Woodberry Down revisited

Hackney Council concluded at the end of the last century that it could no longer afford to throw good money after bad at the Woodberry Down estate. The first residents had moved in in 1948 and social housing historian John Boughton tells us that by 1953 there were 6,500 people living in nearly 1,800 council homes there. For a while it was a bit of a showpiece. But you already know what happened next.

Within three decades, Woodberry Down’s buildings were deteriorating, with damp and asbestos to the fore. Furthermore, at least in some eyes, its social environment had come to typify Hackney’s largely unfair but not wholly unfounded reputation as a borough of decay and crime. I write this as a Hackney resident of 40-odd years. The estate didn’t meet the Labour government’s Decent Homes standard and a 2002 structural evaluation found that most of its 57 blocks would cost more to patch up than could be justified.

Soon began a partnership of the type other boroughs with similar housing stock problems would enter into. In Hackney’s case it was with Berkeley Homes, a prestigious private developer to, bit by bit, knock down the old estate and replace it with a much larger number of homes and a mix of tenure types, ranging from social rent to private ownership.

Profits from the sale of the latter would pay for the former and for other “affordable” housing types as well. The Genesis housing association, since merged with the Notting Hill housing association, would buy and manage them.

And soon also began an accompanying, oppositional political narrative that, just like the regeneration, continues to this day. Work began in earnest back in 2009. How are things going in 2025?

02

The other week, I took a walk around the whole of Woodberry Down, my first for five years. It was a Saturday lunchtime, and I approached via Clapton Common from the east because I wanted to cover the distances between a couple of local primary schools and between one of those schools and the estate (more on this strange behaviour below).

The sun was out, and I stepped into the estate footprint via Newnton Place, a little left hand turn off Bethune Road which leads you across the famous New River, an artificial construct built 400 years ago to help supply Londoners with fresh water, and past an entrance to the Woodberry Wetlands on what used to be called the Stoke Newington East Reservoir. The creation of the wetlands, with the help of Berkeley, and its opening by Sir David Attenborough in 2016 has been a major feature of the regeneration programme. There is a companion West Reservoir, too, where sailing and swimming take place. On maps, these vast lagoons stand out out like a pair of blue-tinted spectacles.

Two sides of Woodberry Down are bounded by New River, whose course at this most northerly point of Hackney forms two sides of a wedge. This widens towards the west, where its open end is bounded by the A105 Green Lanes. The estate is bisected on its east-west axis by Seven Sisters Road, a wide highway that connects South Tottenham and Finsbury Park but severs the estate. Manor Park Underground station is at the point where Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road meet.

I set off along the walkway, the river and East Reservoir wetlands on my left, the evolving housing scene on my right. First, I passed a tall, silvery block, one of four new buildings for which planning consent was given in 2011 and form part of the completed Phase 1 of the eight-phase development plan. They occupy a triangular piece of land marked on the map below (from architects Waugh Thistleton) as KSS4. Where once there were 26 residential properties there, 22 with three bedrooms and four with four bedrooms making 82 bedrooms in all, today there are 170 dwellings, comprising 33 with three bedrooms, 72 with two and 62 with one, a total of 305 bedrooms.

My two-hour tour refreshed my sense of the incremental progress of the scheme, its phases spread out across space and time with the resulting, rather choppy, contrasts between the surviving ranks of old, largely five-storey blocks and the higher-rise new ones. It also prompted renewed reflections on familiar rows.

On the one side, the regeneration’s more militant critics effectively allege that the whole thing is an elaborate cover for a forced “displacement” and “social cleansing” of poorer Londoners with the shameful collusion of Labour-run Hackney Council.

On the other, its champions maintain that the transformation is enabling not only the provision of new and far better homes for all occupants of the old Woodberry Down homes who want them, but also supplying in addition a similar number of shared ownership “intermediate” affordable homes of a type in increasing demand among those whose financial circumstances are neither difficult enough for them to qualify for social or other low-cost rental homes nor prosperous enough for them to be able to buy at market rates.

This blend, together with new amenities, is, according to one supportive Hackney councillor, not just an estate regeneration but the creation of a New Town. And although its latest anticipated final tally of nearly 6,500 dwellings doesn’t meet the government’s New Town definition, that being a development of 10,000 homes or more, it is interesting to imagine Woodberry Down as gradually becoming a smaller version of such a settlement.

