Building the foundations for growth

Government policy, power infrastructure and major regeneration projects all pointed towards the same underlying challenge this week: creating the conditions in which investment can translate into development.

That was clearest in the Government's latest overhaul of the National Planning Policy Framework, which introduces stronger support for development in sustainable locations and a new “default yes” for housing within walking distance of well-connected stations.

It is an important change for residential development, including Build to Rent, but the revised framework reaches considerably further, with strengthened support for data centres, AI Growth Zones and strategic development alongside changes intended to make viability assessments and planning decisions more pragmatic.

The direction of travel is clear. Government wants more development around existing infrastructure, with fewer planning obstacles standing between viable projects and construction. Whether that produces the acceleration in delivery ministers are seeking will depend on more than planning policy, but the revised NPPF changes the balance of the system in favour of development.

Infrastructure of a rather different kind sits behind National Grid's newly launched North West London Upgrade. It may lack the architectural appeal of some of this week's schemes, but its importance to future development is difficult to overstate.

The programme includes new and upgraded substations, 60km of cable infrastructure and more than 200km of upgraded overhead line. Crucially, part of that investment will enable five new data centres requiring a combined 1GW of electricity.

That single figure illustrates one of the defining development challenges facing the data centre market. Demand for new facilities may be enormous, but without equally substantial investment in electricity infrastructure, much of the proposed pipeline cannot progress. Increasingly, the data centre construction story starts well beyond the boundary of the development site.

Elsewhere, developers are looking at how the right combination of uses can generate economic growth.  At Bicester Motion, three outline applications form the opening phase of a proposed £1 billion, ten-year expansion of the former RAF Bicester site.

The unusual aspect of the masterplan is that workplaces, rather than housing, provide its economic core. R&D, engineering, demonstration and scale-up space would create a specialist mobility and technology ecosystem, with around 200 homes and other amenities supporting the businesses and people working there.

Great Yarmouth's proposed £150 million Quayside regeneration takes a very different approach. Here, an outlet village and leisure offer are intended to become the catalyst for a broader waterfront destination incorporating hospitality, a hotel, homes and new public realm.

Both schemes are mixed-use, but their underlying logic is similar: establish a sufficiently strong economic anchor and build a wider place around it.

Perhaps the most intriguing example of adaptation this week, however, came from Canary Wharf. Plans for the retrofit of 8 Canada Square show how dramatically the requirements of the prime office market have changed since HSBC's headquarters was completed in 2002.

Following the bank's departure in 2027, the million-plus sq ft tower could be transformed from a single-occupier corporate headquarters into a multi-tenant destination incorporating offices, a hotel, food and beverage, leisure and cultural uses. The building itself is not obsolete, but the model around which it was originally designed increasingly is.

Owners across the office market  are confronting ageing stock, changing occupier expectations and the carbon implications of demolition and redevelopment. At 8 Canada Square, the proposed answer is an ambitious retrofit that retains the structure while evolving how the building interacts with its occupants and the surrounding city.

Across five very different stories, then, the common denominator is not simply construction activity but the infrastructure needed to support the next cycle of development.  Sometimes that means planning policy. Sometimes it is electricity cables and substations. Elsewhere it is transport connectivity, specialist employment clusters or finding viable new uses for existing buildings.

Capital can identify opportunities, developers can draw up ambitious schemes and occupiers can create demand. But ultimately, growth happens only when the conditions exist to turn those ambitions into physical development.  This week offered five very different examples of the industry trying to create exactly those conditions.