“‘If you think we have a housing crisis… we’re going to have an even bigger one in 15 years,’ warned campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa. Henley Construct, behind Tulse Hill’s stalled scheme, collapsed in 2023 – one of several contractors to leave sites derelict, or defective.

Building work has restarted at ‘Tulse Henge’, the previously abandoned building site on Norwood Road, writes Laura Graham. The site lay abandoned for almost five years after the private developer Henley Construct went into voluntary liquidation costing their social housing partner, Southern Housing £36 million. As a result of this, Southern Housing announced in April last year that it had to pause all new development commitments to ‘de-risk’ the business and focus on existing homes.

Planning permission for the Norwood Road site was re-validated in February 2026 so that it now includes communal cycle parking (and it appears that is the main focus of the current building work) and the scheme will now be wholly ‘affordable’ homes managed by Southern Housing.

The new builder, Roberts Gallagher was awarded the contract in early March of this year. They specialise in ‘distressed projects’ and described Tulse Henge as being in a ‘challenging position with partially completed structures, unresolved design elements, warranty issues and significant logistical and statutory constraints…’. The cost of the new building work is £16 million.

The Southern Housing and Henley Construct partnership wasn’t unique to Lambeth. They had a similar deal in Croydon. A former meatpacking depot on Cherry Orchard Road also has a partially constructed building site, also abandoned, but now also recently restarted. The builder for this project is West London based Formation Design and Build and this project has received financial support from the London Mayor Sadiq Khan as inflation pushed costs up to £52 million.

What is a concern about both sites is that the existing half-built skeletons of the apartment blocks seem to remain part of the plan. Both are weather beaten and rusting after four years of neglect (and home to various local wildlife). Tulse Henge is visibly ageing and damaged.

An example of inadequate checks to new builds can also be found in Croydon. Henry Construction was responsible for building The Fold, a 35 storey, 251 luxury apartment development which was completed in 2022 under a ‘Build to Rent’ scheme. The most recent owners of the building, the insurance giants Legal and General, recently instructed hundreds of tenants to evacuate the building so that extensive remedial works could take place.

This scandalous building project saw residents suffer severe mould, damp, leaks and fire safety issues with renters being charged up to £3,000 per month to live in slum-like conditions.

The entire structure was deeply flawed. Henry Construct received £100 million in subsidies from Khan for this disastrous project. It also went into administration (but had paid members of the Henry family millions of pounds before declaring bankruptcy).

Henry Construction was also the builder at the Thornton Park site in Clapham. This was also in partnership with Southern Housing. The social housing buildings were built and occupied ahead of Henry Construction’s liquidation which left the ‘luxury’ accommodation part of the project derelict, forcing the social housing residents to live on a building site for three years.

Currently, McLaren the new developer, following an extensive survey, has subcontracted demolition specialists John F. Hunt to take down the substandard building work of Henry Construction before it can be rebuilt.

The construction at The Fold was so poor that housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa used it as an example of what not to do when trying to reach Steve Reed’s target of building 1.5 million new homes when he was invited to contribute to a recent Housing Select Committee in Parliament. He warned, ‘If you think we have a housing crisis at the moment, we’re going to have an even bigger one in 15 years time when some of these homes have to be torn down because the quality is so bad and they fell apart.’

The Housing Select Committee is supposed to hold Steve Reed to account in his role as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. However, the Chair of this committee is Labour’s Vauxhall MP, Florence Eshalomi who was a councillor at Lambeth Town Hall’s chumocracy at the same time as Reed.

Henley Construct’s director, Kashif Usmani, hasn’t gone anywhere – he remains an active director of Henley Homes RF 2 Limited, even as multiple Henley companies sit in administration or liquidation and Southern Housing’s £36 million loss on Norwood Road remains unresolved.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result – but Reed isn’t mad, and Labour doesn’t do housing – ‘build baby build’ outsourced to the private sector is just good old focus group capitalism, the same familiar model that keeps making cash from crises.

Article by Laura Graham