03

My latest excursion to Woodberry Down was prompted by unease over a bout of irritation. A while back, an article appeared elsewhere rhetorically inquiring if the regeneration, with what were described as its “luxury flats”, was responsible for the impending closure of a Hackney primary school, Sir Thomas Abney, which stands not far from some parts of the estate on the other side of the East Reservoir at the junction of Bethune Road and Fairholt Road (it’s marked on the Google map above and on the Hackney Council map below). Claims to that effect were published, including some by teachers’ union officers opposed to Hackney’s proposals for closing or merging four borough primary schools due to falling demand for places at them.

Reduced primary school pupil intake is not only a Hackney thing. It has affected several other inner London boroughs in recent years, notably Islington, Camden, Southwark and Lambeth. The principal reasons for it are London’s notoriously high housing costs, which are giving extra impetus to inner Londoners who want to start families or increase the size of them to look for homes in outer London – of itself, such migration is not a new phenomenon – and a general fall in birthrates, something seen across England and Wales and, indeed, the world.

However, these explanations appeared not to satisfy some dismayed by Sir Thomas Abney’s unhappy situation. They insisted that its shrinking intake was directly related to families with children being “pushed out” of Woodberry Down by the regeneration and replaced by childless young professionals.

I reacted badly to the airing of this theory. I did so as someone with personal connections to Sir Thomas Abney school, knowing well both current and former members of its staff. I did so, too, as someone who is long familiar with “pushed out” or, still more emotively, “social cleansing” narratives about neighbourhood population change in London, all of them reductive, led more by ideology than evidence and highly appealing to some in the media. The Guardian, a sucker for that type of thing, published a classic of the genre about Woodberry Down itself some years ago.

But the following day I reproached myself. Had I been too cross? Was I quite sure of my ground? The answer to the first question is “yes”. The answer to the second is…well, let’s see.

The map below shows, picked out in blue, a map of the electoral ward called Woodberry Down. It is taken from Hackney Council’s profile of the ward, which draws data from the 2021 Census. The ward encompasses the entire estate footprint and more territory besides, including several streets to its east and to its south, the latter extending down the east side of the East Reservoir to where Sir Thomas Abney (faintly marked) stands at its boundary.

As the map shows, the school is much more adjacent to a number of terraced residential streets than it is to the parts of the estate from which it can be most easily travelled to, including the completed part of Phase 1 mentioned above, with its increased number of homes that can accommodate households with children. The same is true of another part of Phase 1, a larger area on the north side of the West Reservoir.

Still, an increase in the number of homes with enough bedrooms to accommodate children alongside adults in these parts of the estate is one thing. It doesn’t tell us how many children of primary school age are living in them. And, after all, it is far from uncommon for two, three or four young adult Londoners with decent jobs to share a two, three or four bedroom privately-rented flat.

Moreover, a recurring element of “pushed out” narratives has it that families in old council dwellings are “displaced” by estate regenerations to make way for better-off yuppies, including single sharers and “dinkies“. That may be tendentious, but it is the case, speaking generally, that some estate residents whose homes are lined up for knocking down relocate voluntarily. That has been the case with at least some now former residents of Woodberry Down. So, do such factors account for the slump in Sir Thomas Abney’s intake after all?

Perhaps the Census data about the Woodberry Down ward’s population provide a clue to the answer. The most recent Census, conducted on 21 March 2021, by which time the first two phases of the regeneration were complete, found that 12,113 people lived in the ward, of which, according to Hackney Council’s ward profile, 1,810 were aged nine or under.

The ward didn’t exist when the previous Census was carried out ten years earlier – it’s a product of subsequent boundary changes. However, for purposes of comparison, the council has used other data and a “best fit” methodology to work out what the population of Woodberry Down ward would have been in 2011, had it existed at that time. It gives a total of just 8,758 residents, of whom only 1,279 would have been aged nine or younger.

According to these figures, then, the Hackney electoral ward encompassing the estate area saw a very substantial increase in its population of children of primary school age or approaching it over a ten-year period that included the completion of some the estate regeneration programme.

True, the ward includes territory that isn’t within the estate footprint, still less in Sir Thomas Abney’s most proximate intake area. But it does, for example, include the triple towers of the Lincoln Court council estate, which has 200 homes (and could get more) and is closer to Sir Thomas Abney than any part of the estate. And if the building of “luxury flats” is responsible for a scarcity of primary school age children, how come the Woodberry Down primary school, situated actually on the estate, north of Seven Sisters Road, is in no danger of closure and accommodates three classes in each year group?

