The former Holloway prison site

• SINCE May 2018 Community Plan For Holloway’s (CP4H) has worked to amplify the voices of the thousands of residents it has engaged with who’ve expressed strongly held views and concerns about plans for the former Holloway prison site.

Thousands of local people are in need of better housing in our area, and its absolutely right that a large number of homes at council rents are being provided on the site.

However many residents say that Peabody and Islington Council can do so much better and that the quality of homes, public space, and women’s building on offer, is far from good enough.

So we are again calling for the council to tell the developer to go back to the drawing board.

Full detail of the community’s objections can be found on the Community Plan for Holloway website https://plan4holloway.org/cp4h-our-vision-for-the-future-of-the-holloway-prison-site/

Many of the objections, in the view of the CP4H represent a specific failure to comply with the planning policy framework.

Key concerns include:

• Discrimination against social housing tenants in the mix and allocation of tenure.

There is a clear differentiation of quality of homes for social and private use in the overheating / air conditioning and the majority of homes with an attractive view over the central landscaped area are proposed as private tenure.

We also note that publicly-funded social housing includes shared ownership tenures, which are unaffordable to many Islington residents in desperate need of housing.

• A lack of community facilities to provide for nearly 3,500 new residents, many of them in social housing.

This will have an impact on existing local community facilities and public services, and Peabody has not properly analysed this impact, despite the council asking them to do so.

• The rich history of this site is being erased. The single floor offer of a “Women’s Building” located under a 14-storey block of flats is far from a fitting legacy to the capital’s only women’s prison and will not be able to replace the support services that women need.

It seems tokenistic, rather than the women-led living legacy this site deserves. Legacy and women’s history should have been at the heart of this development, not applied as an afterthought.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for women and for the capital, which is in real danger of being missed.

• The height, density, and design, fail to comply with specific Islington policies and will have a severely detrimental effect on the area and future users of the site.

There are also poor levels of sunlight and daylight in proposed dwellings and an unacceptable loss of sunlight and daylight to neighbouring estates such as Bakersfield.

We are very concerned that there will be overheating of many of the proposed flats and that their single-aspect design does not allow for proper through ventilation.

There has also been a failure to provide a traffic-free design for the site, that would support cycling and other modes of transport, as well as a failure to propose an environmentally responsible construction, with excessive carbon emissions.

As we all know, we are in a climate emergency. Everything that can be done to meet this crisis should be done.

WILL McMAHON
Chair, on behalf of Community Plan for Holloway Board