This week, Wandsworth Council’s new administration confirmed that demolition work will happen at Block A, the derelict building and old Co-op at the entrance to Roehampton’s Alton Estate. But in a video fronted by the new cabinet member for housing, Cllr Matthew Corner, it is clear that the estate faces yet another lengthy delay in proper renovation efforts.
The announcement comes four months after the council signed the contract to tear it down, and is the first confirmed physical progress on the Alton Renewal Plan since residents voted for renewal in October 2025. It is also the only thing about the plan’s future that is confirmed at all.
The council has also filed a planning application for a temporary cabin at Alton Community Play School, on Fontley Way, to serve as a “decant office/training space” for a period of five years: the first sign of how long the council expects the wider rehousing process behind the Alton scheme to run. The school’s buggy park will be relocated.
A plan that has already changed once
The Alton Estate has been here before, many times. In October 2020, under the then Conservative administration, the council’s planning committee approved a scheme for around 1,108 homes, most for private sale, after the original developer, Redrow, walked away before the vote went ahead. The Mayor of London, residents’ groups and local critics objected to the scale of demolition and the shortage of genuinely affordable homes.
Labour took control in May 2022, paused that scheme and reworked it into the Alton Renewal Plan: fewer homes, less demolition, a higher proportion of social and council housing. That is the plan residents backed in last October’s ballot, by 82.4% among those who voted, though only around a third of all eligible residents voted yes and nearly 60% did not vote at all.
It has not had an easy process and now most of it will likely be lost. As we reported in October, the plan’s own paperwork counted living rooms as bedrooms to make its three and four-bedroom numbers add up. Six weeks after the yes vote, costs on the £123m scheme had already risen by £40m. Block A itself carried an acknowledged £12.6m funding deficit when planning permission was granted in March, alongside a right-to-light legal warning that the council’s own lawyer said had to be resolved before construction could proceed. It is not clear that legal hurdle has been breached, so while the block itself may be demolished, there is no certainty about what will replace it.
The threat that hasn’t gone away
The bigger question hanging over the plan is not the council’s, but the administration’s. A Conservative candidate told a hustings before May’s election that the party would scrap the Alton Renewal Plan if elected and could not commit to a scheme with an unresolved funding gap.
The Conservatives now run the council and Cabinet Member for Housing Matthew Corner’s public message since taking office has been that residents will be consulted on “future phases of the masterplan,” not that the current plan is confirmed to proceed as approved. Read alongside the pre-election warning, that consultation language is signalling that the plan may change again, not as a commitment to build what residents actually voted for.
Corner has also talked about widening affordable home ownership options alongside council rent. What that means in practice, including whether it involves private developers or a proportion of homes at market rent, has not been set out. Nor has the council said anything about the underlying economics that made the previous, Labour-era plan hard to stand up: council rents that were never going to cover build or upkeep costs, on an estate where the council itself has told Wandsworth’s own Housing Committee that eviction for rent arrears is something it “very, very rarely” does.
What four years of promises has delivered
Strip away the announcements and what has actually happened at the Alton in four years of Labour control, now handed to the Conservatives, is a set of new playgrounds that are nearly done, and the start of one demolition.
What is meant to replace the derelict Block A is a library, a GP practice, council offices and youth space, on a site that already had a library and a youth club before the Co-op building fell derelict. Whether the new facilities represent more capacity than what they replace, or simply a rebuild of what residents already had, was disputed at the March planning committee, where questions were raised about the youth space’s stated floor area. There are no proposals for a new supermarket to replace the Co-op.
There are also no plans to improve public transport – another long and persistent problem that administration after administration has failed to properly address. Residents are reliant on a bus network to get anywhere, and with Putney traffic at an all-time high, combined with the closure of Hammersmith Bridge – now into its seventh year – it is difficult to get in and out of the estate. More homes mean more people on an already overstretched transport system.
Putney’s MP, Fleur Anderson, launched a petition to save the wider Alton rebuild earlier this month. Wandsworth Council has released a video of the Block A works starting, titled “Work starts at Block A on the Alton Estate,” on its YouTube channel, in which Cllr Corner says the council will “keep you informed every step of the way.”
For residents of this long-neglected estate in the corner of Roehampton, which was once seen as the future of housing but is now marked out by dilapidated and rotting buildings thanks to a lack of care and upkeep, the result is the same as it has been now for 20 years: nothing is coming.
Managed decline? As you have seen how neglected the whole estate has been for over 20 years
The regeneration has now become a political pawn in wandsworth concil plans.
Time to start putting the local residents first.