Meanwhile, population change in next-door Stamford Hill West ward (map below) over the same ten-year period tells a quite different story. The 2021 Census data and the calculation by Hackney Council of what the ward’s population would have been in 2011 show that, in sharp contrast to the baby-booming Woodberry Down ward, there had been a fall in the number of children aged nine or under – from 2,294 to 2,212.

That isn’t very many and the figure of itself does not amount to a conclusive explanation for the drop in demand for places at Sir Thomas Abney. But perhaps the overall number of children aged nine and under doesn’t tell the whole story about local population change and demand for primary school places.

The Stamford Hill area is, famously, the heart of London’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. The 2021 Census found that 40 per cent of those living there who answered the voluntary question about faith identified as Jewish, a proportion that equates to 4,140 people out of 10,349. That is an increase since 2011, according to Hackney’s “best fit” estimate for 2011, of 37.6 per cent, equating to 3,868 Jewish Londoners. (The Jewish presence in Woodberry Down ward has been much smaller throughout the period, at less than 10 per cent).

That detail is significant in the context of this article for two reasons: one, ultra-Orthodox communities have notably high birthrates, which probably explains the increase in the number of Jews in Stamford Hill West ward; two, Stamford Hill West’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish children do not attend local authority, non-Jewish schools such as Sir Thomas Abney, going instead to Jewish private schools in the area.

Taking those two things into account, it seems reasonable to infer that without its ultra-Orthodox Jews, the fall in the number of primary school age children in Stamford Hill West ward who might have gone to Sir Thomas Abney is greater than it might appear from the fairly modest drop in the overall figure for that age group in the ward.

The fate of Sir Thomas Abney has, sadly, now been sealed. Hackney has confirmed that it will close at the end of this academic year and its student body merged with that of Holmleigh primary school a few minutes’ walk to its east. Holmleigh, which the council describes as itself being only “relatively full”, will re-open in September in the current Sir Thomas Abney building, which is larger and can therefore accommodate the two groups of pupils combined.

None of the population data examined above definitively rules out the Woodberry Down regeneration having had some sort of effect on the school’s intake, which does include children from the estate. But it comes nowhere near contradicting Hackney’s firm rebuttal of suggestions that the regeneration has led to Sir Thomas Abney’s closure, and does nothing to substantiate any theory that the appearance on the Woodberry Down site of “luxury” flats is responsible.

There is a strand of political activism in Hackney that is ill-disposed towards both estate regenerations and school closures. Suggesting a causal relationship between the two creates a story that is emotive and marketable, but seems a bit of a stretch.

04

Meanwhile, the regeneration continues. Last May, planning consent was granted for Phase 4 of the eight-phase project, a roughly triangular section of 144 original estate homes, marked and highlighted in pink on the Berkeley map below. They are to be replaced by 511 homes, of which only 90 will be for social rent, compared with 289 for private sale and 132 for shared ownership.

The Hackney Citizen reported comments made at the planning committee meeting by Geoff Bell, a leading light of the Woodberry Down Community Organisation (WDCO), which represents all of the estate’s residents and retailers, and has long been closely and often productively engaged in negotiations with the council, Berkeley Homes and Notting Hill Genesis.

Bell expressed dismay about the number of social rented homes to be included in Phase 4 being smaller than the number to be knocked down, saying the same had happened with Phase 3. He also said that promises that the difference would be made up appeared to him to be imperilled by a new draft masterplan Berkeley had drawn up for Phases 5 to 8.

Bell’s disquiet was striking because he had previously been notably enthusiastic about the regeneration. While helping On London make a film about it, released in April 2020 and in which he appears, Bell told me he enjoyed a good relationship with Berkeley founder Tony Pidgley, a legendary figure in the property world, who died later that year.

He had persuaded Pidgley, who also appears in the On London film, to change his mind about swimming pools being included in housing blocks for private sale for their residents’ exclusive use, arguing that providing such facilities went against the principle of creating a truly mixed community.

However, in May 2020 Bell was among critics of a decision to fell a 150-year-old plane tree on the site. By 2023, he was voicing major concerns about the direction the regeneration was taking. And by the time of the approval of Phase 4 his view, as reported by Hackney Citizen, was that “it is no longer a community-led regeneration”.

