See our latest posts (right hand column) for two letters sent to David Lunts (CEO at the OPDC). Our next meeting (open to all OONF and GUA members) will be at 6.30pm on Tuesday 4th January. It will again be on Zoom.
Email oonforum@gmail.com to join the Forum. You can be a full member if you live or work within the designated Old Oak neighbourhood area, or an ‘associate member’ from the wider area with an interest in OPDC and HS2 plans for Old Oak.
At this session we will be discussing the details of evidence that we wish to give to the Planning Inspector at the public hearings he has agreed to hold on January 11th and 12th. Paul Clark as Inspector has allowed only a very limited number of issues to be discussed at the hearings. Two of them are important to OONF.
These are whether OPDC’s modified draft Local Plan ‘conforms’ with the new 2021 London Plan policy on Tall Buildings. We will be saying that it does not.
Plus questions on changed levels of accessibility to public transport resulting from the modifications to the OPDC Draft Local Plan. We will be arguing that the Draft plan has gone backwards in this respect since it was submitted in Octover 2018.
We will also have our usual update on new development proposals in the area. These include the application for One Portal Way at North Acton, with its plans for three towers above 50 storeys in height (see below for CGI image of the North Acton cluster assuming these and other consented schemes are built). By the time of our meeting we should be close to finalising our objections to this scheme. Were it to be granted consent and built (along with other pending applications at North Acton) the outcome would be as per the image below.
Further background
Old Oak is a part of west London lying at the heart of the UK’s largest urban regeneration project. It is the location of the HS2/Queen Elizabeth Line rail interchange at Old Oak Common station, on which construction started in 2020.
Since April 2015 the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) has been the planning authority for 650 hectares lying within the London Boroughs of Ealing, Brent, and Hammersmith & Fulham. The OPDC is accountable to an appointed board, and ultimately to the Mayor of London.
Because of its future connectivity to the national rail system, Old Oak has been earmarked for many years as one of London’s major ‘opportunity areas’. The rail interchange is seen as a ‘catalyst’ for high density commercial and residential development.
Back in 2015, a target of 24,000 new homes at Old Oak was set in the revised London Plan. This target stays the same in the 2021 London Plan. Yet during 2020, London’s patterns of travel and working changed out of all recognition during the pandemic. Demand for office space in central London has slumped. No one yet knows how far it will be ‘back to normal’ in 2021 but many believe that aspects of global city life have changed for good.
Much of Old Oak has remained as industrial and railway land, bisected by the Grand Union Canal. In 2015 a group of local residents associations in the area came together as an ‘interim’ neighbourhood forum. Our original aim was to achieve designation of a 280 hectare Old Oak neighbourhood area, and to prepare a neighbourhood plan which would help to integrate the existing residential settlements within and around the edge of the OPDC boundary.
After many months of discussion with the Corporation and with Hammersmith & Fulham Council, both these planning authorities rejected the boundary we had proposed (shown in blue on the map below). In September 2017, the OPDC designated a much reduced 22 hectare are in East Acton (see green boundary below). Hammersmith and Fulham Council designated a separate (but nearby) boundary as the old Oak Estate neighbourhood area (see brown boundary below).
Details of the reasons for these decisions, as published by each authority, can be found here and here. Following a further designation application, the Old Oak Neighbourhood Forum was designated in February 2018. This body has the legal powers to prepare a neighbourhood plan for the 22 hectare area that includes the Wesley Estate, the Island site (TITRA railway cottages), Midland Terrace/Shaftesbury Gardens and Wells House Road.
No organisation has yet come forward to apply for designation as an Old Oak Estate Neighbourhood Forum, in Hammersmith & Fulham. This area remains one of two ‘orphan’ neighbourhood areas in the Borough.
The Forum held its inaugural meeting in May 2018. Its membership is open to ‘full members’ (i.e. those who live or work within the 22 hectare boundary) and to ‘affiliate members’ (those who live or work in the wider area).
Please get in touch by emailing oonforum@gmail.com if you wish to join the Forum as a full member or an ‘affiliated member.’ There is no membership fee to join.
Other pages on this website give more details of who we are and the story so far. These include a second draft of our neighbourhood plan (2020 version).