Billionaires' Row: London street full of derelict mansions 'has space for 300 homes'

It is one of Britain's most expensive streets, earning the moniker "Billionaires' Row". Yet The Bishops Avenue in north London also has mansions that have been left derelict for decades.

- Robert Booth

Now, some of Britain's leading architects have drawn up plans for building hundreds of affordable homes on the avenue. According to designs drawn up by firms including Mae, which last month won the Stirling prize, the UK's most prestigious architecture award, there is room for up to 300 homes on one site.

The proposals have provoked questions about how soaring land values, offshore property ownership and weak national and local planning powers have deepened England's housing crisis.

Last week, the Local Government Association said the number of unoccupied homes in England had risen by nearly 60,000 since 2018, to more than a million properties.

In the past decade, the housing waiting list in the London borough of Barnet, where The Bishops Avenue is located, has more than tripled to more than 3,000 households - part of a 1.2 million household queue for social housing across England that is at its highest level since 2015.