Two fellow WDCO stalwarts, its current chair, Jackie Myers, and Billy Sheehy have the same concerns. “We’re still quite involved, but I’m not sure we are as much as we were,” Myers says. Sheehy thinks things have changed since the death of Pidgley, a self-made businessman from a very poor background, who took a close interest in Woodberry Down. “Anything that was bothering you, you had someone to talk to,” Sheehy says. “You’d know he was listening, because something would be done about it”.

Myers and Sheehy also feel that WDCO’s input isn’t as important to the council as it was. Sheehy recalls attending the very first of the regular round table meetings it established with them, Berkeley and what was then the Genesis housing association prior to its 2018 merger with Notting Hill. That was around 20 years ago. Among those present was the Mayor of Hackney of that time, Jules Pipe, now Sir Sadiq Khan’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Regeneration.

Of WDCO’s current engagements with the council, Myers says “it sometimes feels like we’re just making up the numbers. I’m not sure how much they’re listening to us, like before”. She is disappointed, too, by the design of Phase 3 of the scheme, which has just been completed. “I wouldn’t say we’re happy with it,” Myers says. “The densities are not great. I think the buildings are just very close together.”

The question of how many social rent homes will be provided in the remaining phases continues to be a burning one for WDCO. At the time of the Phase 4 decision last May, Guy Nicholson, Hackney’s Deputy Mayor for Delivery, Inclusive Economy and Regeneration, wrote to Myers, setting out the what had been built so far and what the council anticipated could be built eventually.

“The total number of homes of all tenures on the estate before the regeneration began was 1,980” Nicholson wrote, adding that this had been set out in a report to the council’s cabinet that was considered in December 2006.

He included a breakdown of the tenures and occupancies of those 1,980 homes at that time. This listed 1,295 as being inhabited by secure council tenants, with a further 163 being used as temporary rented accommodation for homeless people, making 1,458 rented properties in total. Right to Buy had rendered or was in the process of rendering 449 of them  – 355 and 94 respectively – into leasehold properties, and 62 were termed “void” – possibly because their condition was so poor they were uninhabitable. The other 11 properties were freehold.

At that point, Nicholson wrote, 537 social rent homes had been completed in Phases 1 and 2 of the regeneration, another 117 soon would be in Phase 3 and another 90 were awaiting consent in Phase 4 (which they received), making 744 so far delivered or guaranteed. The latest draft masterplan, he continued, anticipated up to another 606 new social rented homes being built in Phases 5 to 8. If so, that would produce an overall total, once all eight phases were complete, of 1,350 new social rent homes.

You can assess that number in different ways. If you go back to when all of the 1,980 homes mentioned in Nicholson’s letter were council dwellings for rent, you might, if so inclined, regard it as symbolising a grievous, 50-year ongoing loss. A less purist but still disappointed stance might disparagingly compare 1,350 to the 1,458 homes being rented by secure council tenants or temporary residents.

It is, however, a bigger number than the 1,295 Nicholson’s letter described as “secure council tenanted properties” as of 2006. They were the households the council was pledged to rehouse within the new Woodberry Down if that was what they wanted (leaseholders are offered replacements on a “shared equity” basis).

And as well as those hoped-for 1,350 new social rent homes, Nicholson’s letter said that 1,376 “intermediate” affordable homes could be built as well – the shared ownership variety. He wasn’t making a guarantee – each individual phase needs its own, detailed planning consent, each one subject to negotiation in the context of circumstances at the time. However, the “could be” social rent and intermediate figures in Nicholson’s letter combined would represent 41 per cent of all the new homes on the new Woodberry Down, which is the proportion committed to by Berkeley in the Principal Development Agreement it entered into with the council in 2010, along with Genesis, as was.

That agreement was described in the relevant council document as “the largest single project ever undertaken by the Council” and the regeneration “with modern, mixed tenure, sustainable homes with a transformed environment” as “realistic, bearing in mind that the £116 million needed for repairing the remaining Phase 2 to 5 homes with a 30 year life is neither available, nor would it address the sub-standard living environment”. The agreement is still in place.

05

Are things working out as planned? Or are Geoff Bell, Jackie Myers and Billy Sheehy right to be worried? Again, a lot depends on how you view the big picture.

I spoke to Tom Anthony, Berkeley’s senior development manager, and Harry Lewis, its divisional land and development director. Addressing WDCO’s worries about social housing numbers, Anthony offered reassurance. He said that the latest draft masterplan, which has now been submitted as a planning application and awaits determination, foresees a grand total of 1,327 social rent homes eventually being built.

