Officers recommend approval of nine flats and a shop on the old Fir Trees pub site despite 124 objections. Redbridge Planning Committee decides on 16 September.

A scheme for nine flats above a new shop on Hermon Hill in South Woodford has drawn 124 objections, and council officers are recommending that it be approved anyway.

Redbridge’s Planning Committee decides the application at 7pm on Wednesday 16 September in the Council Chamber at Ilford Town Hall. The officer report published with the agenda recommends that permission be granted, subject to conditions.

The site is 142 Hermon Hill, about three miles north west of Ilford town centre. It is a former public house that has been a fish restaurant for years, with a car park covering roughly half the site.

What is proposed

The application, reference 1822/25, would keep a commercial unit at ground floor and build two new storeys of flats above it. The officer report sets out:

  • nine flats: four with three bedrooms, five with two bedrooms
  • an enlarged ground floor commercial unit of 334 square metres, up from the restaurant’s 285, which officers assess as a small supermarket
  • five car parking spaces, down from the 14 the site has now
  • 19 cycle parking spaces
  • a 61 square metre communal terrace for residents on the first floor

The building measures 475 square metres now. The scheme would take it to 1,190, an increase of 715 square metres. All of those are gross internal figures from the officer’s floorspace table.

Comparison of the existing building at 142 Hermon Hill with the proposed scheme
142 Hermon Hill as it stands and as proposed, from the officer's floorspace table. Graphic by Ilford Today.
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Why 124 people wrote in

The council posted two site notices in April and consulted neighbours. It received 124 objections and three comments in support.

The objections in the report cluster around a handful of themes:

  • Privacy. Homes in Alexandra Road back on to the site. Objectors say windows and balconies would be as close as 10 metres from bedrooms and living rooms, not the 18 metres normally sought.
  • The shop. Objectors say South Woodford already has six supermarkets, and name Gaks Wines and Abby Food and Wine as independents that would be hit.
  • The building. Several object to losing what the report describes as the former Fir Trees public house, which historic maps show on the site from at least 1862.
  • Traffic and air quality. Hermon Hill is an Air Quality Focus Area, and the whole borough is an Air Quality Management Area. Objectors expect rat running down Burton Road and Alexandra Road.
  • No affordable housing. None is proposed.

Officers answer the affordable housing point directly: the threshold in both the Local Plan and the London Plan is ten homes or more, and this scheme is nine. One objector made the same observation the other way round, noting that ten homes would also have made it a major application. Officers confirm nine are proposed.

On the pub, the council’s conservation officer agreed with the applicant’s heritage assessment that the building has been altered too much to be worth protecting. It was not included in Redbridge’s 2023 review of locally listed buildings, and officers conclude it is not a non-designated heritage asset, so its loss carries no heritage harm in planning terms.

There is an odd detail in the retail argument. Objectors point out that page 197 of the Local Plan defines the Key Retail Parade here as “126-140 Hermon Hill”, which would exclude No 142. Officers reply that this is a typographical error in the plan, and that the policies map and the council’s own mapping system put the parade at 126 to 164.

What the developer changed

The scheme has been amended twice, once after a pre-application drop-in and again during the application. A leaflet drop advertised a session at the site on 21 July 2025 between midday and 4pm. Twenty-five residents attended and three wrote in afterwards. Objectors later told the council that a weekday afternoon was the wrong time to hold it.

Changes made since include cutting parking from seven spaces to five, moving the residential entrance away from the shop entrance, adding more family-sized flats, raising the cill levels of second floor rear windows to 1.7 metres above the internal floor so occupants cannot look down into neighbouring gardens, and setting the first floor terrace back with privacy screens.

Officers do concede two failures. Flat 7 is 10% below the internal floorspace standard, and the communal terrace will not meet BRE guidance on daylight. They describe the harm from both as very limited.

The number that decides it

The reason officers give so much weight to nine homes is Redbridge’s building record. The report states that over a three-year period the borough delivered 1,204 homes against a target of 3,954, a Housing Delivery Test result of 30%.

That, the report says, “means that Redbridge has the second worst housing delivery across all 33 London Boroughs and the 12th worst in the country (291st place out of 302)”.

There is better news alongside it. The report records 1,431 homes completed in Redbridge in 2025/26, which it says exceeds any annual figure for over ten years. But it warns that the rate would have to be sustained for a considerable period for the council to avoid Housing Delivery Test sanctions. Our Redbridge planning page sets out how the borough got here.

Money attached to the scheme

If permission is granted, two payments follow. The applicant has provided a unilateral undertaking to pay £2,529.63 towards managing recreational pressure on Epping Forest, which is a Special Area of Conservation. The scheme is also liable for the Community Infrastructure Levy, charged at £198.29 per square metre as of January 2026, made up of £125.56 for Redbridge and £72.73 for the Greater London Authority.

What it means for you

If you live near the site, the condition to read is number 15. It requires a scheme to be approved that excludes future residents of the flats from any current or future local parking permit scheme. That is the council’s answer to the parking objections, and it binds the new flats, not the existing streets. Condition 16 restricts the ground floor unit to Class E uses including shops, food and drink, professional services, medical services and a day nursery, and nothing else without a fresh permission.

If you want to speak at the meeting, the council asks you to contact the Committee Support Officer no later than 5pm on the working day before, which is Tuesday 15 September. Up to three people are allowed to speak on an application, with the applicant or agent given a right of reply. The contact named on the agenda is Margaret Herring, on 020 8708 2159. The committee is chaired by Councillor G. Williams and has eleven members. Meetings are held in public and may be filmed or recorded by anyone present.

A recommendation is not a decision. Committees do refuse schemes their officers support, and the report itself asks members to authorise the Director of Planning and Building Control to grant permission, with the exact terms of the conditions delegated to the director afterwards.

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