Project Background

The Woodberry Down regeneration area is located in the northern most part of the London Borough of Hackney, bounded by Manor House Station, Finsbury Park and Green Lanes in the west and two former reservoirs to the south.

View the Woodberry Down Map (opens in a new window) that details all the housing blocks in the regeneration programme

Site Boundary (opens in a new window)

The New River winds its way around the southern and northern boundaries of Woodberry Down. In addition to this attractive geography, unique for inner London, it has an ethnically diverse and dynamic community of around 5000 which, despite many problems, wish to remain living on Woodberry Down.

A Structural Evaluation survey report carried out in 2002 by Hackney Council revealed that many of the buildings within Woodberry Down were in a poor state of repair with structural problems and therefore beyond economic repair.  The report recommended wide scale demolition and rebuilding of most of the blocks in favour of refurbishment.

The decision was therefore taken by Hackney Council to omit Woodberry Down from its Decent Homes strategy in favour of a ‘self-funding regeneration’ scheme in order to improve housing standards and meet Government targets.

For a regeneration project to be ‘self-funding’ the vast majority of finance to re-provide or refurbish the homes must be generated from the redevelopment of the area. This necessitates an increase in the number of homes overall with a percentage of homes sold privately to fund the re-provision of social homes.

In 2004 a Cost Options report was prepared on behalf of Hackney Council to see how the rebuilding could be funded. The report specified the mix of tenures likely to be required for Woodberry Down to be ‘self-funding’.

This necessitates increasing the number of homes from 1,980 to approximately 4,600.  Of these new homes, it is expected that at least 50% will have to be sold on the open market to generate sufficient income to enable the redevelopment to be financially viable and cover the costs which are estimated to be in the region of £850 million over the next 15 to 20 years.

In addition to the new homes, the regeneration will provide the opportunity to improve new facilities with better open spaces, roads, retail shops, schools, nurseries, health and community facilities, all of which are being looked at in order to meet the needs of the diverse and growing community in the area.