Croydon Council’s proposed masterplan for Purley Way includes 7,500 new homes and a fundamental redesign of the whole area. This was my response to the consultation.

The Masterplan covers the area from Ikea / Valley park in the north down to The Colonnades in the south. You can see Croydon Council’s plans here.

Neil Garratt’s response to Croydon Council’s Purley Way Masterplan.

Types and styles of housing

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create what is in effect a new town centre almost from scratch, in fact four linked town centres. What is built will dictate the shape of thousands of people’s lives for generations to come, so we owe it to them to create a built environment in which those future generations can thrive and take pride.

It is for this reason that I have concerns about the plans. There is an attempt to create some pocket parks and other small areas to break up the development and create places to congregate, which I welcome. But looking at the massing of buildings proposed, the masterplan would benefit from more human-scale development with streets of front doors and points of interest.

I would prefer to avoid a street scene dominated by tall blocks as they inevitably create stretches of dead street frontage. Such dead street frontage deters pedestrians by providing no points of interest, no reason to linger, in turn making the street an intimidating, lonely place dominated by blank walls - unpleasant for those people who do walk.

This is why I would prefer to see more townhouses and fewer towers. Where there are blocks, I would prefer more mid-rise “mansion block” styles where each front door is serving a smaller number of dwellings. This not only humanises the street but fosters better communities and more neighbourliness among residents, compared with large blocks where a single entrance serves dozens of flats over many floors.

Regarding styles, I would strongly favour traditional brick or rendered finishes, and would strongly oppose brightly coloured cladding or “gritty” industrial finishes as they tend to age badly. These are to be people’s homes not a film set. In Valley Park for example, I fear that an attempt to reflect an industrial heritage with industrial-looking housing may not reflect the type and style of housing that people actually want to live in. In fact, the main type of housing found in historic industrial areas is the much-loved brick terraced house.

Transport

Summary. If this area is to thrive, there must be binding commitments to improve transport capacity and a realistic assessment of how people will get around before work starts. This plan to house an extra 15,000 to 20,000 people in the area is ambitious, it calls for equally ambitious hard-headed transport planning if it is to succeed. The baseline assumption for every form of transport must be that existing capacity will be swamped with so many extra people and require major upgrade. Dramatic modal shifts away from private cars to public transport cannot simply be assumed.

Public transport. When normal public transport usage returns after the pandemic, Croydon’s trains, buses, and trams will once again be at capacity at peak times. It seems obvious that adding an extra 15,000 – 20,000 people in this area will overwhelm the existing capacity, especially as the Masterplan seems to envisage buses and trams as the main way people will get around. Is there an analysis of the trips that this new masterplan would generate, and the number of extra buses, trams, and trains this equates to? We need a binding commitment to provide those extra buses, trams, and trains.

Roads. The London Mayor has indefinitely suspended the Fiveways junction upgrade, a junction at the heart of this Masterplan which is already notoriously busy. There needs to be a binding commitment to carry out that work, or equivalent work, before the Purley Way Masterplan proceeds. Note that the Mayor’s Fiveways plan included significant realignment of the junction and road widening, so the masterplan and junction projects need careful coordination.

The A23. I learn from the proposed Masterplan that Purley Way “will be transformed from a hostile and divisive road in to a green city street.” This is an easy thing to write, but it is no easy thing achieve. The A23 is a major trunk route between the M25/M23 and inner London, a Transport for London Red Route which must carry large volumes of through traffic including heavy goods vehicles. This traffic cannot be diverted or wished away. A reality-based Masterplan must accommodate this traffic as well as the extra traffic generated by the extra residents.

Car parking. Much of the new building in the Masterplan comes from building over existing surface car parks. This may be reasonable since surface car parks tend to under-utilise valuable land compared with underground or multi-storey car parks. However, there seems to be little intention to re-provision that parking. Instead, the assumption running through the document seems to be that the new shops and offices will thrive off the back of public transport. This would be a dramatic change, as currently many customers arrive by car. What if the lack of parking encourages customers to go elsewhere, taking their business with them, blighting the area with unviable boarded-up shops and offices? It is one thing to draw an artist’s impression of a bustling street scene full of thriving shops and businesses. To make it happen, those businesses have to persuade real people to spend their time and money here, but if they find it inconvenient to get here they will go somewhere else.

I conclude with my opening thought, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a new town. I would love to see a beautiful, welcoming place whose residents are proud to call it home, bustling with thriving businesses, where people can easily get around. I am not sure that the Purley Way Masterplan is the ticket to take us there.