I live in New Barnet, on the northern edge of London. My house—which in this map from around 1897 still didn’t exist—was built on land purchased by the railway company who constructed the line from Moorgate to Welwyn so that they could make money from the uplift in value achieved by turning the rural hamlet into a commuter town.
Jump forward to today, and the area looks like a typical suburban neighbourhood. There’s a slightly down-at-heel high street, dominated by a large supermarket built in the 1970s with its large surface car park beside the station. The more affluent west side of the tracks is characterised by large villas and several churches of various ages and denominations; the eastern streets largely Victorian terraces, giving way to interwar housing estates along the boundary with Enfield, built when the Piccadilly Line was extended to Cockfosters in the 1930s.
Today, the area immediately to the east of the station achieves a density of around 30 dwellings per hectare (dph). Not bad by suburban standards, but well below the target identified by the government in its draft National Planning Policy Framework, published in December 2025.
Around 70% of London’s suburbs fall below the 40dph threhold. Suburban stations are more widely spaced, extending outward from the centre along the railway corridors of the nineteenth century and the metroland Underground routes of the early twentieth.
The NPPF talks explicitly about stations as an opportunity for intensification, so excluding those areas beyond 800m (roughly 10 minutes’ walk) reveals the better-connected neighbourhoods. Even within this far smaller zone, only 40% exceeds the 40dph threshold.
“Minimum densities for residential development proposals are appropriate in locations which provide high levels of connectivity to jobs and services. Where development proposals for housing or mixed-use schemes are within reasonable walking distance of a railway station, a density of at least 40 dwellings per hectare should be achieved within the net developable area of the site, or 50 dwellings per hectare where the station or stop is defined as ‘well-connected’.”
Draft National Planning Policy Framework, December 2024. “Well-connected” rail stations and underground, tram and light rail stops are those in a top 60 Travel to Work Area located partially or fully within England by Gross Value Added (GVA) and which, in the normal weekday timetable, are served (or have a reasonable prospect of being served due to planned upgrades or through agreement with the rail operator) throughout the daytime by four trains or trams per hour overall, or two trains or trams per hour in any one direction.
Across London, there’s an area of more than 500 sqkm that’s within 800m of a station, 60% of which falls below the proposed NPPF density of 40dph. The median density is well below this, too, at just 32 dph (roughly what New Barnet achieves). If we were to simply uplift every part of low-density London to this level through a programme of suburban intensification, it would yield 1.23m homes.
Using the sampling methodology described above, most of London sits within the 20-30 dph band:
There are some very limited clusters of density around the city; parts of Canary Wharf exceed 150dph since residential towers started to pop up, and the mansion blocks of Maida Vale get close to this too, but 92% of the city’s housing areas fall below 80dph. For comparison, the urban core of Paris—that zone inside the Boulevard Périphérique—achieves around 52dph over a much larger area.
Obviously these figures vary from borough to borough. Hillingdon, on the north west extremity of the city, is the least dense, with fully 99% of its residential areas failing to meet the 40dph target. The most consistently dense borough overall is the central London borough of Islington, with over 94% of its residential areas above it.
Raising the density of housing around London’s suburban stations even by a small amount could deliver a very large number of new homes. Simply raising the city’s well-connected suburban areas by 25% would delivery some 500,000 homes; and if we set the minimum to the government’s target of 40dph, this figure would rise to 545,000.
When considered at the city-wide scale, these figures feel abstract. What does such an increase in density actually look like? Let’s consider a real-world example.
This video shows how a typical suburban neighbourhood, close to a railway station, could go from a density of less than 10dph to 40dph in just a decade.
At first glance this looks like a transformation, but in reality only 11 of the existing 52 houses would be replaced, and with the right policies in place, there would be no loss of family homes; in fact, in this example, there would be significantly more.
Even so, such a significant increase in density within a relatively small area would be likely to come up against huge political resistance, as we saw when a similarly permissive policy was introduced in Croydon. But this level of development would be impossible to deliver given the paucity of developers, contractors and trades within the market. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t at least give it a go.