City’s empty buildings and shops are a wasted asset

There aren’t many good things to say about our antiquated planning system. It stifles good design and innovation, makes it almost impossible for anyone except massive corporate developers to build new housing in our cities, and it’s unbelievably unpredictable, expensive and slow-moving.

Perhaps the only plus side is that — because the planning process is so sclerotic — lots of buildings end up sitting vacant while you wait for permission to transform them.

We encounter this all the time with my business, Second Home, so while we’re twiddling our thumbs and waiting for council approval we always hand over the keys of our empty buildings to charities and creative organisations to use on a temporary basis.

We’ve hosted all sorts over the years, from the world’s first retrospective of the African-American composer Julius Eastman, through to student exhibitions with the Royal College of Art. We’ve also worked a lot with the social enterprise Somewhereto, to give young people from diverse backgrounds free space to do creative stuff, like making music videos and doing fashion shows.

What’s nice is that this brings buildings back to life, filling them with people and activity, and it also gives start-ups the chance to try stuff out and experiment in a low-cost way.

Obviously, we’re not the only ones doing this kind of thing, and an excellent new report by the Centre for London shines a light on just how much empty property (sometimes known as “meanwhile space”) there is in our city at any given moment.

The numbers in the report are pretty staggering. In total there are almost 30 million sq ft of commercial floorspace in London that’s been empty for more than two years. If you take vacant office buildings alone, you could accommodate up to 200,000 workers, while empty shop space adds up to a bigger area than the whole of Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush.

Right across the city you find people using these idle spaces in interesting ways — such as low-cost workspace provider Camden Collective or the Croydon Arts Store.

But as the report makes clear, too much vacant space is going unused, with outmoded planning rules yet again getting in the way.

As the financial director of a London university quoted in the report points out: “Right now it is harder, longer and more complicated to get planning permission for meanwhile use than for a permanent building.”