A VIBRANT FUTURE FOR INDUSTRIAL LAND

Industrial land in our towns and cities provides employment, supports services and is often a place of innovation. To maximise its economic potential and contribution to urban life, industrial land needs to be flexible, diverse and more intensively used: it needs strategic planning and selective and transformative investment.

Urban industrial areas accommodate a broad array of activities. While a lot of recent attention has been placed on logistics warehouses and distribution, these are only one of many types of businesses found on commercial and manufacturing land. Site activities could include anything from pharmaceutical, aerospace, food processing and specialist food products, clothing and uniforms, and other trade-only activities, as well as customer-orientated businesses like printing, cabinet making, office and building supplies, car dealerships, repairs and so on. Typically, around 10-15% of land1 is also used for useful non-industrial purposes such as training centres, entertainment boxes (trampolining, go-karting, bowling, etc.), cafes and community halls. Smaller areas may have a collection of creative industries (fashion, graphics, digital, furniture etc.) intermixed with artist studios and standard industrial activities. At the fringes, older brick warehouses are sometimes converted to homes, offices and studios.

This diversity, and the interplay between different needs and employment profiles, is a real strength for our towns and cities: it provides employment for a wide range of skills and abilities, it ensures flexibility and adaptability to changing economic conditions and ultimately supports a fertile environment for innovation.

Emerging planning policy in London requires overall retention of industrial floorspace, therefore allowing release or change of use only where floorspace can be increased elsewhere. It also indicates 65% as an appropriate plot density for urban industry  - roughly equivalent to 50% gross density. This is rarely the case in practice: only in Central London does average floorspace density approach 100%. More often, industrial land has a gross floorspace density of 30-35% and around 20% where distribution warehousing is prevalent. This is a wasteful level of utilisation for expensive urban land – and clearly one of the reasons why there is sustained pressure for more intensive patterns of development.

In an evaluation of sample sites, it was found that plot-by-plot intensification (such as encouraging mezzanines and additional floors) can typically add only 10-15% to the overall density of an industrial area. These measures in themselves will therefore not be sufficient to deliver the degree of intensification needed across urban industrial land: more comprehensive approaches are clearly required.

By overlaying multiple interventions, significant gains in floorspace can be made, while adding diversity and retaining flexibility and operability. This can only be done through strategic planning and a comprehensive approach, which retains valuable premises and progressively rationalise operations, while adding and intensifying activity.

Such an approach has been sketched out in detail in The Master Planner's Guide to the Future of Industrial Land, prepared by URBAN Silence and Litchfield.