Hope for part-built Bristol homes that are still a 'dystopian shell' two years on

It has become a symbol of the challenge of building affordable homes in Bristol A view of the 'Old Brickworks' site on Luckwell Road in Bedminster, taken in 2025 A view of the ‘Old Brickworks’ site on Luckwell Road in Bedminster, taken in 2025(Image: Bristol Post)

Neighbours near an unfinished block of flats in South Bristol have described their frustration after another year of living next to the boarded-up buildings. It has been two and half years now since work stopped on the building site next to the climbing centre in Bedminster, and the sight of the empty shells that are supposed to be affordable homes for local people has become a symbol of the challenges Bristol is facing to provide homes for people on the waiting list.

The housing association that is supposed to have provided 67 affordable homes has told Bristol Live of the ‘very challenging’ times in the industry, but now there is a glimmer of hope that, at last, work may restart in the coming months as it enters the ‘final stages’ of talks with a new contractor.

The case of ‘the OId Brickworks’ is one which highlights the challenge of getting new affordable homes built in a city where building costs are spiralling, developers say they are being squeezed and the cost of creating what is effectively subsidised homes for people on the housing waiting list is increasingly impossible.

It is an issue that Bristol Live is increasingly reporting on. One developer of a proposed block of flats in a prime riverside location near Temple Meads told councillors they can’t afford to include affordable homes and no one wants to help build them anyway. The council also cut its own planned investment in affordable homes, explaining that it needs to prioritise repairing the shabby state of the existing council homes in Bristol instead.

Down at the end of Luckwell Road in Bedminster, the challenge of building affordable homes in Bristol is very visible. Rather than being a few lines on a ‘viability’ report, it’s there for all to see as a stiff breeze whips the plastic coverings on the roof and around the window frames, and the hoardings around the front of the building gather dust.

What happened at the Old Brickworks?

There had been hope back at the end of the 2010s and into the 2020s that new homes could be built to provide somewhere local for younger people to live. Luckwell Road here is the border between Bedminster’s Victorian terraces going up the hill and Ashton’s pre- and post-war council homes – now almost entirely privately-owned – on the old coal mine land that runs down to Ashton Gate Stadium.

On the corner of Luckwell Road and Winterstoke Road, a former cinema has been repurposed as a climbing centre, and next door to that, an old brickworks was a Kellaways building supplier for decades until the end of the 2010s.

Back in the mid-2010s, Bedminster was named as one of the places with the fastest rising house prices in the country. The area was rapidly changing, with a generation of local residents, who had lived there from the days when the tobacco factories were the biggest employers, either selling up and moving out, or dying and their relatives selling their homes.

There was a new wave of people moving to Bedminster and Ashton, and soon former council houses on the west side of Luckwell Road were regularly being sold for more than half a million pounds – eye-watering sums for an area seen by generations of Bristolians as one of the city’s more down-to-earth and working class areas.

In 2017, the Kellaways building supplier moved to a new site on the other side of Bedminster at Hartcliffe Way, and the site was cleared, ready for new homes.

It was a prime site for new housing, and a local developer got planning permission to build 67 new homes – a block of 59 flats and eight terraced town houses. After gaining permission and starting work in pandemic times in 2020 and 2021, the local firm Crown signed a deal with a housing association to convert all the homes from regular private sale flats to ‘affordable’ homes.

A view of the former building supply yard at Luckwell Road in Bedminster, taken in June 2016(Image: Google Maps)

It was something Crown had done with another development near East Street in Bedminster, and the firm said it was pleased to be able to contribute to solving the housing crisis in South Bristol. Having them as ‘affordable’ in planning terms means the new homes will be managed by a housing association – either rented out at ‘social rent’ levels, the same as a council house, rented at ‘affordable rent’ levels to people on the housing waiting list at 80 per cent of the local market rent for an equivalent flat, or offered for sale as shared ownership flats.

There are other definitions of ‘affordable’, which include homes for the elderly, adults with special needs, keyworkers like NHS staff or police officers, or for special projects for people leaving homelessness. Converting developments to be 100 per cent ‘affordable’ also means developers don’t then have to pay Bristol City Council a Community Infrastructure Levy – which can be in the hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of pounds.

Crown built the flats at Leicester Street, which was part of the Bedminster Green regeneration area, and did a deal with housing association United Communities, but as work got underway to prepare the site at Luckwell Road, the land and the plan was sold to a housing association and affordable homes developer called Brighter Places.

