Can building homes around and above railways help get Labour's housebuilding plan on track?

The distance to the nearest railway station is often listed on property sites and is high on the wishlist for house-hunters and local residents when new estates are approved across the UK. 

But finding a home that is within walking distance of a station isn’t always a guarantee. 

Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill is trying to change that by boosting the number of homes near commuter stations. Ministers have promised to green-light building on the grey belt – disused areas of the green belt. 

It’s a bit of tunnel vision that might help the government get on the right lines in the journey towards 1.5 million homes after the spring statement revealed they were off course to hit the milestone. Since then, ministers have announced a £39 billion programme looking to deliver around 300,000 affordable homes, including 180,000 for social rent.

Where those homes will be is another matter. But there is no shortage of ideas on how to increase the density of homes near railway stations. 

Network Rail will set up a new development company that will become operational later this year, promising to build 40,000 homes on its rail estate over the next decade. 

The property company has promised projects that will build as many as 5,000 homes at Newcastle Forth Yards, 1,500 homes at the former Manchester Mayfield railway station, and a mixed-use development in Nottingham which could deliver 425 homes. 

It’s not just around railway stations where there are proposals to build new homes – some are advocating for building above them too. 

One of 16 projects that was in the running to win this year’s Davidson Prize – a prestigious architectural award looking at solutions to the housing crisis – has put forward an idea to build above railway lines. The proposal ultimately lost out to this year’s Davidson Prize winner 300 Homes Within a Union Street Mile, which set out how to build community led homes on struggling high streets.

But architects James Waddington, Nathaniel Welham and WSP’s Rail Belt project has identified more than 700 miles of uncovered, exposed railway track in London and they believe around 10% could be suitable for rail overbuild. 

The group said conservative estimates suggest building on the land, which currently offers no financial benefit to the landowners, could provide upwards of 250,000 homes, with long-term rents generating public income. 

“It’s something quite important to us that these assets go further than just sort of providing an immediate solution to housing, but it’s also about a long-term solution to perhaps some of our existing funding models,” says Welham. 

The architects have demonstrated the concept by proposing a scheme for the Grosvenor Sidings site in London Victoria. The site boasts 4.5 hectares of publicly owned land in London’s Zone 1 and overlooks the River Thames and Battersea Power Station. 

With Labour committed to creating Great British Railways to nationalise train travel, the architects said ministers have a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to thread railways through cities and towns across the UK and boost housing. 

“We’ve been working on rail overbuild for going on 50 years so it’s not necessarily a new concept but is something that is obviously quite close to our hearts,” says Andrew Dickenson, a structural engineer at WSP. 

“It’s actually very flexible. Once you get that box to close the railway line – the crash deck – over the top of it, that allows you to do whatever you want on top, so you’re separated from the railway.  

“The key message really here is that you can do this sustainably. It doesn’t have to be one particular structural solution. It could be a timber solution, it could be modular, it could be anything really so you could do this nicely with low-embodied carbon for the actual building frame.” 

The key issue for anyone living near a railway line is the noise of trains rumbling past. 

Waddington, an architect who specialises in structures built in inhospitable environments such as the Arctic and Antarctica, said that the group’s proposal hopes to mitigate this by enclosing the railway and acoustically isolating the homes on top. 

“Residents that currently live next to railways have quite a difficult time. The kind of environmental nuisance that you get when you live near a railway line is pretty nasty with noise pollution. These are all things that you can’t really get away from if you’re a resident next to or nearby,” says Waddington 

“You could deck over these rail assets and start to mitigate the impacts of environmental nuisance. You could stitch back together the communities physically divided by rail. I think that’s something we quite liked as a narrative. You could start to bring new public spaces and green spaces into the city on places which are completely barren. 

“This isn’t just a London solution. This is something that will work in any major city where land and house prices go through the roof, whether it’s Edinburgh or Manchester.” 

Over-station development was recently described as “challenging” by the Railway Industry Association, which said logistics and legal hurdles can be barriers. 

But the lobby group said that successful projects can be lucrative. The report cites the over-site development at London’s Farringdon station which built six storeys of office spaces as part of the Elizabeth Line development to raise a reported £500 million for Transport for London. 

Meanwhile, TfL’s property company, Places for London, has pledged to build 20,000 homes over the next decade on the 5,500 acres of London it owns. 

And there is potential to build homes near stations outside the English capital. 

As many as 1.2 million homes – almost as much as Labour’s entire housing target – could be built around England’s rural stations. That’s the verdict of Russell Curtis, director of RCKa. 

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As an “intellectual exercise” he decided to use mapping tools to evaluate which of the UK’s rural stations could, theoretically, support housebuilding around them. 

His research found 777 stations with development potential at the cost of 15,750 hectares of green belt – less than 1% in total. 

Curtis based his assessments on boosting housing density around stations to 50 dwellings per hectare within 800 metres of a station, roughly equivalent to a 10-minute walk. 

“Obviously when I started the work a couple of years ago, I didn’t know that this was going to be a key tenet of the Labour manifesto,” Curtis says. “It’s actually an obvious thing to promote but I didn’t know that at the time. 

“You can imagine that a lot of rural authorities would not be happy about the idea of suddenly building 10,000 homes around a station when at the moment it has probably got half a dozen homes or a small village. So planning is a big barrier but the recent Planning and Infrastructure Bill makes things a little bit easier.” 

Curtis has followed up his research with a masterplan to show how his findings could work in practice. 

The masterplan – dubbed Locomotopia – focuses on Ashwell and Morden, a station in North Hertfordshire. 

But Curtis accepts that any work to boost the number of homes around rural stations must be “fully integrated” with infrastructure that residents might need, such as schools, GP surgeries and roads. Environmental considerations may also impact expansion too. 

“It is so mad that you’ve got this one station and there’s about 20 houses, a car breakers yard, a car park and a disused chalk quarry. Well, this is an obvious place, so that’s the station that we’ve chosen as our focus on the master plan,” says Curtis. 

“Having said that, you know, the capacity in that line is limited. So if you suddenly load up a train in the morning with commuters at peak in the middle of the countryside, by the time it gets into outer London it’s going to be packed.  

“So there are some other considerations that are a bit more complex than just building around railway stations in the middle of nowhere. 

“It has to be fully integrated.” 

Labour’s journey to 1.5 million homes is likely to kick off with significant delays, take a few diversions and risks terminating at a station prior to its planned final destination. 

But better integration between how our homes and public transport interact could be a positive place to alight in 2029 nonetheless. 

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