London's housing problem could be eased if only there were a large area of land available to turn into homes. We pick at brownfield sites in a piecemeal manner, building dense and high where possible, but the days of creating a substantial new suburb are gone. The Green Belt stops further spread, and rightly so, but what if there were scrappy bits nobody would miss. Bring on Hainault Farm.
Out on the borders of Redbridge, Barking & Dagenham and Havering is a great big field, or rather several fields all joined together, without a single existing resident to get in the way. They nearly built London's third airport out this way but instead RAF Fairlop ended up as a country park and the fields further east have continued to be ploughed. I'm thinking of the open space between Hainault Road and Collier Row, just to the north of Marks Gate, where undulating furrows are still the dominant land use. It's a massive space, well over a square mile, and exactly the kind of farmland that elsewhere got turned into Barkingside, Hainault and Harold Hill. You could fit twenty thousand homes here no trouble, some with proper gardens rather than yet more stacked flats, and throw in some nice parkland for good measure.
I'm not saying nobody would miss the agricultural offering. To the farmer it's their business, to local wildlife it's home and for those on Billet Road it's somewhere to exercise the dog. But it's not brimming with hedgerows and coppices, more an amorphous ploughed zone, indeed if you stand on the far side you can see all the way across to the City of London. It's not pretty, if that's what you're worried about. Perhaps most importantly it's not generally accessible, there being just one public footpath which isn't especially pleasant, doesn't go anywhere useful and dissolved into thin air the one time I tried walking it. It may be Green Belt, but it's not really the kind of countryside that Green Belt legislation was designed to retain.
On all my travels round London this is by far the largest space that screams "development potential". Imagine what you could do with 1.3 square miles of scruffy field, specifically the schools and shops and community you could build here if only legislation permitted. Redbridge council know they can't touch it, which is why their latest local plan only proposes 800 homes on a much smaller parcel alongside the A12. Another issue is the lack of rail connections, with the Central line being too far west and Crossrail too far south. It means all you'd likely end up building was another dormitory suburb for car owners... but that describes a lot of northeast London and people don't really mind living there.
I've knocked up a Google map so you can see exactly where I mean, plus three adjacent plots that could easily be added on. An equally scrappy patch between Hainault Farm and Fairlop Waters could add another 0.25 square miles - we could call that Fairlop Plain. A mostly blank canvas around Aldborough Hatch could add half a square mile more and has the advantage of direct Central Line access - let's call that Barkingside East. And a similarly sized swathe between Marks Gate and Collier Row would be a lot more useful as housing - let's call that Rom Valley. A few assorted business would have to move out but hardly any of consequence, and they might well be glad of the financial windfall anyway.
You may never have seen this huge field, it being off the main roads and major bus routes, and may think it sacrilege anyone might want to transform it into built-up area. But the housing estate where you live was likely a field once, and probably prettier too, and thereby far more worthy of keeping than this. If we had to sacrifice 1¼ square miles of London to try to get a grip on the housing crisis, I can't think of anywhere better.
