The best way to view Ebbsfleet is from a low hill above the muddy banks of the Thames estuary. Here, between the chalk cliffs, ponds and scrubland, a new community is gradually taking shape in what was once a cement works.
“As far as the eye can see, all the way out there, will be development,” says Simon Dudley, chair of the public development corporation tasked with overseeing the creation of a new town the size of Chichester. “We’re literally looking out on to the place we’re helping to create.”
For decades tens of thousands of homes have been planned on this site in Kent, which is just 17 minutes by high-speed train from central London.
Since the early 1990s, successive governments have pledged to build what is hoped will be one of Britain’s largest new towns since Milton Keynes. But while several streets of identikit new-build houses can be seen from the low hill, most of the 2,500-acre site remains a dusty, blank canvas.
Mass housebuilding in the Ebbsfleet valley was first suggested by John Major’s government in 1994, with a proposal for 43,000 homes. Thirty years later, just 4,000 homes have been built. At current rates, the work is not expected to be complete until at least 2035, with a high chance of overruns into the 2040s.
‘Bulldoze planning laws’
Keir Starmer is the latest prime minister to try to tackle Britain’s dismal housebuilding record. Labour promised a “revolution” adding 1.5m new homes before the next general election, in 2029.
Bulldozing planning restrictions in England to kickstart private sector development is the cornerstone of his plan. New development corporations will have the power to remove blockages, and the locations for a 21st-century generation of new towns will be announced within 12 months.
“The tone coming out of the new government is very encouraging,” says Dudley. “They don’t have a schizophrenic attitude to housing development, which the Conservatives, concerned about their voting base in the south-east, had.”
“They talk about 1.5m homes. That is an enormous cross-departmental, governmental undertaking. But we are ready to go: we’re cranking the lever and ready to deliver.”
This will, however, be a serious challenge. Britain has not built more than 300,000 homes a year – the annual average Starmer needs to hit – since 1977, when about half were built by councils. Last year, 189,260 homes were added to the UK’s housing stock, about three-quarters from the private sector.
“I’m not a prophet of doom,” says Anthony Codling, housing analyst at investment bank RBC Capital. “But you have big supply issues to bear in mind. Even if you get planning approved today, it takes on average two years before you can sell the first home, so it’s not going to happen quickly. As they say with trees – the best time to plant one was yesterday. You have to crack on.”
Every time a governments has promised to boost the housing supply, Ebbsfleet – in the affluent south-east, close to London – has been central. House prices here are above the national average, at about £340,000 for a typical home, but are significantly below those in the capital, where properties change hands for north of £500,000. The valley is ideal for commuters and the site, on former north Kent industrial land, is well away from the Garden of England’s more nimbyish villages.
In the 2010s, David Cameron used near-identical language to Starmer’s, announcing a “housing revolution” and a bonfire of planning rules. In 2014, George Osborne picked Ebbsfleet to become England’s first garden city in 100 years, with a target of 15,000 homes, and launched a development corporation to oversee the process.
The former chancellor’s promise did not represent anything new, however. In 2012, just three years earlier, the Tories had heralded a “historic deal” to build 22,600 homes at Ebbsfleet, led by the developer Land Securities, best known for handling big city-centre projects. And even this built on plans announced by Tony Blair almost a decade earlier: in 2003, he promised to expand housing along the Thames gateway corridor – including 7,250 homes at Ebbsfleet.
The Ebbsfleet works provided cement for Victorian London’s housing boom and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network, but were gradually wound down in the 1990s. In the years since, Ebbsfleet has come to encapsulate Britain’s patchy record in delivering and knitting together major projects.
‘Hezzaville’
In the early 1990s, then environment secretary Michael Heseltine ensured a high-speed rail line between the Channel Tunnel and central London would pass through the area, on a route designed to kickstart regeneration and housebuilding. But whereas the French managed to open a high-speed line to Paris a year before the tunnel’s completion in 1994, Britain would run Eurostar services on Victorian tracks to Waterloo until 2007. That only changed when the route to London St Pancras was completed – a failure mocked by President François Mitterrand.
Heseltine’s plans for housing along an “east Thames corridor” were christened “Hezzaville” or “Heseltown” by the media. But while London’s docklands and the area around Stratford International station have been transformed – with help from the 2012 Olympics – the former Tory deputy prime minister is disappointed by the lack of progress further east.
Ebbsfleet was picked as the site for an international station, which opened in 2007, but the land around Ebbsfleet International remains blank, and trains to the continent ceased in 2020, a casualty of the Covid pandemic and Brexit.
“The upshot is that there has been very little development,” says Heseltine. “I come back to the devolution agenda. After George Osborne, it died, and the country became obsessed with Brexit and all that sort of thing.”
The development corporation still plans to build around the station, but work is unlikely to be complete until about 2040, and will require taxpayer funding for a multistorey carpark and other infrastructure, Dudley says.
One Heseltine plan that was completed is the Bluewater shopping centre, opened in 1999 in a quarry a couple of miles west of Ebbsfleet, but even that took almost a decade.
The 91-year-old politician says Starmer’s attempts to revive housebuilding will require more financial firepower and devolution of powers from Westminster. “I’m not that critical of the new government, actually,” he says. “They’ve made quite a reasonable start. But that’s the easy bit. In the end you have to do things. And that means decisions.”
A government spokesperson said changes to “speed up and streamline the planning process” will be announced soon. In next month’s budget, chancellor Rachel Reeves is also expected to provide details on financial backing for the newest housebuilding revolution.
