Industrial land is one of the invisible conditions of everyday London. The builders’ yards, food producers, specialist manufacturers, repair workshops, recycling businesses, warehouses and depots that keep the city functioning rarely feature in anyone’s vision of the perfect neighbourhood. But as London plans for hundreds of thousands of new homes, a difficult question is becoming harder to avoid: where do we put the things a growing city cannot live without?
Most Londoners probably do not spend much time thinking about industrial land.
We notice the van blocking the road. The warehouse beside the railway. The builders’ merchant we pass on the bus. The waste transfer station we would rather not live next to.
What we rarely see is the system connecting them.
The timber delivered to a housing site. The replacement boiler collected by an engineer. The vegetables arriving at a restaurant before dawn. The theatre scenery being built in a workshop. The broken lift component waiting to be repaired. The waste leaving a construction project.
All of this needs space.
And London has been losing that space for years.
The Greater London Authority’s London Industrial Land Supply Study found that around 1,483 hectares of industrial land were lost to non-industrial uses between 2001 and 2020, a contraction of approximately 18 per cent.
Now, as work begins on the next London Plan, the question of what happens to the city’s industrial land is moving back up the agenda. The Greater London Authority is developing a London Logistics Plan, while a recent BusinessLDN report on industrial and logistics land argues that this land has been misunderstood and undervalued, too often treated as a competitor to housing rather than infrastructure that makes housing, and city life, possible.
The timing matters. The next London Plan will guide the capital’s development over the next two decades.
London needs homes.
But homes need things.
There is a version of London that appears in planning images.
It has homes, trees, cafés, playgrounds and people cycling.
There is another London, mostly absent from the picture.
It contains concrete batching plants, commercial kitchens, scaffolding yards, vehicle repair workshops, laundries, data centres, recycling facilities, specialist manufacturers, distribution depots and the businesses that maintain everything from lifts to restaurant kitchens.
The second city makes the first one possible.
The GLA’s work on the London Logistics Plan uses a deliberately broad definition. Logistics is not simply parcels arriving at front doors. It includes construction materials, waste collection, servicing activity and the movements made by building and maintenance trades. In 2023, nearly five per cent of London’s workforce was employed in logistics, with more than 37,000 logistics firms operating across the capital.
Industrial land also supports businesses that do not fit the popular image of industry.
London’s planning framework recognises that its Strategic Industrial Locations accommodate activities that can create tensions with housing because of noise, dust, odours, emissions, operating hours or vehicle movements. Yet these same places provide relatively affordable space for thousands of businesses and are often connected to major roads, railways, canals and wharves.
The challenge is obvious.
Everybody wants the city to function.
Very few people actively campaign for a waste transfer station near their new flat.
To understand what industrial London actually looks like, go to Park Royal.
According to the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation’s overview of the area, Park Royal is London’s largest Strategic Industrial Location, supporting around 1,700 businesses and more than 43,000 jobs.
It is easy to think of Park Royal simply as a logistics hub.
That misses much of what makes it remarkable.
Yes, Park Royal is one of London’s most important food production and distribution centres. Behind anonymous roller shutters, food is prepared, packed and delivered to restaurants, cafés, schools, hospitals, hotels and workplaces across the capital. Much of London’s everyday food economy starts here.
But alongside the food businesses are vehicle repair workshops, film and prop makers, specialist manufacturers, recycling companies and a growing number of advanced manufacturing businesses.
Take Koalaa, which develops comfortable, adaptable and more affordable prosthetic arms for adults and children. Designed and manufactured in Park Royal, its products can be sent directly to users and are helping make prosthetics more accessible in the UK and internationally.
Or BLAST Studio, whose Cupsan material turns discarded coffee cups into panels for furniture, interior fit-outs and cladding. It demonstrates how a difficult waste stream can become a useful manufacturing resource.
These businesses succeed not despite being located in an industrial area, but because of it.
Easy access to specialist suppliers, precision engineers, fabricators, upholstery firms, recycled materials and skilled trades creates an ecosystem where ideas move quickly between neighbouring businesses. Koalaa, for example, benefits from access to the leather, fabrics, waste materials and manufacturing expertise available within Park Royal’s wider business community.
Innovation, in this sense, is as much about proximity as technology.
OPDC has recognised the importance of protecting and strengthening this productive ecosystem alongside the major regeneration taking place across Old Oak and Park Royal. Its adopted Local Plan supports the protection and intensification of Park Royal’s industrial land while seeking to improve workplaces and create opportunities for further employment growth.
Industrial areas like Park Royal work because they are ecosystems.
Businesses cluster because they use each other’s services, share suppliers, exchange materials, recruit from the same skilled workforce and solve problems together. A circular economy business can source waste materials from neighbouring firms. A manufacturer can have components repaired or fabricated just down the road. Innovation often happens because businesses are close enough to collaborate.
Move one business and it may survive.
Break the network around it and something far more valuable can be lost.
This is one reason why industrial land matters so much to London’s future.
The issue is not whether London should build homes.
It is how to accommodate growth without dismantling the economic systems those homes will rely upon.
There is perhaps no better illustration of this tension than New Covent Garden Market.
