Can Allies and Morrison’s Canada Water masterplan match King’s Cross?

Five years after planning was granted, the first phase of British Land’s Canada Water mega regeneration project in south-east London is almost finished.

Back in May 2020, Southwark council gave the green light for the Allies and Morrison-designed masterplan to transform 53 acres of redundant docks, tired retail sheds and the Daily Mail printing works into a mixed-use community with 3,000 homes, two million square feet of workspace and one million square feet of retail, cultural and leisure facilities. With roots in office and retail, British Land had never attempted a mixed-use regeneration scheme on such a scale before so drafted in Argent’s Roger Madelin and colleague Phil Tait, who were responsible for the highly acclaimed Kings Cross regeneration project, to hopefully repeat that success. In another parallel, pension fund AustralianSuper, which has a 74% stake in Kings Cross, took a 50% stake in Canada Water last year.

The first phase includes a 35-storey residential tower with 186 homes, two office buildings, a leisure centre and public realm improvements. A social housing scheme at the other end of the development was completed last year.

There is also a specialist engineering college called TEDI London, and laboratory space for let. Called Paper Yard, this is housed in modular buildings so can be expanded if demand grows.

With early aspirations now realised, Building visited the scheme to see what it is like and what is coming up next.

The new buildings are clustered around the grade II-listed Dock Office, the only historic building on the development, which has been refurbished as the project hub. Located on the far western extremity of the scheme close to the Lower Road – a busy thoroughfare cutting across the relatively isolated Rotherhithe peninsula – the buildings are conveniently positioned between nearby Canada Water and Surrey Quays stations on the Jubilee and Overground lines respectively. The Jubilee line will whisk commuters to London Bridge in just three minutes with Bond Street another nine minutes away.

Behind the Dock Office is an attractive garden with Corten-faced terracing, brick paving and a pond. Opposite is the smaller of two office buildings, Three Deal Porters, which divides into two volumes thanks to deep, centrally located inset balconies facing the garden.

Featuring warehouse-style punched windows, one half is faced in red and the other in beige brick. The building features modest floorplates which can be further subdivided to appeal to smaller companies.

Next door is the Dock Shed, a distinctive building with a saw-tooth roof and twisted bronze-gold balcony facings that reference the architecture of the long-gone timber warehouses that once lined the docks. This has much larger floorplates.

“These were both designed purposely to appeal to slightly different occupiers at the early part of regeneration,” explains Philip Tait, Canada Water’s head of development. “One is much smaller and more flexible, the other is more HQ- focused with much larger, 45,000ft² floorplates and 12m spans.”

The Dock Shed has a more distinctive quality than Three Deal Porters with large terraces overlooking Canada Dock. The top floor is flooded with natural light thanks to north facing rooflights.

It also features a huge reception area simply finished with a polished concrete floor, exposed concrete soffits and huge trusses to support the office floors above. This is conceived as a social space with rentable meeting rooms, areas for ad hoc working and a coffee and sandwich bar.

Historically not an office location, attracting the first large corporate occupiers to Canada Water rather than the City of London or Canary Wharf could be a challenge. Although no leases have been signed yet, Tait says interest is “ticking up” now that the buildings are finished.

Both office buildings have achieved BREEAM Outstanding and are targeting NABERS 4.5*, which is good for buildings designed at a time before NABERS had arrived in the UK. This will help the buildings appeal to corporate occupiers.

Three Deal Porters is configured as a podium to the residential tower, The Founding. The tower is very different in style, consisting of three distinctly coloured volumes terminating at different heights towards the top to soften the building’s mass.

One element is clad in bright red panels that reference a vividly coloured new boardwalk over Canada Dock. Designed by Asif Khan, the boardwalk links Canada Water station to the existing Surrey Quays shopping centre. This will eventually be replaced by a new town centre complete with a high street and town square.

One-bedroom apartments start at £700,000, two bedrooms £1m and three bedrooms £2m. Tait admits sales are slow, which he puts down to a difficult market because of high interest rates. He adds that the flats are not yet finished and buyers want to see completed apartments before parting with their cash.

The Dock Shed incorporates a leisure centre at lower ground floor level with a 25m-long, eight-lane swimming pool, a sports hall with four courts for badminton and basketball plus a 150-seat gym, a spin studio and a second studio for other activities such as yoga. Part of a deal with Southwark council, this will be open to the public.

