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.
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