A consented tower has sat unbuilt at Waterloo for five years and will be another five before any works complete. HB Reavis has now decided to keep the 1960s building instead. Interestingly, what changed in the last five years is the market, not the carbon case.
In the last week of August, HB Reavis launched a consultation on a substantially new plan for Elizabeth House, the tired 1960s block sitting alongside Waterloo station. The developer will retain much of the existing structure and turn the vision for One Waterloo from a commercial new build into a retrofit-led mixed-use scheme: two hotels, student accommodation, build-to-rent homes, offices, shops and leisure, masterplanned by PLP Architecture. They say retention cuts embodied carbon by 75% against demolition and new build, with a target saving of around 100,000 tonnes.
The 100,000 tonnes and the 75% are the developer’s own figures, released at consultation stage. They could be doing two things at once, retaining structure and reducing size, but the material published so far does not separate these.
How did we end up here
The AHMM scheme this replaces was no small thing: the existing 11-storey building swapped for a 31-storey tower and a Google KX style groundscraper running more than 200m along the side of the station, with roughly 112,000sqm of offices. It got final sign-off from Lambeth in 2021, then not much happened. Enabling works, a meanwhile-use application and a long-running argument about Northern line access and section 106 contributions.
And so the building is still standing - and will now stay standing - and that is being presented (understandably) as a climate win.
What actually changed
It would be easy to take the timeline and think that this is a story in which planning policy and embodied carbon assessments quietly did their work and a developer saw the light. But I don’t think that is what happened - nothing about carbon counting changed between 2021 and 2026. And demolishing a serviceable 1960s frame was exactly as wasteful in 2021 as it is now.
I think what changed is that the product (speculative Waterloo London offices) stopped being a fundable proposition, and a blend of hotel, student and build-to-rent income began to look like a better option. Retention is the result when you need something faster, cheaper, with lower capex and are having to revisit planning in a post-M&S world.
This isn’t a criticism of HB Reavis. Developers respond to markets - that is their job. But we should be honest that the retention argument was not won by the planning system, it was won by the appraisal and funding.
Something else to bear in mind with this is a slight irony that many blame the planning system for slowing things down, but in this case planning had been ticked off the list (exc. S106 details) for 5 years and still nothing happened.
Thought
This is an interesting case study because the best embodied carbon outcome over the past five years was achieved by doing nothing. The building remains standing because the money was not there, and by the time the money returned the answer had changed.
Anyone currently holding a consented demolition scheme they cannot fund is actually sitting on a retrofit.