Ian Piper, chief executive of the development corporation, says the ups and downs of the economy – including the 2008 financial crisis and Covid – have not helped: “You will have spotted the connection that planning permission was received just before the 2008 crash, when housebuilding plummeted across all the country as a result.”
Nor have the chopping, changing and vagaries of the political cycle: Britain has had 25 housing ministers since 1997, with the last 10 averaging less than nine months in post.
“We’ve repeatedly brought different housing secretaries here. It’s a good way of meeting the parliamentary party,” Dudley says.
“You had people who aren’t necessarily experts in housing, and revolving doors through departments. All good people, but it takes time to get your feet under the table. Stability is important.”
Angel of the South
In the mid 2000s Land Securities constructed an observatory building on the hilltop vantage point, offering sweeping views over the conurbation-to-be. The idea was to march housebuilders to its viewing deck and sell the vision of Ebbsfleet, with, on a clear day, the City of London and Canary Wharf visible on the horizon. At one point, the plan was to wow visitors with a 50-metre high white horse – commissioned by developers in 2008, after a design competition won by Turner prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger – like an “Angel of the South” landmark.
But the horse – so huge that a person standing next to it would have been no higher than one of its hooves – was, like much around here, never built.
But where housebuilding has progressed, there is a semblance of a community coming together, particularly in the Castle Hill estate, where Sam Bott runs the Blue Bean coffee shop, which also hosts yoga evenings, quiz nights and live music.
Growing up in nearby Dartford, Bott would ride his bike around the woods of Ebbsfleet’s quarries before the developers moved in. He started a coffee business in the early 2000s, and set up a stall at the high-speed railway station in 2019, before an opportunity arose to bring the Blue Bean to Castle Hill.
“It’s a focal point where you can come and have a drink. People love it,” says Bott. “You’ve got everything on your doorstep here. You’re in London in 20 minutes, you’ve got Bluewater, you’ve got the coast and the countryside nearby. It’s a great place to live.”
Jumping spiders
There have been other false starts. A £2.5bn theme park called the London Resort, dubbed locally the “Dartford Disney” was proposed for another former cement works, on the Thames-side Swanscombe peninsula north of Ebbsfleet.
The site lay within development corporation land, and had been granted nationally significant infrastructure project status in 2014 by the previous Tory government. But despite its backers spending £100m, the plans were withdrawn in 2022 when another government department – Natural England – designated part of the peninsula as a site of special scientific interest for its invertebrates – including a rare spider – birds, plants and geology.
Steve Norris, the former Tory transport minister who chaired the London Resort project, says that decision was maddening: “We had things like jumping spiders coming out of Natural England, which caused enormous problems for us,” he says, suggesting that the lack of progress at Ebbsfleet was down to “bloated bureaucracy”. “One thing the new government has to look at – if they do want to support economic growth and get the planning system into some sort of order – is how they take the bureaucracy out.”
Edel McGurk, regional director for the south-east at Natural England, disagrees. “Housing and nature are not competing interests,” she says. “Sustainable development and nature recovery must go hand in hand. We will continue to work with developers within Ebbsfleet valley to both protect the exceptional variety of birds, invertebrates and plants and support local development to incorporate its unique environment and wildlife.”
The battle is symbolic of a wider challenge Labour will face across the country, given the competing pressures of addressing the housing crisis while safeguarding natural spaces and biodiversity.
“There’s no life in a dead planet,” says Laura Edie, a Green councillor on Dartford council, who set up the Save Swanscombe Peninsula campaign group to push for the SSSI status.
“I completely sympathise that we need to build. And the last government didn’t do enough to build affordable housing. But it’s not fair to tar people with genuine environmental concerns as nimbys. Places like Swanscombe are so important for people’s health, and we need natural spaces. We can’t concrete over everything.”
Where Ebbsfleet has had success is in the creation of the development corporation, which took over certain powers – including over planning – from the local Dartford, Gravesham and Kent county councils.
Public money was used to help fund vital infrastructure, including roads, power networks and sewers, which private developers are often reluctant to finance, for Ebbsfleet’s initial 4,000 homes.
While still far short of targets, Dudley and Piper say new homes are being delivered at a run-rate of about 700 a year, which is among the fastest rates of new housing supply in the country.
“We would say this, but we’re big fans of the model,” says Piper. “I call it a ringmaster approach. Someone has to do it, as its too much for one private sector developer to do alone.”
Readying a former quarry for housebuilding also comes with costs, which have slowed the project down, says Ian Rickwood, the chief executive of Henley Investment Management, which bought the site from Land Securities in 2018.
“There was a huge amount of earth moving, a new lake was created, and then the link roads between Ebbsfleet station and Bluewater, which is a huge project.”
Then there is the huge challenge of ensuring Britain’s 1.5m new homes are not concrete jungles but places where people want to live, with the roads, buses, schools and doctors’ surgeries that thriving communities require.
Danielle and Dominic Sambrook moved to Ebbsfleet in 2019. But have been disappointed at the lack of facilities.
“We’re moving away. It had promise when we moved, but the lack of development of the community means we haven’t got huge connections to stay,” says Danielle, as the couple sip iced coffees outside the Blue Bean.
Later this month they will move to a leafy village near Ashford, deeper into Kent, where their son will start school. They had found it difficult to find a space in the oversubscribed Ebbsfleet education system.
“The community is nice. But the fact that more and more houses are being built is almost a negative. Over time it will be more of a draw on resources. You need the infrastructure.
“What about the doctors? You can’t get an appointment. The train is rammed at Ebbsfleet in the morning. If you build houses you need GPs, schools, hospitals. It needs to be there, you can’t wait for it to come five years later.”