Bryson House, Horace Road Application also presented as “Hogsmill Yard”

The proposal. Oakford Homes proposes to demolish the vacant former Frederick W Paine funeral directors at the northern end of Horace Road and replace it with 48 flats in a single C-shaped building of four to six storeys. The 0.27ha site sits immediately beside the Hogsmill River, with Kingston University’s Middle Mill site to the west and the much smaller-scale residential character of Horace Road to the east. The housing mix is 10 one-bedroom, 25 two-bedroom and 13 three-bedroom flats. The building rises to six storeys towards Middle Mill and the river, stepping down to four storeys with an upper-level setback towards Horace Road. This stepping is explicitly intended to mediate between Middle Mill and the more sensitive Horace Road context.

Layout and landscape. The scheme wraps around a south-facing landscaped courtyard, with gallery or deck access to many of the flats. The northern edge is pulled away from the Hogsmill to create a wider landscaped river corridor. The landscape proposals include a riverside park, woodland planting, courtyard garden and play/picnic areas, together with new trees, habitat features and natural play. The development is essentially car-free, with only two Blue Badge spaces on site and a proposed car-club bay on Horace Road, while 66 cycle spaces are proposed. The site is not especially highly connected by London standards, being described by the Design Review Panel as approximately PTAL 1b to 2.

Affordable housing. There is no affordable housing proposed. This is likely to be one of the most important matters for the Society to note. The applicant accepts that both London and Kingston policies seek affordable provision but relies on its Financial Viability Assessment, which concludes that the development has a negative residual value of approximately £1.38 million and can therefore support no affordable contribution. That argument will plainly require careful scrutiny rather than simply being accepted at face value.

Click here for Design and Access Statement

Design review. The scheme has had unusually substantial pre-application design scrutiny, including three Council pre-application meetings and two Kingston Placemaking Panel reviews. The first panel considered residential redevelopment appropriate but was concerned about height, scale, massing, the relationship with the river and the quality of the emerging communal spaces. The revised scheme was received much more positively. The follow-up panel was broadly supportive of the height, scale, massing, architectural approach, single entrance, courtyard and deck access, but significant reservations remained. In particular, it wanted further work on the sixth-storey roofline, the north-east view towards Middle Mill, daylight beneath the access decks, defensible space around ground-floor homes and, most notably, a landscape strategy that it felt remained less resolved than the architecture.

Residential quality. This may deserve more attention than the attractive CGIs initially suggest. The applicant’s own daylight assessment reports that only about 67% of the 147 rooms tested meet the full 200-lux daylight target, rising to 73% if the lower 150-lux criterion is applied. Only around 66% of bedrooms achieve their relevant target. The applicant argues that the principal living spaces perform substantially better and that the layout prioritises dual-aspect homes. The Design Review Panel nevertheless specifically questioned daylight to rooms beneath the gallery decks. This looks like an issue worth examining rather than treating as a technical footnote.

Other planning considerations. The site is predominantly within Flood Zone 3a, immediately adjoining the Hogsmill. The applicant argues that hydraulic modelling, raised finished floor levels, drainage measures and its Sequential and Exception Tests demonstrate that the development will be safe. The loss of the former employment-generating use is justified by marketing of the property since May 2023. The applicant also claims a strong landscape improvement over the largely hard-surfaced existing site, although it is claiming the statutory BNG de minimis exemption, rather than providing the normal 10% Biodiversity Net Gain. The existing weathervane is proposed to be retained and repositioned as public art within the landscape.

Initial Kingston Society response. This does not appear as an obviously poor scheme. There has been genuine design evolution, the river edge is being treated as an asset rather than a back boundary, the housing mix includes a respectable number of three-bedroom homes and the building makes a serious attempt to step between Middle Mill and Horace Road.

The questions are more specific and potentially important: six storeys and the relationship with Middle Mill, zero affordable housing, residential daylight beneath the decks, car-free development in a relatively low-PTAL location, flood risk and whether the promising landscape is actually secured at the quality shown. Local consultation was relatively limited, with 145 leaflets distributed, and residents raised height, parking, environmental impact, light and design among their concerns.