The Prime Minister recently announced plans to "turbocharge" development within England's largest towns and cities to mark a Government consultation on strengthening planning policy for brownfield development.

Sam Stafford thought then that now would be a good time to share a conversation that he recorded online in August 2023 with old friends of the podcast David Milner and Rebecca Coley, and new friend of the podcast Mark Aylward, about the redevelopment of big box retail parks.

The prompt for the conversation was a 2018 report that Sam had come across by Create Streets and Policy Exchange called ‘Better Brownfield’, which claimed that there are over 1200 sites across London currently occupied by single-storey big box retail and industrial sheds and that, by ‘banishing boxland’, these sites could accommodate between 250,000 and 300,000 new homes.

Who owns and manages assets like these? What is the market like for big boxes in the new world of online retail? And what are the opportunities presented by, and the barriers to, sites like this coming forward for a mixed-use redevelopment? These are the questions that Sam invited David, Mark and Rebecca to explore with him.

Some accompanying reading.

How to house London’s surging population? Banish “boxland” – by Susan Emmett

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/41218/how-to-house-londons-surging-population-banish-boxland

Better Brownfield

https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/better-brownfield/

Five retail and leisure trends to look out for in the post-pandemic era

https://www.savills.co.uk/blog/article/340262/commercial-property/five-retail-and-leisure-trends-to-look-out-for-in-the-post-pandemic-era.aspx

Pipeline of data centres needs to more than double by 2025 to meet demand for storage in Europe

https://www.savills.co.uk/insight-and-opinion/savills-news/336014-0/savills--pipeline-of-data-centres-needs-to-more-than-double-by-2025-to-meet-demand-for-storage-in-europe

The London Land Challenge; The Industrial Land Market

https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/329623-0

Some accompanying listening.

Brighouse on Saturday Night – Roger Davies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQmACfPhY4

50 Shades T-Shirts!

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning you will have heard Clive Betts say that...

'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'.

Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html