British Land wants to attract food and beverage outlets to the office building ground floor spaces to help activate the area. “There’s huge demand for good quality buildings in good quality spaces,” Tait says. “The beauty we have is we are mixed use so we can provide that daytime and nighttime activation”.

Like at Argent’s Kings Cross, British Land has actively pursued meanwhile uses for existing buildings. Planning permission was granted in February to convert a former unit in the Surrey Quays shopping centre to a jazz club, food hall and vertical farm producing 20 tonnes of salad leaves a year. Called Corner Corner, this should appeal to potential new arrivals to the area.

With the first phase virtually finished, British Land is pressing on with the next phases. This includes capitalising on the benefits of one of the most successful meanwhile uses to date.

British Land leased the former Daily Mail building as a 5,000 capacity music club called Printworks. The company behind this, Broadwick, will operate Corner Corner and will return to part of the refurbished printworks building, which has been stripped back to its structural frame, once it is completed in 2026.

Originally intended as a 300,000ft² office, this has been reduced to 160,000ft² to accommodate the return of Printworks. The building will also include a rooftop conference facility.

British Land is making other changes to the 2020 masterplan and has submitted a Section 73 application to Southwark council to vary the planning consent granted in 2020. This seeks to increase the overall number of homes and to maintain viability in the face of changes to building regulations and the new requirement for tall residential buildings to have two staircases.

Building regulations include changes to Part L and meeting the new Part O which control overheating. The former means better thermal performance and the latter a move towards air conditioning.

“It is difficult to pass [Part O] without putting air-conditioning in, so we are looking at supplementary air-conditioning if not full air-conditioning,” says Hannah Farahar, Canda Water development director and head of sustainability.

Tait says these regulatory changes mean adding six to 11 storeys and extra width to the tall residential buildings. “The principle of the masterplan stays the same, we are just seeking extra height and massing that allows us to deliver the homes we wanted to,” explains Tait.

“We have also seen steep cost inflation over the last five years and quite flat values as well. All of that has gone into the pot to make sure that we have got a successful scheme going forward.”

The Building Safety Act has prompted the scrapping of podiums incorporating tall residential towers. The next part of the scheme is a large five-storey podium incorporating a new Tesco and five residential buildings. The podium will also include a basement car park for the supermarket and a private park on the roof for the residents.

Tait says the whole scheme is classified as higher risk under the Building Safety Act if any residential element is more than 18m or seven storeys high. “We are going to move away from that because the higher risk building designation applies to the whole thing. That is driving risk, programme and complexity into it, so we are going to be more traditional in terms of standalone residential and offices,” he says.

The adjacent zone has been designed by AHMM and includes two residential towers now separated by a standalone office building.

A side benefit of standalone buildings is this opens up the market to a wider contractor audience as the contracts can be let as simpler, single-use projects. Tait adds that the requirement to submit detailed plans to the building safety regulator (BSR) at gateway 2 is problematic for large, complicated sites which are built out over many years because designs need to be adaptable to changing market conditions.

“These are six-year schemes, so you have to add flexibility for change to come,” Tait says, adding that the gateway 2 requirements mean a large upfront investment in design work, which takes time, coupled with long delays getting approval from the BSR. And any changes mean going through the same process again. “Everyone is in the same boat and trying to derisk their schemes.”

Looking further ahead, when Tesco moves from its current site next to the Surrey Quays shopping centre into the new building, that will free up the site for the new town centre and square. The high street will be lined with five-storey buildings with offices above retail.

Tait says the Surrey Quays shopping centre is staying for now, so new occupiers have shops on their doorstep. There are also plans for a 300,00ft² life sciences building designed by Stanton Williams – the hope is the demand stimulated by Paper Yard will help establish the area as a life sciences hub.

There is still a long way to go, and much could change over the next 10 years before the scheme completes. The first phase looks promising; there is a broad mix of uses, the quality of the buildings and public transport links are good and the improvements to Canada Dock and the new boardwalk are impressive. This should help to attract people to the new apartments and offices.

In the longer term, the mixed-use nature of the scheme, including the cultural elements, and the abundance of park and woodland plus the proximity of the river should give Canada Water the edge over other big London regeneration schemes – and repeat the success of Kings Cross.