Our next open meeting will be on June 7th at 6.30pm on Zoom. Please email to oonforum@gmail.com to join us, if you live or work in (or near) the area for which the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation has been the local planning authority since 2015. Membership of the Forum is free and open to all.
Our Forum continues to campaign against the very high-density/high rise development which is being inflicted on North Acton, East Acton, and North Hammersmith. Our latest letter to Liz Peace (chair of the OPDC) can be downloaded below. We have yet to receive a reply, over a month after sending it.
OONF to Liz Peace April 2022.final.2
As reported to our May meeting, there has been no further news on the the two major planning applications which OPDC planning officers have been asessing for several months (One Portal Way, North Acton and a proposed development by Pocket Living at Atlas Wharf — see the posts in the right hand columns). The next OPDC Planning Committee is scheduled for 16th June at 5.30pm. This follows a long gap since February 2022.
The OPDC Draft Local Plan is expected to be adopted formally by OPDC at its next Board meeting on June 22nd. Planning Inspector Paul Clark has required 464 ‘major modifications’ to be made to the Plan and its maps, before that Draft Plan is accepted as being lawful and ‘sound’. His report can be found at this link https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/opdc_local_plan_inspectors_report_appendices_and_annexes.pdf. But as yet there is no published version of a final Draft Plan incorporating these changes.
A reminder that it is not too late to submit an objection to the application from Imperial College at One Portal Way. OPDC are legally required to take all representations into account until the date of decision. See our campaign website at www.imperialfolly.org.uk for more background. The image below is what the increasingly notorious ‘North Acton Cluster’ will look like if this development is built, along with other towers that already constructed or have planning consent.
Objections and/or comments can be emailed to planningapplications@opdc.london.gov.uk. Please include the reference 21/0181/OUTOPDC and your name and address (which will be redacted before comments appear on the OPDC online planning register).
Further background to the Forum
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. Completion and opening of the station is due some time between 2029 and 2033.
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 2020-2022, London’s patterns of travel and working changed significantly during the pandemic.
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).