Homes plan for cattle market site
EALING can expect roughly 125 more affordable homes after the council’s cabinet passed recommendations to purchase a historic cattle market site in Southall for redevelopment.
The Cattle Market site - where a town market still operates three days each week - will be combined with the adjacent Southall Market car park to make way for the development.
The car park and its 80 spaces is expected to be closed for up to two years, should the programme go ahead, but the spaces will be re-provided upon completion.
During the Cabinet meeting, council leader Julian Bell said the development would use a significant amount of the £99million received from the Mayor of London to build council homes.
He said: “This is an opportunity for us to build 125 genuinely affordable homes and also re-provide the 80 spaces in the public car park.
In October 2018, the council secured a circa £98.8 million grant funding from the Greater London Authority under the ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ programme to deliver 1138 affordable homes.
Mr Bell said: “This is moving us forward to that 2,500 affordable homes target - a key manifesto pledge.”
The council report into the project noted an element of shared ownership or private sale units may need to be introduced to support the viability of the scheme.
The site is located between the car park behind the Red Lion pub and the remainder of the old Cattle Market site to the rear of the Lidl supermarket on Southall High Street at the eastern end of Southall Town Centre.
The developer of the Red Lion site offered to buy the car park in early 2016, however the sale did not proceed when the proposed supermarket operator dropped out.
Action is now in the hands of the Executive Director of Place to negotiate and enter the legal agreements necessary to progress.
According to a council press release Ealing is more than a third of the way towards the target of delivering at least 2,500 new genuinely affordable homes for the borough by March 2022.
Work to build 898 new homes for let at genuinely affordable rates by either the council or housing associations has now been started or completed.
A council statement reads: “Over 90% of the new homes will be available as social lets either by the council or housing associations, priced well within the means of local people on low incomes.
“The other 10% will be let at London Living Rent – a genuinely affordable rent level that allow tenants to save a deposit to buy their own home.”
The release continues: “With 1,138 homes in the pipeline for the next three years, Ealing is directly building more council homes for let than any other London borough.”
If the council achieves its target it will have developed more new homes for social rent in the fouryear period to April 2022 than it did in the rest of the century combined.
The cattle market dates all the way back to 1698 when Francis Merrick of Southall was granted permission by William III to hold a cattle market in the village of Southall. At that time the population of Southall was just 697.
Even as recently as 1961, horses, cattle, pigs, carts, and harness were sold on Wednesdays. General produce and market stalls were held every Saturday.
The last horse market took place at the site as recently as 2007.