James Dunnett asks why we should lose our ever decreasing green spaces in the bid to build more housing
Peregrine House is a 26-storey Council residential tower built in 1968 on Hall Street, running between City Road and Goswell Road, and it has a large open space of 1 hectare (2.4 acres) at its foot, the only green space along City Road. It also includes some hard games pitches.
This space has caught the eye of the Council as a potential site to build more housing. In 2025 it commissioned an outline plan which proposes a sequence of nine- and seven-storey blocks around the perimeter of the site, including along the City Road frontage, taking up a large part of it. A survey was made of the opinion of residents of the tower last summer, with a subsequent meeting to discuss how the remaining open space should be used – neither exercise being well publicised or held at convenient times according to residents. The survey included questions such as ‘how often do you use the green space’ which, given that the pitches – previously well used – have been closed for two years for ‘health and safety’ reasons, might lead to misleading results.
As is well known, the Government, the Greater London Authority, and Islington Council are all committed to building the maximum possible number of new homes. Targets are set centrally for each Borough by a ‘Standard Method’ based on a presumed 0.8% per annum increase on the existing stock, modified comparatively little to take account of whether there is space in any particular Borough to build such housing – and little finance provided to do so. The result is that Councils seek free sites they already own, such as spaces on existing housing estates or schools considered to be under-used, and they also seek development partners who can build housing for private sale to subsidise the construction of new affordable or social housing. Examples in Islington are the new blocks built on incidental green spaces on the Parkview Estate, and those being built by the City Corporation on its York Way Estate.
Another, from which the Council has since backed off, was the Finsbury Leisure Centre pitches on Central Street, where the ground-level pitches were to have been replaced by new and considerably smaller pitches on the roof of a rebuilt Finsbury Leisure Centre. The Council has also granted consent for the complete rebuilding of the New Barnsbury Estate by the Newlon Housing Association in association with Mount Anvil developers. The original 371 units will be replaced by 1116 of which 690 will be for sale, 290 to rehouse existing tenants, with only 136 additional social/affordable units. The amount of open space per resident will be about one quarter what it originally was. The need to subsidise the new social housing with housing for sale means that densities have to be far higher to achieve it.
The Estates that are typically targeted are those from the 1950s, ’60s and early ‘70s, built at comparatively low densities by present standards, and with taller buildings than the previous 4- or 5-storey walk-ups, so as to leave as much ground level open space as possible giving all residents a green outlook. The Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury, merged with Islington in 1965, was a pioneer in this, hiring the immigrant Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin, with new ideas from Paris, to design not only the Finsbury Health Centre which opened in 1938, now Grade 1-listed, but also the eight-storey Spa Green and Priory Green Estates (note the ‘Green’ component in their names), not built until the early post-war years. Also designed by him and built post-war was Bevin Court, after which his practice Tecton was dissolved, and much of his Finsbury work was inherited by his former associate Carl Ludwig Franck, a pre-war German refugee from Nazism. Applying similar green principles, Franck initially worked with Joseph Emberton on the Brunswick and Stafford Cripps Estates, and then was primarily responsible for the King Square, Finsbury, Pleydell, and City Road Estates (comprising Peregrine House and Kestel House). These all include extensive areas of greenery. This, however, is not recognized by the Council’s ‘Local Plan’ which protects only ‘Designated Open Space’ – parks – not open space on Estates, which may be as large or larger. This is even though there are numerous clauses elsewhere in the Plan acknowledging the great value of all green space especially in a Borough which is notoriously short of it.
A housing policy which deprives inner-city communities of such spaces is madness. One solution would be to re-classify Peregrine House’s open space as Designated Open Space, in which case it would be protected and might be more welcoming to the surrounding population, including those in the much taller blocks recently built without any open space along City Road.
Kim Delve, who has lived in Peregrine House since 1981, says “the green space is vital for everyone – there is so little of it round here. In summer it is heavily used by residents to sun themselves, catch up with neighbours, have picnics, and as a safe area for children’s play, and the pitches were in constant use until closed for inspection two years ago and never re-opened”.
The loss of the space must most definitely be resisted.
