Street will be rebuilt with 500 new homes
A whole street on a West London estate will be bulldozed to make way for 500 new homes after plans were approved by the local council. Houses and tower blocks on Austin Road on the Hayes Town Centre Estate will be demolished to make way for new tower blocks.
According to documents submitted to Hillingdon Council by architects Pollard Thomas Edwards, five tower blocks providing a maximum of 500 homes will be built over the course of several phases.
The proposal to bulldoze and rebuild the homes on Austin Road form part of a plan to regenerate the estate, currently made up of buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, and improve the quality of housing available for people in the area.
Under the plans, the number of available homes will nearly double from the 260 currently available, helping to address some of the overcrowding that currently exists there.
The new homes will consist of a mixture of one, two, three and four-bedroom units and more than half of the homes will be affordable.
At a meeting of Hillingdon Council’s planning committee to discuss the proposals, one councillor voiced concerns that there were not enough large properties to address the needs of families in the community.
Councillor Janet Duncan said: “The greatest demand we have is in three and four-bedroom units. We have got one and two-bedroom units everywhere and we really need larger family units.
“We are having people living in appalling overcrowded accommodation and really very unsuitable accommodation, sometimes with families suffering quite a lot of stress and the children suffering illness that we are very mindful of.”
Cllr Duncan was assured that the majority of three and four-bedroom homes on the new estate would be reserved for social housing.
According to documents submitted to the council, it is also hoped that the new layout of the road will improve the safety of the area, removing spaces where groups currently hang out and cause a “nuisance”.
Seconding the proposal to grant planning permission for the project, Cllr Philip Corthorne said: “This is something that has been overwhelmingly supported in the [residents] ballot that took place and I was really pleased to see that and I think this is a real positive.