Southern Grove unveils £4.5m development of London mews houses

By Bridging Loan Directory 29th July 2020

Developer Southern Grove today unveils a £4.5million pilot development of mews houses in a popular residential area of north London.

The scheme in leafy Finchley, called Granville Mews, will provide six townhouses benefiting from a communal courtyard and spacious three-bed, five-person accommodation.

Most developers avoid small sites because they feel they don’t deliver a great enough economy of scale.

However, Southern Grove believes that the sheer number of smaller infill sites in the capital represents a huge opportunity to increase the provision of family housing.

The company will be announcing plans for a series of other infill sites later this year.

Granville Mews, located in High Rd, will replace a branch of Buildbase on a corner plot in an area that is extremely popular with young professionals and families.

Finchley has built a reputation as a quiet corner of London covered in peaceful Victorian and Edwardian terraces.

Sheffield-based Axis Architecture have designed the scheme, for which a planning application was submitted yesterday (Tues) to Barnet Council. A construction partner has yet to be chosen.

News of the scheme comes as the company continues to progress large-scale residential developments of apartments, featuring hundreds of affordable homes.

Tom Slingsby, CEO of developer Southern Grove, commented:

“This is an exciting pilot project for us. Smaller parcels of land are unappealing to most big developers because they prefer the simplicity of single, large schemes that offer an easily defined economy of scale.

We think that’s the wrong way to look at infill sites. We believe they offer valuable opportunities to regenerate residential areas and increase housing stock.

London is littered with infill sites and, if you add them all together, they represent a huge bank of land that is either undeveloped or in need of regeneration.

A greater number of them will be needed to build housing at scale but the speed at which they can traverse the planning process makes up for this.

They represent a largely untapped opportunity to provide substantial amounts of new housing in London and we will be exploring how we can expand our use of them.

All developers should be trying to exploit infill sites to make best use of areas that are already substantially urban.”