The permitted co-living block at 15 to 23 Fife Road pays £450,000 rather than build affordable homes. A council review found it could afford no more.

A nine-storey building holding 200 rented rooms has had planning permission next to Kingston station for five years. Not a brick has been laid.

The council’s own file explains part of why. The scheme at 15 to 23 Fife Road carries no affordable housing at all. Instead it pays the council £450,000, and when that figure was reopened in 2023 under a review clause written into the legal agreement, the answer came back that the scheme could not afford a penny more.

What has permission

Permission 20/00945/FUL was issued on 23 March 2021, eleven months after the application arrived. It allows:

  • demolition of the existing buildings on the site
  • a part-seven, part-nine storey building plus basement
  • co-living accommodation, classed as sui generis, meaning it fits none of the standard planning use classes
  • a restaurant on the ground floor
  • associated access, servicing, parking and landscaping

The site is the block currently holding Sports Direct and Currys PC World. The applicants of record are 15 Fife Road Ltd and 19 Fife Road Ltd, care of Viewranks Estates, a developer based in Mortlake.

The architect is Assael Architecture. Its own account of the design says the site “once housed the Royal County Theatre and Super Cinema, which operated from 1917-1940”, and that the building borrows from that art deco heritage, including fluted terracotta detailing echoing the old theatre’s stonework. The finished building is to be run under the brand Nineyards Living.

The £450,000, and why it did not grow

The Section 106 agreement was signed on 16 March 2021, a week before the permission was issued. Clause 17 of it set up an early stage review: a second look at the numbers once the scheme was closer to being built, to test whether the affordable housing contribution could be increased.

That review was triggered and decided under reference 23/00963/LEG. The council’s decision notice, issued on 10 November 2023, sets out who did what:

  • the applicant’s assessment was prepared by DS2
  • it was independently reviewed for the council by Aspinall Verdi
  • the council’s lawyers, the South London Legal Partnership, also took part

The notice explains that the point of the exercise is “to determine whether there have been any significant changes to the GDV and construction cost inputs” since the original viability assessment, “and whether there is any scope to improve the affordable housing contributions agreed at the application stage”.

Its conclusion is one sentence: “the outcome of the review is that the scheme cannot provide any additional contributions beyond the £450,000 already agreed.”

For context, £450,000 is less than the borough’s average house price. Land Registry figures for June 2026 put the average Kingston home at £594,498.

A separate deed of variation, reference 23/01910/DOV, was granted in 2023 to change the wording of Schedule 11 of the same agreement, which covers the carbon offset contribution.

What the developer said the building would do

At the public exhibition stage, the developer’s material set out the case for the scheme. It was reproduced in full by the Kingston upon Thames Society in February 2020, and the claims are the developer’s own:

  • over 20 full time staff employed on site
  • 385 square metres of ground floor commercial space
  • a “field to fork” all-day dining concept open to the public
  • 24 hour security and a managed timetable of resident events
  • improved public realm and motorcycle parking on the Dolphin Street frontage

The most striking claim is about housing supply. Taking 200 people out of shared houses, the developer argued, “frees up circa 50 typical four bedroom family homes”. That is an argument about the second-hand market rather than a promise to build anything affordable, and the council’s file records no affordable homes on the site.

Five years of paperwork

The permission has not lapsed. It has been amended twice and picked apart condition by condition, and the file shows steady work through 2025 and 2026.

Timeline of the Fife Road co-living permission: application received April 2020, permission granted and the Section 106 signed in March 2021 with £450,000 agreed, first variation November 2022, early stage review November 2023 finding no more than £450,000 was affordable, second variation June 2025 for a new rear lift core, drainage strategy refused December 2025 and granted April 2026
The Fife Road co-living permission, from application to the most recent condition signed off. Source: Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames planning register.

The two amendments matter more than they sound.

22/03680/FUL, granted after being validated in November 2022, changed the approved plans to make “minor non-material amendments arising from detailed construction stage design in order to meet current Building Regulations and Fire Regulations”.

25/00463/FUL, granted on 5 June 2025, went further. It allowed “the formation of a new lift core on the rear elevation, changes to the fenestration and internal alteration”. A new lift core added to the back of a building five years after permission is a fire safety and access change, not a cosmetic one.

The conditions signed off since then read like a building preparing to start:

  • September 2025: accessibility and noise conditions granted
  • 3 December 2025: the construction environmental management plan granted
  • 3 December 2025: the drainage strategy refused
  • 9 April 2026: a resubmitted drainage strategy granted

Four other applications were withdrawn rather than decided over the same winter, covering public realm improvements, flood resistance measures and a non-material amendment.

What we could not confirm

Property trade titles reported in August 2026 that a pan-European investment manager had agreed to forward fund the scheme, putting a gross development value of £80m on it and saying construction would start imminently.

We could not stand that up from a first-party source today. Neither Viewranks Estates nor Nineyards Living has published anything about it. The investment manager’s own press release page carries nothing later than 2023. And the two site companies, 15 Fife Road Ltd and 19 Fife Road Ltd, still show only a single charge each at Companies House, both registered to Alpha Bank London in July 2019 and both still outstanding. No new lender or funder appears on either register.

So the position we can evidence is the one above: a live permission, amended twice, with its pre-commencement conditions being cleared, and nothing yet built.

What it means for you

If you live or work near the station. When this does start, Fife Road is a narrow street with the station at one end, and a demolition and nine-storey build will run for years. The construction environmental management plan has already been approved, which is the document that fixes working hours, lorry routes and dust control. It is worth reading before the hoardings go up. Fife Road already has works of its own, listed on our Kingston roadworks and travel page.

If you are looking for somewhere to live. Co-living is not covered by the usual housing figures. These are rented rooms with shared kitchens and lounges, let by one operator, and none of them counts as an affordable home. If you are watching Kingston’s housing supply, this scheme adds 200 rooms and zero affordable units.

If you want to follow it. Every document quoted here is on the council’s register, free to read, at publicaccess.kingston.gov.uk. Search the reference or the address. Our Kingston planning page tracks the borough’s bigger applications.

Sources