Wandsworth Council is knocking down residents’ garages on the Alton estate to build new flats, and leaving them nowhere else to park.
A resident and Putney.news reader said garages and parking spaces have gone or are going at two blocks, Bessborough Road and Farnborough House, in an area already short of parking. When the losses were raised at a meeting, the resident said, they were told: “Homes over cars.”
At Bessborough Road, the council is demolishing garages and car parking to build eight supported-housing flats. Permission was granted in October 2023, and work is due to start on site this summer. One council letter apologises “to residents who kindly vacated their garages early to allow this to happen.”
At Farnborough House, garages are making way for three blocks totalling 38 flats, approved in March 2024. Council paperwork for the scheme includes a “parking bays suspension letter,” dated April 2025. Neither scheme’s approved description includes a replacement garage or parking space. Council consultation material from the early design stage at Bessborough Road said officers were “keen to provide alternative garages where possible” to residents who rented them there. That was a stated intention, not one that survived into what was actually approved.
The resident also named a third area, a car park by the Alton community hall and local shops, which they said is being removed to allow building.
A 20-year habit
This isn’t new, and it isn’t Alton’s alone. Wandsworth has been building homes on old garage sites for more than two decades, ever since Hidden Homes launched in 2002, converting disused estate spaces (garages, boiler rooms, laundries) into homes because the council already owned the land and didn’t have to pay for a site. Officers have put the saving at £60,000 to £200,000 a unit. The programme was rebranded Homes for Wandsworth and has continued under every administration since, Labour and Conservative alike. But the scheme has gone so far, residents say, that they are now facing serious parking problems at the same time as overcrowding thanks to new homes.
Roehampton has other recent examples. At Toland Square, on the neighbouring Eastwood South estate, permission was granted in November 2024 to demolish 33 garages for seven houses; residents organised a petition against the loss of green space, storage and parking that gathered more than 500 signatures on a 125-home estate. At Aubyn Square nearby, 11 garages were approved for demolition in March 2025.
Not every inherited scheme has survived the change of political control at the Town Hall. On 29 July, the council’s new administration dropped five Homes for Wandsworth sites, including Ashburton South (Innes Gardens, Hayward Gardens and Cortis Road) and the Lennox Estate, together 192 of 253 cancelled homes, citing local opposition rather than cost.
Wandsworth Council has been asked whether it will provide replacement garages or parking at Alton, whether the “alternative garages where possible” commitment has been dropped and why, and whether the loss of parking has been assessed anywhere in approving either scheme. Cabinet Member for Housing Matthew Corner has been asked separately whether Alton’s garage schemes are affected by the wider review of the estate’s “future phases.”
