IN Brief:
- Eastmoor Street will provide 182 affordable homes, with two thirds allocated for social rent.
- Hyde and Formation Design and Build coordinated the scheme’s architectural, structural, fire, and construction evidence.
- The approval establishes a regulatory route for later phases within Hyde’s 1,200-home Charlton Riverside programme.
The Hyde Group has secured Gateway 2 approval for a 182-home affordable housing development at Eastmoor Street in Greenwich, allowing the project to progress towards construction under England’s higher-risk building control regime. It is Hyde’s first development at Charlton Riverside and its first to pass the enhanced pre-construction approval process.
The scheme will be delivered with Formation Design and Build. All 182 homes will be affordable, with two thirds intended for social rent and one third for first-time buyers. Eastmoor Street forms the opening phase of Hyde’s wider plans within the Charlton Riverside Opportunity Area, where it has consent to deliver about 1,200 homes.
Gateway 2 is a statutory hold point for higher-risk buildings. Construction cannot begin until the Building Safety Regulator has approved the building control application, including the design information and arrangements for managing compliance. Higher-risk residential buildings are generally those with at least seven storeys or a height of at least 18 metres and two or more residential units.
The approval is therefore more than a planning milestone. It confirms that the submitted design and management information has passed the regulator’s pre-construction assessment, giving the project a defined baseline before work starts rather than leaving material building control issues to be resolved during delivery.
Approval depends on coordinated evidence
Hyde said its team worked closely with Formation throughout the application, coordinating architecture, structural engineering, fire safety, and construction information. That coordination reflects the practical burden of Gateway 2, where the client must demonstrate how the completed proposal will comply with building regulations and how work will be controlled on site.
The process extends beyond a conventional drawing submission. Applicants must address competence, change control, construction management, mandatory occurrence reporting, and the information that will form the building’s golden thread. Major changes after approval require further regulatory consent, making early design completeness and disciplined decision-making commercially important as well as legally necessary.
For a design-and-build contractor, the regime changes the balance between flexibility and certainty. Project strategies have often allowed substantial elements of detailed design to continue after mobilisation. Gateway 2 imposes a firmer boundary before construction, while later changes can affect approvals, sequencing, procurement, and programme.
That places the contractor’s design responsibilities inside the client’s regulatory case from the outset. Structural interfaces, fire strategy, compartmentation, façade design, service penetrations, and product specifications need to be considered as a coordinated system rather than as separate packages settled at different points in procurement.
The additional pre-construction effort can reduce the volume of unresolved safety-critical information carried onto site, but it also exposes weaknesses earlier. Incomplete design ownership, late specialist input, or uncertain product choices can hold an application in review and delay the point at which the main contractor can mobilise.
Eastmoor Street gives Hyde a working model for later phases. The housing association has described the development as strategically important within Charlton Riverside, where housing delivery will be accompanied by public space, community and commercial uses, and improved connections to the riverfront and Thames Path. A repeatable internal process may help subsequent projects progress with greater certainty, although each higher-risk building still requires its own compliant submission.
The tenure mix places the project within a constrained part of the residential market. Social-rent delivery depends on funding, land, planning obligations, and build costs aligning over a long programme. Regulatory approval does not remove those pressures, but it clears a critical barrier that has delayed a number of higher-rise developments since the new regime took effect.
Procurement teams must now ensure that approved specifications remain available when packages are placed. Substitutions driven by cost, availability, or lead time can become regulatory changes rather than routine commercial decisions, particularly where structural behaviour, compartmentation, façade construction, or fire performance is affected.
The same discipline applies to construction information. Site teams need to build against the approved design, record authorised changes, and preserve evidence for Gateway 3, when occupation depends on completion approval and registration. The golden thread is therefore not a handover exercise assembled at the end of the job; it must reflect decisions made throughout delivery.
For project teams, the change lies largely in the timing of coordination. Gateway 2 moves detailed evidence, dutyholder responsibilities, and construction controls towards the front of the programme. Clients and contractors that treat the submission as an administrative checkpoint risk late redesign and repeated information requests, while those that use it to structure design decisions enter construction with a clearer baseline.
Hyde’s approval now shifts attention to mobilisation, procurement, and the control of changes once work is under way. The regulator will remain involved through construction, and Eastmoor Street must ultimately demonstrate that the completed building matches the case approved before the first major works begin.