London’s housing crisis is pricing out families. The sky-high cost of space means that many Londoners face a tough question: if you want to have children, what do you sacrifice? Do you try to fit your family into a small home, or do you say goodbye to the community you call home?
But one interesting housing reform enacted by Haringey Council back in 2010 shows us that there is a third option: allowing homeowners to extend upwards. Since residents in South Tottenham were empowered to add up to 1.5 new storeys above their homes, the take-up has been impressively high, but it makes absolute sense — it’s a living standards improvement for local residents.
As of today, almost 60% of eligible homeowners have added new storeys to their properties, meaning the same area can now house over 1,000 more people — children, elderly relatives, lodgers.
This example of resident-led housing policy1 demonstrates that by understanding the needs of residents, we can help densify cities in a popular, sustainable fashion, so that Londoners no longer have to choose between starting a family and staying in the place they call home.
Lessons from South Tottenham
A critical, yet frequently ignored, dimension of the housing crisis is not just the cost of a roof over your head, but quality and space beneath it. In addition to high housing costs, Britain possesses some of the smallest and poorest-quality housing stock in the developed world. To understand the scale of this issue, it is important to look at how much space you get for what you pay.
In London, the average home now costs approximately £7,000 per square metre. This places the capital in a league of its own compared to the rest of the country. The sky-high cost of space hits London’s young families particularly hard, as moving homes to accommodate more children often entails leaving your community to move to a different borough, or even city, with lower housing costs per square metre meaning that you can have that extra bedroom.
The tension between high costs and the need for space is particularly relevant to South Tottenham. This corner of Haringey is home to a vibrant Charedi Jewish community where large families are the norm, often averaging six children – triple the national average.
However, South Tottenham’s small Victorian terraces were not designed to house people at modern living standards. The difficulty of squaring historic housing stock with today’s demands has ultimately resulted in widespread issues of overcrowding and poor-quality housing.
A rough map of South Tottenham, highlighted in red
Relocation is not a viable option for Charedi families, whose concentration in specific neighbourhoods is driven by a deep reliance on essential community infrastructure, such as synagogues and kosher markets.
The combination of large families, high housing costs, small homes, and a tight-knit community bound by geography meant that local leaders had to devise innovative solutions. Councillors were faced with a pressing question: how do you ease overcrowding and add more space in a built-up urban area? Their answer was to build upward.
Building upwards
Upward extensions are a straightforward concept: adding more living space by building new storeys on top of existing homes. In an urban neighbourhood like South Tottenham, the typical options for expanding a home are simply not possible. You cannot extend sideways when your home is a mid-terrace, flanked on both sides by other homes. You cannot extend backwards when there is a small rear garden. And you cannot extend forward when the front of your house sits close to the road. In many urban areas, the only way to build is up.
This is what Haringey Council enabled through its Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) for House Extensions in South Tottenham, first adopted in 2010 and later revised in 2013. The council instituted a policy of allowing specific, clearly defined types of upward extension that homeowners could choose to add onto their homes. To ensure that the extensions fit the Victorian character of the streets and minimise opposition to the planning changes, the SPD outlined that the design must match the original home.
Haringey Council now permit three types of upward extensions in South Tottenham:
Type 1) A full width dormer to the rear with possible rooflights at the front.
Examples of type 1 upward extensions in South Tottenham, Google Earth
Type 2) A whole floor extension with a flat roof behind a parapet.
Examples of type 2 upward extensions in South Tottenham, Google Earth
Type 3) A full second floor extension plus a loft extension on the third floor. This is the most ambitious category of extension that Haringey allowed in South Tottenham, enabling homeowners to add 1.5 storeys to their homes.
Examples of type 3 upward extensions in South Tottenham, Google Earth
Since Haringey Council empowered residents to extend their homes upward, the take-up has been enormous. Sixteen years on from the SPD, our current estimate shows that nearly 60% of the 1,000 eligible homeowners have added new storeys to their properties. Street after street has seen homes grow, with extensions becoming a popular and widely adopted feature of South Tottenham rather than a rare exception.
This locally led reform has alleviated a great deal of pressure for local families, demonstrating that when faced with a stark choice between overcrowding and leaving their community, residents will opt for a third option if they are given the tools to do so. Instead of being priced out or crammed into overcrowded homes, families have been able to adapt their homes to match their needs, allowing children to grow up in the same neighbourhood and close to the institutions that anchor community life.
The cumulative effect of these individual decisions has been transformative. By enabling hundreds of homeowners to add space, the same small area of South Tottenham can now house around 1,000 more residents than it could just over a decade ago.
Local solutions in a national setting
South Tottenham’s experience shows that resident-led reforms are one of the most effective ways to densify high-demand urban areas while directly improving living standards for the people who already live there. Instead of forcing families to move away, or relying on controversial and slow development, upward extensions allow neighbourhoods to grow in line with the needs of local people.
Crucially, upward extensions do not always need to mean adding more bedrooms for existing households. Although not allowed in the Haringey example, they may also create the option to add entirely new homes if done elsewhere. A homeowner can extend upward and convert the building into two spacious maisonettes, allowing new households to move into well-connected neighbourhoods that would otherwise remain closed to them. This means that the same reform that helps families stay can also help new residents arrive.
This is why upward extensions should be expanded across London and other high-demand cities. By empowering residents to build upward, councils can unlock thousands of new bedrooms and homes in the places people want to live most. South Tottenham shows that when residents are incentivised to add space, they do so at scale. Replicating this model would allow cities to grow in a way that is popular and rooted in the needs of communities, ensuring that more people can build their future in the places they call home.
- Learning From History, Suburban Intensification in South Tottenham (2021) Create Streets. ↩︎
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