A group of housing specialists presented their thoughts on how we can deliver more – and better – affordable housing this week against a backdrop of Covid-19 highlighting the sector’s crucial contribution to the city, perhaps more than ever before.

This was ‘Delivering Affordable Housing’, which included best practice examples being built across London and which was kicked off by Prisca Thielmann of Maccreanor Lavington. Thielmann showed a number of projects at different scales and delivered through different models, including Dujardin Mews in Enfield, designed with Karakusevic Carson Architects. With an immediate context of a local school on a long, rectangular piece of ‘left over land’, the scheme delivered more units than was in the council brief, along with a new playground and school drop-off area. ‘We were working to a tight budget, but we took great care to identify some special moments to add something interesting and of a scale that residents can easily engage with’, Thielmann said.

Swan Housing Group project director Neil Baron said his company, which has a secured pipeline of 8000 homes, 15 per cent of which will be affordable, had also delivered more units at Blackwall Reach near Canary Wharf, tripling the number without grant. ‘What we're trying to do here is create a place where people actually want to be for its own sake’, he said, ‘rather than a place where people want to be because it's convenient to get somewhere else’. The success of the housing was not just about the numbers, said Baron, or indeed the layouts inside the schemes, but about placemaking taken ‘in its purest sense’; creating places where people want to live, work and play. The project includes public squares, public art, a community hub, a replacement school, mosque, commercial units and local housing office. Swan is continuing to up its capacity to build this project and others by building a new factory to deliver steel framed housing alongside its one focusing on cross laminated timber schemes.