At this stage, that’s a bit short of what Guy Nicholson put in his letter of May 2024 and bit shorter of the 1,458 properties that were theoretically available for rent if the 163 being used as temporary accommodation the letter also mentioned are included.

But there is always fine-tuning and there are always interlocking trade-offs among different elements of a big development between the first draft of a masterplan, the one that eventually gets submitted and approved, and the more detailed plans that follow for individual phases. The council has had input into that process throighout, and will continue to do so. I’m told that local interest in shared ownership is high. If the number of social rent homes in a scheme is your touchstone metric, 1,327  is still 32 more than 1,295. And it remains the case, as Anthony confirms, that “every tenant has a right to return”.

Furthermore, as indicated above, not every household living in a Woodberry Down estate council homes has taken up the guarantee of a new home on the same stretch of land. In some cases, that is because tenants have died. In others, it is because they have chosen to move into different existing Hackney Council homes in another part of the borough, as and when one that appealed to them became available.

“We don’t have many families moving off the estate,” Anthony says. “If they are a secure tenant, they go into the next phase that is going to be developed.” But one example of someone taking the other option is Jackie Myers. A Woodberry Down resident of many years, she is soon to stand down as WDCO chair, having already moved with her family to a different council home not far away.

Such decisions may be far from typical, but neither are they wholly unusual. For example, the Principal Development Agreement document says (paragraph 5.15) that up to five of the households affected by Phase 2 of the scheme with a recognised “right to return” to a new home on Woodberry Down said they wanted to move away.

Even so, WDCO’s various concerns remain. There is some questioning of the 1,980 homes overall starting point figure. And, indeed, slightly different ones are available. For example, a May 2009 Stage 1 report document of the Greater London Authority, to which large planning schemes must be referred to make sure they conform to the policies of the Mayor, said the site area “currently comprises 2,013 homes”.

Primarily, however, WDCO is worried that the net loss of social rented homes on the phases completed so far augers badly for the phases that remain. If only 90 of the 144 of those in the original blocks in Phase 4 are to be replaced, why would they believe that similar erosions won’t take place in Phases 5 to 8?

Anthony provides explanations for the arrangement with Phase 4. One is that the replacement social rented homes will be larger than the old ones, meaning fewer can be accommodated within the overall mix of 511 new homes than would otherwise have been the case. The reason for the larger sizes is that the current ones fall short of the government’s nationally-described space standards (NDSS).

“If you take a three-bed in there at the moment, it averages about 63 square metres of floor space,” Anthony says, “whereas we’re delivering 80.85 square metre three-bed homes. It’s quite a significant jump.” In doing that, Berkeley is going beyond the NDSS minimum to sizes that exceed by 10 per cent the famous housing space standards set by the Parker Morris committee in the 1960s and which became mandatory for all council housing in 1969, by which time most of the post-war Woodberry Down was completed.

Some of the old homes have become overcrowded. The new ones provided for those living in them will have the increased number of rooms they need, as assessed by Hackney’s regeneration team. “We might find a family living in a two-bed where there is two parents and three children. The estate regeneration has a commitment to provide every child with their own bedroom, so that can then become a four-bed,” Anthony says.

Of course, the reverse can also be the case, with tenant households having become smaller rather than larger. Each situation adds its own factor to the planning, architectural and development finance equation that needs to be worked out for each separate phase, honouring commitments to residents, adhering to council policies and meeting Berkeley’s need to make a profit, without which nothing would be built at all.

“The affordable homes are bigger than the private homes we’re selling and using to cross-subsidise the construction costs of the affordable,” Lewis adds. Referring to the pending masterplan, he points out that, as it stands, 43 per cent of the overall number of homes it envisages being eventually completed will be “affordable” of one kind or another, bringing the proportion for the entire estate footprint up to the 41 per cent set down in the Principal Development Agreement.

Sir Sadiq Khan’s current policy is to give an automatic green light to private sector housing developments boroughs wish to approve if they commit to 35 per cent affordable. Lewis also stresses that, as was the case with Phase 4, if the affordable homes are calculated according to the number of habitable rooms, those in phases 5 to 8 are provisionally planned to provide close to 48 per cent. “Show me another scheme in London that is delivering those kinds of numbers,” he says. “It’s fantastic that we’ve been able to keep this going at that height of affordable provision.”

