IN Brief:
- The approved Wansbeck Road scheme contains 280 co-living studios and 44 affordable homes.
- HTA Design has planned two buildings rising to 10 and seven storeys on the final Neptune Wharf plot.
- The car-free development includes rooftop PV, sustainable drainage, landscaped public realm, and a BREEAM Excellent target.
McLaren Living has secured planning approval for a 324-home co-living and affordable housing development at Wansbeck Road in Fish Island, Hackney Wick, completing the final development plot within the Neptune Wharf masterplan.
The approved scheme will provide 280 co-living studios and 44 affordable homes across two buildings rising to 10 and seven storeys. HTA Design has designed the development for the corner of Wansbeck Road and Monier Road, where it will form a new residential edge between Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Victoria Park.
The co-living building combines private studios with a substantial shared amenity offer, including a library, gym, studio space, communal kitchens, dining areas, social rooms, a cinema, creative rooms, and laundry facilities. At ground level, the plans also include a social co-working café and flexible event space intended to create activity beyond the residential entrances.
A landscaped courtyard will sit between the two buildings, with new public realm connecting the development into the surrounding street network. Existing mature trees around the site boundaries are being retained within the landscape strategy, while rain gardens, bioswales, and permeable paving form part of the sustainable drainage approach.
The project is designed as a car-free, cycle-first development. Roof-mounted photovoltaic panels are included within the energy strategy and the scheme is targeting BREEAM Excellent, placing operational energy, drainage, and landscape performance alongside density and tenure in the approved design.
Planning approval moves the scheme beyond the stage where its housing mix is simply an allocation within a wider masterplan. The next phase will require the design team to translate two residential products into coordinated technical packages and establish how the buildings can be constructed on a constrained east London site without compromising the public realm and access arrangements that form part of the consent.
Co-living has a distinctive construction profile because much of the product value sits outside the individual studio. Bedrooms can be highly repetitive, which supports standardised fit-out and services strategies, but the shared kitchens, lounges, gyms, workspaces, and circulation areas create a wider range of acoustic, ventilation, fire, and finishing requirements than a conventional apartment block.
The adjoining affordable housing building introduces another set of requirements. Although both blocks are residential, their tenure, management, access, servicing, and handover arrangements are different. Keeping those differences clear in the detailed design while sharing site logistics, utilities, and public realm will be important if the project is to avoid duplicated work or late coordination changes.
The drainage strategy also has to move from planning principle into buildable detail. Rain gardens, bioswales, and permeable surfaces depend on levels, sub-base design, planting, overflow routes, and long-term maintenance working together. On dense urban sites, those systems compete for space with utilities, cycle storage, access routes, and structural requirements, so their performance cannot be protected by landscape drawings alone.
McLaren Living describes Wansbeck Road as the final parcel within the Neptune Wharf masterplan. That gives the project a completion role within a wider regeneration area rather than treating it as an isolated residential block. The landscaped courtyard and new public realm will therefore be judged partly on how well they close gaps between earlier development phases and the surrounding Fish Island streets.
The project also arrives as co-living becomes a more established part of London’s residential pipeline. The model concentrates more amenity and management space within a single development and depends on efficient operation of those shared facilities. From a construction perspective, that puts pressure on repetition in the private studios while maintaining a higher specification across the communal areas that differentiate the offer.
No construction start date or main contractor has been confirmed in the planning announcement. Procurement, programme, and detailed delivery methodology therefore remain to be established. The consent nevertheless gives the project team a fixed basis from which to develop those packages and move the final Neptune Wharf plot towards construction.
The next visible milestone will be less about adding amenities to the planning narrative and more about proving that the two buildings can be delivered efficiently as one site. Repetition, services coordination, facade design, logistics, and public realm sequencing will determine whether the approved density translates into a controlled construction programme rather than simply a dense set of drawings. Early resolution of those interfaces will also be important if the affordable homes and co-living accommodation are to reach handover without one block becoming dependent on unfinished work in the other.
