In March, the London Society visited HTA Design’s new studios as part of their ‘Meet the Architects’ series. HTA are recognised for their expertise across every form and tenure of housing, and the practice has delivered some of the largest and most complex residential projects in England. As a town planner newly arrived from Western Australia, I found it a rare opportunity to hear from a practice at the front line of housing delivery and to see familiar problems through a different professional lens. An impressive scope of projects was on display over the evening, but I was drawn to the following cases.
The projects
Lea View House in Hackney comprised 300 interwar flats. HTA’s approach was, in their own words, deliberately anti-establishment. The design process was led by the existing community rather than imposed on them. Tenants were rehoused within the estate rather than displaced, reinforcing the practice’s people-focused ethos that sits at the heart of HTA’s culture.
At the Sutton Estate in Chelsea, HTA delivered 86 affordable and sustainable homes in a retrofitted 1913 Edwardian building. The project achieved a 73% reduction in CO2 and a 75% reduction in energy consumption, making the case that heritage constraints and affordability requirements can sit together.
Cator Park in Greenwich recorded a 162% net biodiversity gain, a signal that housing development done carefully can leave a neighbourhood’s ecology better than it found it.
At West Green Place in Haringey, HTA Design delivered genuinely affordable homes, sold at discount to market rate, to allow local people to achieve home ownership. The flats were dual aspect, and by all accounts, very liveable but at 37m2, they would no longer be permissible under London’s Housing Design Standards. They would, however, still narrowly have met Western Australia’s minimum studio dimension of 36m2 square metres. The project had simple facades and modest footprints, but housing that got built, which is itself a pointed illustration of the tension between what is possible and what is needed.
HTA are global leaders in volumetric modular construction and net zero design. Modular construction featured across several schemes as a partial response to cost and programme pressures. A striking example is Enclave in Croydon, Europe’s tallest modular building at 50 storeys, delivering 937 homes in just 28 months on site. The question running through all of it: how do you make places that people actually want to live in when the economics are working against you? It is a question as live in Australia as it is in England.
Aylesbury Estate masterplan is one of London’s largest housing estate regeneration projects, delivering 3,647 mixed-tenure homes. At a time when London urgently needs more housing and higher quality neighbourhoods, this work speaks directly to the civic challenge of building at scale without compromising design, sustainability or liveability.
The view from Perth, Western Australia
There is a structural familiarity in London’s crisis, which is both reassuring and sobering. In Western Australia, the same forces are at work. Perth built a record 20,000 homes in 2024 and still fell 4,000 short of its annual target. Rents have risen 76% since 2020. The social housing waitlist has grown 330% since 2018. Australia’s national target of 1.2 million new homes over five years from mid-2024 is forecast to fall 262,000 short. The barriers cited are the same being debated in London; construction costs, labour shortages, planning complexity and viability.
One big difference is geography. London’s crisis plays out on constrained urban sites, while Perth’s sprawls outward along growth corridors where infrastructure cannot keep pace with demand and new housing is constructed far from jobs and services. London’s character as a city of distinctive villages with genuine socio-economic diversity, and streets where different tenures sit alongside each other, is something Perth’s inner and outer suburbs rarely achieve.
The structural difference is sharper still. In England, local councils have enforceable legal duties to house people in need. In Australia, social housing is the exclusive responsibility of the state government. Local councils have no legal obligation whatsoever. When the private market fails to develop well-located land, there is no local authority with the duty or the tools to intervene. It falls to state agencies to fill the gap, which they sometimes do and sometimes do not, dependent on political will and budget cycles in a way that England’s system, for all its own failings, is not. And unlike England, Australia has no mandatory affordable housing contribution from private development. So, contrary to the feeling in the room, I was impressed with the scale and density of housing being delivered.
HTA’s work is a reminder that while design, in itself, is not a solution to a housing crisis, it is not neutral either. The choice to put a community in charge of its own regeneration at Lea View, to pursue biodiversity at Cator Park, to make affordable housing as well-built as the budget allows at West Green, these are choices that shape whether people feel at home in a place, or even have a place to call home.
The evening ended, as these conversations tend to, with more questions than answers. How do you build at the scale London needs without sacrificing the quality London deserves? There are no easy answers. But there are better and worse ways to build and I’m grateful to the London Society’s Meet the Architects series and HTA Design for allowing me to learn and network from these conversations.
Hannah Thornton is a senior urban planner with over ten years of experience in strategic masterplanning in Western Australia, recently relocated to London.