Another recent addition to planning rules nationally has been the post-Grenfell requirement under the Building Safety Act to equip housing blocks with two staircases instead of one. This has meant developers and planning authorities going back to their drawing boards with projects that had already been designed, and entailed making buildings bigger if similar numbers of homes, rooms and amounts of space were to be delivered as before.

Lewis explains that this means the densities for Phases 5 to 8 are expected to be higher at the upper ends in order to make everything stack up. However, the resulting need for greater heights has been accompanied in the masterplan with “a significant increase in public open space”. Lewis says only 6,900 squares metres of it was included in the previous masterplan. The new one contains 26,000.

06

We could be here all day, weighing plans against delivery in different ways, measuring commitments and outcomes using different yardsticks. Another objection to the regeneration is that it is taking far longer than it was meant to. It’s worth remembering, though, that its progress has been hampered by coinciding with two of the most economically difficult periods for the development sector in recent history.

First came the global financial crisis of 2007/8, whose “credit crunch” brought the industry to its knees. It took financial support from the government’s Homes and Communities agency to get Phase 1 of Woodberry Down going, with funds put into a bunch of what were called “kick start” sites in different parts of the estate (including that north-east corner by Newnton Close).

Today, a bunch of factors have slowed construction to a snail’s pace in capital and country alike at exactly the time when the Labour government is pledging to increase homebuilding to heroic levels. When walking round Woodberry Down, I noticed that Phase 4, despite having been consented a year before, appeared completely un-started. The big reason for that is the painfully slow workings of the Building Safety Act, which have hit London particularly hard. Nothing can happen until Gateway 2 has been passed through.

Through it all, life on Woodberry Down, its name increasingly used without the word “estate” attached, goes on, as do rival accounts of what is happening there. The ongoing destruction of a proud old working-class community or the gradual emergence of a successful, modern New Town?

Both portrayals are too narrow to cover the subject. The former brings to mind the kind of “golden era” thinking Chris Clarke, in his book The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master, attributes to Left-populism – a kind of nostalgia for an ideal it is claimed became tarnished only because of serial betrayals. In estate regeneration critiques from that part of the political spectrum, a lost council housing dream could be realised anew if those in power would only refurbish old estates instead of knocking them down and replacing them.

But such renditions tend to assume that estate residents are all united in their longing for everything to stay the same forever, a perspective challenged by the outcomes of successive estate regeneration ballots under Mayor Khan’s rules. Quite reasonable misgivings about people being made to move, sometimes reluctantly, and their old homes being destroyed can lead to overlooking the disruption and intrusion reburb can entail.

Then there is the brute business of cost: endlessly half-fixing residential buildings that cannot be truly fixed leaves less money to spend on keeping other council homes well-maintained. Hackney still has a lot of them, around 21,500, and, judging by a newly-published report by the Housing Ombudsman, is struggling to look after those as well as it might.

That isn’t to say that the old Woodberry Down estate, much of it still standing and lived in, didn’t have great strengths that every effort should be made to preserve and adapt for the future – work that WDCO is engaged in by its very existence. The complex choreography of single-move rehousing – “decanting”, so use the mildly clinical jargon – continues, no doubt exciting for affected but causing dismay and anxiety to others.

Moreover, the New Town characterisation might conceal discontents, as the rents and service charges of housing associations rise, reflecting the financial strains they have been under since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took an axe to their grant funding. We might also keep in mind that as “mono tenure” social housing estates have gone out of style – despite Right to Buy making them less mono than when built – the jury is still out on the social benefits to less well-off people of putting them in “mixed” and “balanced” neighbourhoods instead.

Make of all that what you will, the new Woodberry Down, fitfully yet relentlessly, is coming together and winning design awards next to the famous river, lovely wetlands and gleaming reservoirs. Even some of the temporary residents of the remaining old blocks might get housed there eventually.

Critics recoil from Berkeley advertising their homes for private sale to the world, trumpeting their proximity to central London and, yes, the “luxury living” that comes with the purchase of a one-bedroom flat for more than half a million pounds. But effective marketing of that kind is, as seasoned WDCO members know, the source of the funding of the social and shared ownership homes. The more “luxury” the price tags, the more “affordable” is forthcoming down the line.

There’s only so much you can tell about a place from walking round it, and only so many people living there you can speak to. But I’m hoping for the best for Woodberry Down and I believe those shaping its destiny want the best for it too. Should we think of it as a New Town from now on, with all the energy and optimism that implies? I think we should.

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