The planned Docklands Light Railway extension to Thamesmead Waterfront may need to go at least one stop further to make the planned new town commercially viable, the London Assembly has been told.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, approved plans for the rail link in November, and Transport for London hopes it will be ready by the early 2030s. Developers and politicians hope that Thamesmead will be declared a “new town” as a result of the extension, which would serve a new development of up to 15,000 homes.

Peabody, the housing association which runs Thamesmead, said it was “ready to go” to start building the development, while the London Assembly member James Small-Edwards said the extension was a “no brainer”

But Thomas Aubrey, a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, said the experience of building large projects in other major European cities suggested that the DLR extension may need to go further.

Cannon Retail Park
Cannon Retail Park on Central Way is earmarked as the site for Thamesmead’s DLR station Image: The Greenwich Wire

The line would only serve the Greenwich side of Thamesmead, terminating at what is now the Cannon Retail Park, while Bexley Council has long called for the route to be extended into its borough, to Belvedere.

“When you’re looking at the absolute costs of infrastructure, sometimes if you’re only doing a couple of stations in terms of an extension, you just don’t make it commercially viable,” Aubrey told the London Assembly planning and regeneration committee.

“So a lot of the larger scale projects you can see across Europe, they often have to go a bit bigger to make those commercially viable. If you’re looking at Thamesmead, actually extending it into Bexley may be actually necessary in order to make up that commercially viable proposition.”

Aubrey said it may not be possible to fund the new settlement through the income available to City Hall, such as capturing increases in land value, and that the returns from building two stations would be less than it would be for “five or six”.

“One way of trying to ensure that it does get funded and financed and get off the ground is that you actually have to have a larger bit of infrastructure,” he said

Transport for London has left options open for a further extension, but has said it has no plans to build beyond Thamesmead Waterfront. 

Artwork of new Thamesmead DLR line
The line will enable 15,000 new homes to be built in Thamesmead. Image: Transport for London

The academic said the crucial first step to ensuring a new town would be a success would be to ensure infrastructure – especially transport – is built before homes, as it would mean future residents would not be stranded.

He added: “We have a bad example in this country of not putting the infrastructure in first. But if the station is there and then the houses start getting built – put the infrastructure in first.”

Thamesmead’s first residents moved into their new homes in 1968, but plans for the Jubilee Line to run there were scrapped 11 years later and residents have had to rely on buses and rail services from Abbey Wood and Woolwich instead.  A DLR extension to Thamesmead has been mooted ever since the first trains ran on the Isle of Dogs in 1987.

DLR train
There have been calls for a DLR link to Thamesmead since the network opened nearly 40 years ago. Image: The Greenwich Wire

Kane Emerson, the head of housing research at the Yimby Alliance, said a historic failure of this sort was Skelmersdale, which was designated as a new town  in 1961.

Emerson said the settlement, which sits between Wigan, Liverpool and Preston, was intended to be a place for working-class people who were then living in slums to move to a habitable place within commuting distance of Liverpool.

However, the Beeching cuts closing the town’s train station, combined with the only major employer shutting down, meant residents had neither transport nor employment.

Lessons should be learned from Milton Keynes, Emerson suggested, which has a train station with rapid connections to London, as well as being commutable by car to the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, opening up opportunities for residents.

Kumail Jaffer is the Local Democracy Reporter covering London’s mayor and assembly. The Greenwich Wire is a partner in the Local Democracy Reporting Service, which is a BBC-funded initiative to ensure councils are covered properly in local media. Additional reporting by Darryl Chamberlain.