IN Brief:
- Greenwich has approved revised plans for 1,500 homes at Morden Wharf.
- The scheme now comprises 11 buildings, with heights of up to 35 storeys and 20% affordable housing.
- The decision keeps a major brownfield riverfront project moving after redesign, viability pressure, and further negotiation over tenure mix.
Galliard Homes has secured approval for revised plans to deliver 1,500 homes at Morden Wharf on the Greenwich Peninsula, keeping one of London’s larger brownfield residential schemes in play after redesign, funding changes, and renewed debate over affordable housing provision.
The approved scheme will be built across 11 residential blocks ranging from mid-rise buildings to towers of up to 35 storeys. The revised affordable housing offer is set at 20% by habitable room, split 68:32 between social rent and intermediate tenures, with 250 affordable homes in total. That is above the 10% offer that drew criticism earlier in the year, but still below the 35% provision attached to the earlier consent.
Morden Wharf has become a useful example of the conditions now shaping large urban housing schemes across London. Since the original consent, higher build costs, tighter fire and building-safety requirements, and a more cautious funding environment have all fed back into design, density, tenure mix, and delivery assumptions. The revised legal agreement removes mid- and late-stage viability reviews while retaining an early-stage review trigger linked to delivery timescales.
The site remains strategically attractive. It is large, brownfield, close to transport, and capable of delivering substantial housing numbers in an area of persistent demand. Yet the route to delivery has become more dependent on funding support, planning flexibility, and careful phasing than earlier schemes of comparable scale might once have assumed. That tension has become familiar across London, where major residential projects continue to move through planning but increasingly emerge with altered layouts, reduced affordable percentages, or reworked legal structures.
The design has shifted as well. The revised proposal reduces the number of buildings while reshaping the riverside towers, increasing spacing and altering the external treatment. Construction is expected to begin following river wall works, with the build programme extending into the next part of the decade. On sites of this scale, a consent is only one step in a much longer delivery process shaped by infrastructure works, sequencing, contractor appetite, sales or rental performance, and financing conditions.
Large housing projects in London are now being tested against a more exacting set of commercial and regulatory conditions. Second staircases, gateway requirements, specification changes, and funding scrutiny are all feeding into the way schemes are designed and phased. Councils, developers, and registered providers are frequently negotiating not over whether homes are needed, but over what form of delivery remains realistic within the current economics.
Morden Wharf sits squarely within that pattern. The approved scheme remains substantial in scale and significant for Greenwich’s housing pipeline, even if the path to approval has been more contested than first envisaged. Brownfield housing remains central to London’s growth strategy. The current challenge lies in keeping schemes large enough to make a meaningful contribution while making them buildable under present-day cost, safety, and funding conditions.
