Lovell has started work on an 84-home phase at the Ings estate in east Hull, part of a masterplan that will eventually deliver more than 700 homes. As Place Yorkshire reported, the new homes are for affordable rent and shared ownership, in two, three and four bedroom houses.
The thing most housing stories cannot claim
This partnership has already delivered 400 mixed-tenure homes since it was appointed in 2021.
That is the sentence that makes this worth covering. The North is not short of announced housing schemes. It is short of ones that quietly finish hundreds of homes over five years without drama. Four hundred completed, another 84 started, more than 700 in total planned, on a single estate, is delivery rather than intention.
Who is doing it
A partnership of Lovell, Compendium Living, Hull City Council and Together Housing, supported by Homes England and the government’s Brownfield Land Release Fund.
That is four organisations with different jobs. The council brings land and local knowledge, the housing association takes and manages the completed homes, the developer builds, and public funding covers the gap that makes clearing an existing estate viable. Alex Isted, Lovell’s regional managing director, made the point directly: “Long-term partnerships can achieve major regeneration.”
It is a duller sentence than a groundbreaking photo, and it is the actual mechanism.
What was there before
The Balham Avenue site was cleared, which required demolishing properties on Teddington Close and Northolt Close.
That deserves to be said plainly rather than buried. Estate regeneration on this model means existing homes come down and people move. Done badly it displaces communities and replaces social rent with something more expensive. Done well it replaces failing stock with warm, modern homes at rents people can afford, and keeps residents in the same neighbourhood. The tenure here, affordable rent and shared ownership rather than open market sale, is the strongest evidence that this one is being done the second way.
The design detail worth noting
The scheme includes a central green space with seating, trees, hedges, play areas and safe walking routes, and the wider Ings project will deliver a neighbourhood park connecting to Bluebell Fields.
We made this argument about Halewood’s Grace Park a fortnight ago and it holds here. Housing without usable green space between it produces a place people leave as soon as they can afford to. Building the park as part of the scheme, rather than as a phase that gets dropped when budgets tighten, is what separates a neighbourhood from an estate.
Construction runs over the next two years.
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