Docklands News

The cost of an average UK home rose by a record £29,162 in the last year, according to Nationwide. The lender said it was the biggest cash increase in property prices since it started collecting comparable data in 1991. It pushed up the price of an average UK home to £260,230 in February, it said. Property values are being driven by continued demand from buyers who are competing for relatively few properties on the market. Nationwide, one of the UK's larger mortgage lenders, said that its data suggested UK house prices had risen by 12.6% in the year to the end of February. That was an acceleration from the 11.2% annual increase recorded in January. 

BBC News (01/03/2022)  

Figures from the Bank of England show mortgage approvals for house purchases lifted in January. The figures show some 73,922 mortgage approvals during last month. This is the highest approval number since July 2021, when 75,900 mortgages were given the green light. It also represents the third best January performance in the past decade and is higher than the 12-month pre-pandemic average up to February 2020 of 66,700. 

City AM (02/03/2022)  

Banks are limiting how much buyers can borrow when they take out a mortgage because of rate rises and the increasing cost of living. Barclays and TSB have revised their affordability calculators, which help to work out what borrowers can afford to pay in mortgage costs each month, and Santander will follow suit this week. "We can expect more lenders to take living costs into consideration, especially when the energy price cap is removed in April", said Chris Sykes from the mortgage broker Private Finance. "This means we can expect tighter affordability for some and lower loan amounts." 

The Sunday Times (27/02/2022)  

Ljubomir Jankovic, professor of advanced building design at the University of Hertfordshire, discusses how a study by his team shows that a radical overhaul of the construction industry is needed to reach net zero goals. The research found that due to embodied carbon emissions only building all new housing using naturally grown materials with negative embodied carbon will allow the UK housing industry to be net zero by 2050. In addition to drastically ramping up the energy efficiency requirements for new builds, we should also urgently develop regulations for retrofitting existing houses, he argues. Better education of architects, engineers and construction managers is required, and detailed modelling of buildings will be required, too. 

The Independent (25/02/2022)  

British Land has revealed plans for the construction of two more towers at Canada Water. Covering a total of 53 acres, the Canada Water Regeneration scheme is one of the largest mixed-use regeneration projects in London, featuring up to 3,000 new homes, 2m sq ft of workspace, and 1m sq ft of retail, leisure, entertainment and community space including proposed health and social infrastructure, and educational uses for all ages. The two new towers will stand 34 and 37 storeys high with the shorter tower linked to a nine-storey podium of offices.  

Construction Review Online (22/02/2022)  

Maccreanor Lavington has been given permission for a 56-storey skyscraper at Canary Wharf. The £250m, 500-apartment block is being developed by Far East Consortium (FEC); the project will see Ensign House, a 1980s office building at South Quay, demolished and replaced by a 230m-tall bronze-coloured tower. The building, close to FEC's first project in Canary Wharf, the 65-storey Consort Place mixed-use development, will feature a thin spire on its top, which will be lit up at night to "celebrate the siting of the building". The scheme's ground floor will be given over to commercial use. Planners at Tower Hamlets Council said the loss of office floorspace on the site would conflict with its local plan but was "considered to be justified and outweighed by the existing low occupancy levels of the office building [and] the underutilised nature of the site as a whole". A construction start date has not been set and a contractor is yet to be appointed.

Architects' Journal (21/02/2022)   Construction News (18/02/2022)