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Podcast episode 118: Banishing Boxland

The Prime Minister recently announced plans to "turbocharge" development within England's largest towns and cities as part of the recent 'Brownfield Reform Day' announcements.

I thought then that now would be a good time to share a conversation that I recorded online back in August 2023 with old friends of the podcast David Milner and Rebecca Coley, and new friend of the podcast Mark Aylward, about the redevelopment of big box retail parks. It is available via this link or from iTunes and Spotify.

The prompt for the conversation was this 2018 report that I had come across by Create Streets and Policy Exchange called ‘Better Brownfield’, which claimed that there are over 1200 sites across London currently occupied by single-storey big box retail and industrial sheds and that, by ‘banishing boxland’, these sites could accommodate between 250,000 and 300,000 new homes.

Who owns and manages assets like these? What is the market like for big boxes in the new world of online retail? And what are the opportunities presented by, and the barriers to, sites like this coming forward for a mixed-use redevelopment? These are the questions that I invited David, Mark and Rebecca to explore with me.

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