The Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle was demolished in 2014 and replaced by Elephant Park, a development of thousands of luxury apartments, built by the Australian developer Lendlease.

Elephant Park is seen as an exemplar of a new global regeneration industry. In place of lower- and middle-income family housing, the new neighbourhoods are typically created to include luxury apartments. Today two-bedroom apartments in Elephant Park are on sale for between £900,000 and £1m, (comparable to Teddington Riverside)  and of the 2,704 new homes, only 82 are for social housing. Twenty-five per cent of the new homes are designated “affordable”, but since the government changed the definition of affordable in 2010 to mean up to 80% of market rent or market value, that is financially far out of reach for the majority of Londoners and their families. One local resident says: “They’ve got rid of family homes in the area and replaced them with one- or two-bedroom apartments – all the families are moving out; they should have seen this coming.”

The regeneration of so many new districts, from King’s Cross to the Olympic Park, is part of a larger story of the extreme gentrification of cities like London where soaring house prices are leading directly to a decline in birthrates.

The knock-on effects are that across the south-east, millennials are leaving London for Bristol, Brighton and seaside towns along the south coast, such as Hastings, Eastbourne or Deal. It’s not just schools, but GP surgeries and small businesses – the “ecosystem of the city” – that are closing.

The positive rhetoric and branding of these developments is that they transform run-down areas into vibrant and economically successful parts of the city. The reality is that they create sterile places, emptied of so many of the essential aspects of urban life, except the expensive activities. The city may be emptier than ever of children and families, but tables at sought-after restaurants are still booked up weeks in advance. Another category able to stay put are older people, with the census finding that the proportion of the population in every age group over 50 (except for 80-84 year olds) increased, as many of these people bought property in another era, unwittingly benefiting from huge rises in property values of up to 700%.

London boroughs like Southwark and Hackney are a mix of new half-empty neighbourhoods of luxury apartments, round the corner from streets of multimillion pound Georgian and Victorian homes that have soared in value alongside cramped and unaffordable private rental accommodation and a fast declining amount of social housing.

Mortlake next?

This is summarised from the Guardian 26 May 2025. For the full article see  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/26/placemaking-gentrification-london-luxury-apartments-expensive-restaurants-schools