The wholesale market moved to Nine Elms in 1974, long before the surrounding district became one of London’s most visible regeneration areas. Today the market sits alongside the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the US Embassy and thousands of new homes.
Yet behind the apartment towers, the market remains a vital piece of working infrastructure.
According to its redevelopment overview, New Covent Garden Market is home to 137 businesses and around 2,500 employees. The site is being transformed to provide a modern wholesale and distribution market alongside a new generation of food businesses.
This is an important London story.
A functioning food market has not simply been swept away because the surrounding land became valuable. Instead, the site is attempting something much harder: modernising an essential city function while allowing the wider neighbourhood to evolve around it.
That does not mean every industrial use can or should remain exactly where it is forever. Cities change. Businesses move. Technology alters how goods are stored and distributed.
But New Covent Garden Market is a reminder that proximity has value.
A food business serving restaurants, hotels and institutions across central London does not automatically become more efficient simply because its premises have been moved many miles away to make room for housing.
Distance has consequences. Longer journeys mean more time, higher costs, more vehicles and potentially more emissions.
The pressure on industrial land is understandable.
London faces an acute housing shortage. Large, low-rise sites near stations can appear to offer obvious opportunities for redevelopment.
Sometimes they do.
But the choice is not always between warehouses and homes.
It may be between homes with nearby services and homes dependent on increasingly long supply chains.
Between a thriving repair economy and a disposable one.
Between construction materials stored relatively close to building sites and vehicles travelling greater distances through the city.
Between skilled jobs spread across London and an economy concentrated in fewer sectors and locations.
The BusinessLDN report argues that the next London Plan should better protect and modernise productive industrial land, support carefully planned intensification, create a clearer framework for land swaps and consider appropriate new industrial locations.
Some of these ideas will be contested, particularly where they touch the Green Belt.
They should be.
Planning is not about pretending difficult choices do not exist.
It is about making those choices visible and understanding their consequences.
Housing density is discussed constantly.
Industrial density much less so.
Yet there is growing interest in multi-storey industrial buildings, shared servicing infrastructure, consolidation centres and new ways of making better use of valuable land.
Not every industrial activity can be stacked.
A concrete batching plant is not an office building.
Heavy vehicle movements do not sit comfortably alongside front doors and children’s play areas.
Earlier attempts at co-location, placing housing and industrial activity on the same or adjacent sites, have shown both the potential and the limitations of the idea.
Co-location can work more readily for light industry and trade uses, while heavier operations are much harder to combine with housing.
This distinction matters.
There is a risk that “mixed use” becomes a polite term for replacing genuinely industrial activity with flats, offices and cleaner commercial spaces.
A pottery studio is productive space.
So is a waste depot.
A city needs both, but they create very different planning problems.
The question is not whether every industrial estate should remain exactly as it is.
It is which activities London needs, where they need to be located and how land can be used more efficiently without undermining the businesses themselves.
Industrial areas are also part of London’s social and economic infrastructure.
They provide jobs across a wide range of skills and incomes.
They offer affordable space for businesses that could never afford a high street location.
They support the repair economy, manufacturing, recycling and countless everyday services that residential neighbourhoods quietly depend upon.
Losing these spaces can change who gets to run a business in London.
A city made only of expensive homes, premium offices, cafés and carefully curated retail is not a complete city.
Nor is an industrial strategy that simply protects outdated estates without encouraging improvement.
Industrial places can become greener.
Buildings can become more energy efficient.
Streets and public spaces can improve.
Innovation can flourish.
The question should not be whether London needs industrial land.
It is what good industrial London should look like.
These are questions we will be exploring through The London Society’s events programme.
We are planning a tour of Park Royal, looking beyond the warehouses to explore the hidden food infrastructure, advanced manufacturing businesses and entrepreneurial ecosystem that quietly keeps London running. Working with OPDC, we hope to visit businesses that reveal how food is produced, materials are reused and innovation happens in one of Europe’s largest industrial districts.
We are also planning a talk on the future of Smithfield Market.
The City of London Corporation’s update on Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets confirms that traders will remain at their existing markets until at least 2028 while longer-term plans are developed.
The debate is about far more than the future of a remarkable historic market.
It raises wider questions about what happens when essential city functions move, consolidate or disappear, and how London should reuse the places they leave behind.
Both events will offer the chance to explore the London most of us depend on but rarely see: the places where food is prepared, goods are handled, materials are reused and the everyday work of keeping a city running takes place.
Cities are often judged by their visible landmarks.
But perhaps they should also be judged by how intelligently they accommodate the places nobody puts on a postcard.
The depot.
The workshop.
The warehouse.
The yard.
The recycling business.
The advanced manufacturer.
The place where tomorrow’s prosthetic limb is developed.
The factory turning yesterday’s coffee cups into tomorrow’s building materials.
These are not leftovers from London’s past.
They are evidence of a city that works.
London’s debate about growth is understandably dominated by housing.
But the next London Plan must do something harder than identify land for homes.
It must also protect the productive places that allow those homes, businesses and communities to thrive.
The most important infrastructure is not always the most visible.
Sometimes it is hidden behind an anonymous roller shutter, quietly helping to shape London’s future.
