London is obviously no stranger to regeneration megaprojects but it has rarely seen one like this. Chinese developer Knight Dragon’s mammoth £8.4bn overhaul of the former gasworks site at Greenwich Peninsula promises to be one of the biggest regeneration projects London has ever seen undertaken by a single developer.
Measuring over 150 acres it is twice the size of King’s Cross Central and offers an astonishing 1.6 miles of riverfront. It aims to provide 15,720 homes in order to sustain a residential population of around 34,000, more than nine times the size of the Barbican. It will include a commercial district that will offer 3.5 million ft² of retail, offices and hotels and it will also feature two schools and a film studio.
The development’s accommodation will be primarily distributed across a collection of futuristic high-rise towers arranged around almost 50 acres of green space and reaching up to 40 storeys high. The project has already been approved by the mayor of London and the Royal Borough of Greenwich, with the latter awarding outline consent for the masterplan in 2015. Although the scheme isn’t expected to fully complete until well into the next decade at least, several of its smaller buildings are already complete and construction is under way on a number of its major blocks.