Convoys Wharf revised masterplan in the news

Convoys Wharf was the focus of several articles in local papers and the architectural press this week, after Hutchison Whampoa and Terry Farrell briefed the press on the new masterplan for the site, the planning application for which is due to be submitted shortly.

At the time of writing, the documents had not yet been made available, but we are assuming that the masterplan that will be submitted is the one that has been shown at previous public open days, which we wrote about on this blog. When the documents are available we will publish our own assessment.

Much of the coverage has been largely cut-and-pasting from the press release, which was presumably sent out by Hutchison Whampoa. 

However the architectural magazine Building Design was critical of the new masterplan, with the magazine's executive editor Ellis Woodman using his leader column to back up some of the issues raised by Deptford Is..   

"Since its closure as a site of industry in 2000, Convoys Wharf in Deptford has proved one of London’s most intractable development conundrums. Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners and Aedas have previously drawn up plans for the 16ha Thames-side site and now Terry Farrell’s office has submitted a third proposal. 

Sadly, it remains no less persuasive than its predecessors. 

The fundamental problem is the developers’ determination to create 3,500 new homes on a site 10km from the centre of London that lacks a tube stop. That is a particular problem given how few of this luxury riverside development’s 9,000 residents will be employed close to home. Deptford is, after all, one of the poorest wards in one of the poorest boroughs in London. 

Quite what the development gives back to the community is also hard to fathom. Once an area providing local employment, it is to be replaced by a dormitory village that lacks the transport network to support it. Instead, what’s needed is a development that recognises the obligations it owes the community."

The Evening Standard, whose architecture critic Kieran Long wrote insightfully about the project in 2011, went to the other extreme, focussing on Terry Farrell's quote that his masterplan was capable of turning Deptford into 'the Shoreditch of south London'. Deptford Is.. finds this concept hard to grasp, and questions the basis of such an assertion.

Leaving aside the question of whether local residents want to live in a 'new Shoreditch', the notion that building a high-density residential development in an area of deprivation will turn one place into another is out of touch with reality. Terry Farrell was supposedly brought in to re-imagine the masterplan and connect it with the site's heritage, using a 'ground-up' approach that respected the history of Deptford and used it to inform a revised proposal. Farrell also said that the development would attract a more affluent class of resident to Deptford. That much is clear, since the prices of apartments are likely to be well above the means of most people living here already, but there is little indication of how this will have a positive impact on Deptford.