Wandsworth Council refused two separate attempts to convert shops into flats this week, a day apart, for exactly the same reason.
A first-floor unit at 3 Putney Hill was refused on 30 July. A partly-vacant commercial unit at Hardwicks Square, off Wandsworth High Street, was refused the next day. Both applications had used a fast-track route called prior approval, which normally lets a shop, office or other commercial unit convert straight into a flat without the council weighing in. Both were turned down because both sites sit inside a zone where the council has switched that automatic right off.
The council created that zone using something called an Article 4 direction. The government introduced a national rule in 2021 letting empty shops and offices convert into homes with minimal scrutiny, and – in order to protect High Streets – Wandsworth applied to switch it off across roughly 60 areas of the borough, including town centre parades in Putney and Wandsworth Town, Nine Elms, and a number of business and industrial sites. It has been in force since July 2022 and inside those areas, converting commercial space into a home needs a full application weighed against the council’s usual planning policies, instead of happening automatically.
Importantly, however, the conversion itself is not banned, just delayed and both applicants remain free to reapply, so the rules buy time rather than protection.
Death of our communial spaces?
Researchers who study Britain’s high streets, including a Sheffield Hallam University team, describe a healthy high street as something closer to a shared living room than a shopping list, a place whose value is mostly social, built on memory and repeated encounters rather than turnover alone.
And in a series of reviews into the UK high street, commissioned by the retail industry and used by councils across the country, the former head of Iceland, Bill Grimsey, makes a similar case: shops give people a reason to leave the house and run into each other, and a high street that loses too many of them stops being a high street and becomes a row of shopfronts.
Hardwicks Square has lost commercial space to residential conversion at least four times since 2013, all approved quickly under earlier rules. We estimate this is the first time in more than a decade an attempt there has been stopped.
Just days before these two refusals, Brickwood Cafe on Lower Richmond Road closed for good, with flats slated to replace it, a cafe that didn’t survive the same pressure. In January, a different kind of shop-to-flats rejection stopped the old Lloyds Bank site, but for different reasons: the impact on neighbours, not Article 4.
What happens next, and how to check your own street
Both applicants can still reapply through the full planning process. Residents wanting to check whether a specific shop or office nearby is covered can look at the maps Wandsworth publishes on its Article 4 Directions page, which show all 60 protected areas of the borough; for a definitive answer on one address, the council’s own guidance points to applying for a Lawful Development Certificate or getting pre-application advice from a planning officer.
The pressure on Hardwicks Square hasn’t stopped, it has just changed shape: a separate, unrelated application at number 14 wants to fold an existing ground-floor commercial unit into a private home’s pool room and gym, this time through a full planning application, with a decision due by 3 September.
