A council in south-east London has created what it describes as “the UK’s first pop-up village” to house families who are forced to live in B&Bs in other parts of the capital.
Rapidly rising property prices and rents, combined with the loss of social housing through right to buy, have put councils under growing pressure to find new ways to help people off their housing lists.
Number of homeless families living in B&Bs hits 12-year high in England
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In Lewisham one solution is a £4.3m scheme to provide 24 homes and 880 sq m of business space that can be picked up and moved at a later date, allowing the council to make use of vacant brownfield land while longer-term projects are finalised.
The Place/Ladywell project is taking place on the site of an old leisure centre that will eventually be used for a mixture of social and private housing and a new school. But with the planning process notoriously complicated and long, the local council decided to put the area to use for temporary homes. Just over a year after planning was granted for the temporary village, the cluster of two-bedroom flats is almost complete and the first tenants should move in in June.
House prices in the borough have risen by 15% over the past year, according to the Land Registry, reaching an average of £447,291. Rents are also high: last year the average cost for a two-bedroom flat was £1,312 a month. For Lewisham council this makes housing vulnerable residents a difficult business. It has 9,135 households on its waiting list for homes, 540 of them in temporary accommodation in B&Bs, mostly outside the borough.
