IN Brief:
- Eighteen modular homes at Waterloo Road and Queen Street have been completed ahead of occupation.
- The temporary accommodation provides 14 two-bedroom and four three-bedroom homes for local families.
- Wates and Havering are separately progressing Blocks 9 and 10, covering more than 100 permanent affordable homes.
Havering Council has completed 18 modular homes at Waterloo Road and Queen Street in Romford, with local families expected to begin moving into the accommodation shortly. The units provide temporary homes for households experiencing homelessness while a larger permanent regeneration programme continues across the surrounding site.
The development has been delivered through Havering’s work with Wates Residential and comprises 14 two-bedroom and four three-bedroom homes. The accommodation is intended to reduce dependence on hotels, hostels, and other temporary placements while providing families with self-contained kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and living space.
The units occupy land within the wider Waterloo and Queen Street regeneration area, using part of the estate during the period before later permanent phases are built. That creates a specific role for modular construction: the homes can provide usable accommodation during a gap in the main development programme without requiring the council to abandon the longer-term masterplan for the site.
Factory manufacture does not remove the need for conventional site work. The completed modules still require foundations or support systems, drainage, utility connections, fire access, landscaping, external circulation, and lifting operations once they arrive in Romford. The construction process moves a larger proportion of work away from the development site, but places greater importance on accurate dimensional coordination and early design decisions.
That approach can shorten the visible structural phase, particularly where units arrive with internal finishes and services substantially complete. It also reduces the amount of wet construction carried out around neighbouring residents. The trade-off is that design changes become harder once production is under way, making coordination between factory output and site preparation critical to maintaining the programme.
The first residents are expected to move in as the modular development enters its operational phase. Performance will then be judged less by installation speed than by day-to-day factors including heating, ventilation, maintenance, acoustic performance, external space, and the ability to manage the homes safely while construction continues elsewhere on the regeneration site.
The temporary housing sits alongside a separate permanent programme. Havering and Wates Residential have entered a Pre-Construction Services Agreement for Blocks 9 and 10 after that phase received planning approval. The consent covers 107 affordable homes, together with community space and public-realm works forming part of the wider Waterloo and Queen Street scheme.
The PCSA allows the council and contractor to develop buildability, package procurement, logistics, programme, and cost before moving into the full construction contract. That period is particularly important where temporary residents will occupy part of the same regeneration area, because the later works must preserve safe pedestrian routes, servicing, refuse collection, emergency access, and separation from construction traffic.
Temporary accommodation and permanent regeneration therefore need to be planned as one site-management problem even though they answer different housing needs. The modular homes provide immediate capacity for 18 families, while Blocks 9 and 10 are intended to expand long-term affordable housing supply. Allowing one phase to obstruct the other would undermine the value of using the land during the development interval.
The arrangement also provides a practical test of modular housing on a live regeneration site. Relocatable or temporary units are often promoted for their speed, but their usefulness depends on whether their foundations, service connections, access routes, and eventual removal can be designed around the next phase rather than creating costly abortive work.
For Havering, the financial consideration is similarly practical. Emergency and temporary accommodation can carry substantial recurring costs, particularly where families have to be placed in hotels or outside their local area. Providing self-contained units on council-controlled regeneration land creates an alternative asset that can be used during the construction programme while the permanent housing pipeline develops.
The completion of the modular homes therefore closes only the first construction phase. Families still have to occupy and use the units while Wates and the council move the permanent scheme through pre-construction and into main works. The success of the approach will depend on whether temporary housing, site logistics, and permanent regeneration can operate alongside one another without turning a short-term solution into another constraint on the programme.