Brighter Places

This is Bristol’s largest independent housing association, and in May 2022, it announced it had secured £40 million of funding from Scottish Widows that will help build around 1,000 new homes in and around the city over the next five years.

A month later, and Brighter Places added the already-started Luckwell Road site to its roster of affordable homes developments. The housing association got grants from the city council, and from the Government through Homes England. Brighter Places renamed the site ‘the OId Brickworks’ and brought in a new building contractor to do the physical work of building the homes, called Real South West.

Work begins on the building site at Luckwell Road in March 2021(Image: Google Maps)

Work began in earnest, and the houses and flats were built during 2023 and into 2023. Brighter Places said that of the 67 new homes, 20 would be up for sale through a shared ownership scheme, and the other 47 per cent would be let at ‘affordable rent’ levels – 80 per cent of what a private tenant would be paying – to people through the council’s HomeChoice housing system.

But then, in 2023 work stopped. “They were here one day and literally no one showed up the next day,” said one resident, who declined to be named but lives opposite the site. “They were building them at quite a good pace, once they started, they went up in no time, but then it just all stopped,” she added.

The buildings had roofs but gaping holes where the windows were due to be, and no external cladding. They looked like the dystopian shells of homes the army construct on Salisbury Plain to help train soldiers in urban warfare.

“It was like that for months, then someone came back and boarded it all up. That’s when I think we knew this might take a while,” the local resident said. What had happened was Real SW went bust and ever since then, Brighter Places has tried, and not succeeded, to find another building company willing to take on the job of completing the flats and homes.

Every month that passes makes the job even harder – the costs of labour and materials in the building industry increased hugely because of Covid and then the war in Ukraine, and right across Bristol, huge developments of new housing have not even been started, despite being given planning permission, because profit margins have shrunk.

“It’s such a shame,” another neighbour on Luckwell Road said. “We look out on it every day and think ‘that could be someone’s home now who really needs one’. You read about the places the council has to put people who need a home, like the Imperial Apartments up in Hengrove, and think it’s a crying shame they are up there living with that, and this is down here not finished.

“It looks awful. In autumn and winter it’s the worst – the wind whips the sheeting and the covers that are sticking out of the roof and it’s a constant reminder it’s just stopped. I would love to see it finished, and love to see young people moving in there,” they added.

Traditionally, it is more profitable for the house-building industry to build straightforward developments of cul-de-sacs on greenfield sites, than it is to cram scores of densely-packed new flats on brownfield sites in existing areas of the city and, as costs rise, that’s exactly what’s happening: The fields of Filton, Emersons Green, Warmley and Charfield are alive with diggers and bricklayers, while the brownfield sites of Bedminster and St Philips have gone quiet.

When it comes to building ‘affordable’ homes the margins are even tighter, and developers are now telling the council that it simply can’t be done. One developer, Donard Homes, explained the current problem to council officers this week.

The developer has permission to build 221 flats at the other end of Bedminster overlooking the river, of which 66 are supposed to be ‘affordable’ through a housing association. Donard said it approached 50 different housing associations to come on board and use grants and investments to buy up those 66, but couldn’t find any takers.

Government pledges to get Britain building, including an announcement at the start of July that it was creating a new £39 billion ‘Social and Affordable Homes Programme’ hasn’t trickled down to stalled developments right now, like the Bart Spices site, or the Luckwell Road site.

What Brighter Places say

It’s been more than two years now since work stopped at Luckwell Road. Brighter Places’ 2022 investment from Scottish Widows hasn’t been enough so far to attract another building contractor.

Last year, when Bristol Live reported on the state of the development, the housing association objected to the site being described as having been ‘abandoned’ – it said it was trying to restart work, and hoped to have someone back on site by the start of 2025. That didn’t happen, but there is someone they are trying to strike a deal with now.

“Brighter Places is committed to playing its part in tackling the city’s housing shortage and Luckwell Road will deliver 67 much-needed affordable homes in this part of South Bristol,” a spokesperson for the housing association said.

“Unfortunately works on the site were put on hold when our previous contractor went into liquidation. Since then we have been working hard to secure a new contractor against the background of a very challenging time for the development and construction sector.

“Despite these challenges we are in the final stages of discussion with a new contractor and expect to make an announcement in the coming months,” she added.

Hope for part-built Bristol homes that are still a ‘dystopian shell’ two years on

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