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On paper at least, Barking Reach has changed. It has been given the estate agent鈥檚 badge of Barking Riverside, and a blue and green coloured logo to match. Its old, suburban-style masterplan has been ditched in favour of a new version with vibrant jelly-coloured drawings of Manhattan-style living. And behind the scenes, developer Bellway Homes is delivering the scheme in a joint venture with English Partnerships.

All the scheme needs to get beyond paper change is the green light from Barking council鈥檚 planning committee for the outline application submitted at the end of last year. Approval will allow the 180 ha site to cast off its past and start afresh, albeit in an entirely new form as a city district with 10,800 homes at densities of up to 240 homes per hectare.

Barking Riverside needs this fresh start. The site has 2 km of desirable Thames frontage, is 17 km from Trafalgar Square, and was described in the London Plan as the capital鈥檚 largest housing development opportunity. But it also has some very well-publicised drawbacks. It has always suffered from a poor image, due to a lack of public transport links and the 7 km of power lines threaded from its all-too-prominent pylons. These problems were compounded in the early phases of development on the Reach in the 1990s, when the combination of high clean-up costs and low unit sales prices led Bellway to build basic box-like homes with little by way of parks or amenities to enhance the environment.

The new masterplan doesn鈥檛 solve all of the site鈥檚 problems.

The pylons remain, because the power lines are considered too expensive to bury. Public transport provision is uncertain: the East London Transit guided busway is planned for the early phases of development and the developers are crossing their fingers that by the time the new residents are packing out the buses, the government will have given the go-ahead for a Docklands Light Railway extension across the site to Dagenham Dock.

Amsterdam-on-Thames

But with projected housing numbers almost doubling under the new masterplan, the site is now a much better commercial prospect. This masterplan also creates a framework for design quality, including parkland and amenities that are essential if, as CABE remarked about the proposals, people are one day to say that buyers are lucky to live at Barking Riverside.

Bellway and EP set out their stall for the new masterplan by appointing trendy Dutch practice Maxwan to produce it. Maxwan鈥檚 masterplan provides only a strategic framework, with no detail of what the buildings will actually look like. 鈥淚t establishes and tests the principles of whether the site can take nearly 11,000 units,鈥� says Clive Wilding, project director with the Barking Riverside joint venture. The joint venture will be holding a series of design competitions to select architects for individual development phases and key buildings across the site.

Although Maxwan is not designing the buildings, the community it has created at Barking has a clear Dutch influence. It incorporates broad Dutch-style avenues surrounded by cosy neighbourhoods. 鈥淲e started with a clear infrastructure with main streets, which the client initially thought was really puzzling,鈥� says Paul Gerretsen, project leader with the practice. It was the lack of Poundburyesque country lanes 鈥� now being replicated on a housing development near you 鈥� that confused the client. But as Gerretsen explains: 鈥淭his site is something like 14 times the size of Poundbury, so if you had curvy streets you would lose track of where you are. But inside the neighbourhoods you鈥檒l find curvy streets.鈥�

Stacked up

The masterplan has no place for the kind of landmark buildings that are central to so many UK regeneration schemes. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 really believe in the power of them,鈥� says Gerretsen. 鈥淭hey can pull an area up, but here one or two landmark buildings would be dwarfed.鈥�

Although the Dutch are regularly praised for their design flair, it was ultimately their way with numbers that impressed Barking Riverside. 鈥淭hey come at it from the numbers to give the built form. That gives us the comfort overall that the numbers are viable. They have given us certainty,鈥� says Wilding. The practice has a numerical model that takes on board such detail as the depth of gardens and car parking to show how homes can be accommodated.

Although the density of development is high, the masterplan has an assortment of parks and amenity spaces as the developer has chosen to use only 116 ha of the 180 ha site. Every home will also have its own private outdoor space, but that won鈥檛 necessarily be in the form of a conventional garden. 鈥淭he idea of 30 m back gardens with a washing pole are gone, providing there鈥檚 some space in balconies, roof gardens and public realm,鈥� says Wilding.

This fresh approach to Barking Reach is largely down to EP, which stepped in after Bellway had spent a decade trying to build its way out of a problematic site. Roger Bond, the Barking Riverside director who was working with Bellway on the site through the 1990s, sounds relieved to have EP alongside him. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a huge advantage to us. We are sharing the risk and doing so with a partner that has the political will to make things happen.鈥�

How the deal was done

Barking Reach was identified as a strategic regeneration opportunity when the power station closed 20 years ago.

Bellway began building homes with City Grant funding in the early 1990s, and its sales success with the first phase of 500 homes prompted it to buy more land from National Power to carry out a second phase of 500 units without grant.

National Power then invited bids for the remainder of its site, which also went to Bellway. At this stage the housebuilder joined forces with Barking and Dagenham council, which owned the 40 ha landfill site adjoining the power station, and a former allotment.

Bellway and the local authority were taking forward a masterplan to develop 6000 homes on the site, but life became increasingly difficult, says Bond: 鈥淎s time went on, we became more aware of the costs of the site, the infrastructure costs rose and rose, and a few regulatory skeletons came out of the cupboard. We couldn鈥檛 make it viable. We had two or three quite difficult years, and it was all our own money.鈥�

By the late 1990s, Bellway had started casting around for housebuilder partners that might join it in a consortium. But then it got a better offer. 鈥淭he London Development Agency asked if there was an opportunity to help out by putting money in and increasing density. English Partnerships later took on the LDA role and we went on from there. We got to know the people, in the office and socially, and we felt it could work,鈥� says Bond.

The joint venture acquired the land owned by Bellway and the local authority. Under the deal, the two partners have 50鈥�50 voting rights, although Bellway owns 51% of the venture and EP 49%. Bellway has an option to develop up to 50% of the homes on the site, and the remaining 50% will sold to other developers as serviced plots. Bellway also has a 20-year service agreement to procure all infrastructure works.

The joint venture is putting 拢250m of funding into the site, with Bellway putting in 拢1 for every 50p invested by EP. The partners will share risks and rewards equally. The viability test for every development involves testing the return on capital and return on revenue against benchmarks based on Bellway鈥檚 standard development returns, which protects both parties. This time round Barking is marrying economics with quality 鈥� but a lot still depends on the Docklands Light Railway.

Client Barking Riverside (Bellway Homes, English Partnerships)
Masterplanner Maxwan
Landscape design Karres + Brands
Engineering Hyder Consulting
Environmental and geotechnical engineering Merebrook
Socioeconomic and commercial consultant Cushman & Wakefield
Environmental impact statement Waterman Environmental
Process management and planning application consultant Barton Willmore
Traffic engineering Peter Brett Associates
Ecology and landscape consulting LDA Design