Fosters' Whitechapel office tower finally approved after eight years

A conservation area in Whitechapel may have to be reviewed following a decision by councillors to approve a Foster & Partners office tower which breaches local development policy, planning officers have warned.

Councillors at Tower Hamlets voted unanimously to approve Fosters’ long-delayed plans for the 17-storey building at  2-6 Commercial Street yesterday evening at the scheme’s fourth planning committee hearing.

Planning officers had previously recommended the plans for refusal on two occasions for being located outside of a tall building zone and within the Whitechapel High Street conservation area.

The 41,000sq m proposals will now be sent to the mayor of London for stage two approval.

It marks the furthest progress yet for a scheme which has been on the books for eight years, with plans designed by Fosters for a 20-storey tower on the site first being submitted in 2017.

But its approval now means that the site may have to be removed from the surrounding conservation area, “at a minimum”, in a future review if the scheme is built, planning officers said.

“This is because the modern townscape that would emerge would be at odds with the special character that the Conservation Area seeks to preserve or enhance,” the officers’ report said.

Officers also warned the scheme’s location outside of a designation tall building zone “has the potential to undermine the consistent and proper application of the Development Plan going forward, contrary to good spatial planning”.

Last month’s decision to effectively back the scheme was criticised by campaign group Save Britain’s Heritage, which described it as a “blow to the local community who have consistently and strongly pushed back against these controversial plans which are oversized and unnecessarily destructive”.

Conservation Officer for the group Lydia Franklin said: “Conservation areas are created to protect our historic environment and guide development in a particular context. A tall building in this location would make a mockery of these protections and erode this area’s unique character.”

Fosters’ first proposals for the site were withdrawn in 2020 and replaced with a 14-storey redesign, which was recommended for approval by planning officers but rejected the following year after amassing more than 200 objections.

Although the latest version of the scheme, submitted in February last year, was three storeys taller and had been recommended for refusal, councillors voted to defer the decision at a planning committee meeting in December to allow a site visit.

It was again recommended for refusal in January but councillors voted to back the scheme, pushing a final decision to a fourth committee hearing which took place yesterday evening.

Councillors have argued that the scheme would be an effective use of the site, which is currently a car park, and would reduce anti-social behaviour in the area including alleged drug dealing activity.