Farm Close, Dagenham

Southern Housing is one of the largest housing providers in the UK with around 80,000 homes across London, the South East, the Isle of Wight and the Midlands, giving over 167,000 people somewhere affordable to call their own.

Our vision is to create and support communities where everyone has a safe home in a place where they’re proud to live.

We’re rebuilding the fire damaged homes owned by Southern Housing

In July 2022 wildfires destroyed several homes on Rookery Farm Estate, including 10 homes in Farm Close and two in Stratford Close. Six of these homes are owned by Southern Housing. Residents of these fire damaged homes have been permanently rehoused nearby.

In autumn 2023 we appointed Alpine Construction to demolish the fire damaged homes and secure the area surrounding the site in Farm Close. This work began in November 2023 and is now complete.

We've now started to rebuild 9 Stratford Close. We expect to complete this building work at the beginning of 2025.

Farm Close homes

Finding a solution for Farm Close has been complex due to the number of different owners whose homes were affected by the fire. Each private owner has their own planning approval and will be working to a different timescale for rebuilding their home.

We explored regeneration options for Farm Close and found that replacing the demolished homes as they were, but to modern standards was the best solution in this case. Due to the nature of home ownership across Rookery Farm Estate, we have no further plans to regenerate in the area.

Several of our homes attach to privately owned properties and are subject to party wall agreements, which can take time to draw up. Once we've appointed a design team to prepare the planning application, we'll have a clearer indication of timescales for building the replacement homes in Farm Close.

If you have any questions about the rebuilding of the Farm Close homes, please add them to Questions and responses below or email us at farm.close@southernhousing.org.uk. We'll use your questions to update our Frequently Asked Questions, which can be found on the right hand side (or scroll down if using a hand-held device).

We'll add more information as it becomes available and in response to enquiries about the rebuild.

Other issues relating to Rookery Farm Estate

This website is managed by the Regeneration and Strategic Projects team to communicate information about the replacement of fire damaged homes in Farm Close.

For any other queries about the homes we manage on Rookery Farm Estate, you may find the the following contacts useful.

If you're a Southern Housing resident you can log in to our portal to check your account and make payments, book and manage repairs, update your tenancy information, access online services and use our contact form.

Alternatively, you can report new repairs at smsnewrepairs@shgroup.org.uk or call 0300 303 1773.

Our future investment works are informed by the data from our home condition survey programme. Around 65% of our homes within the Rookery Farm estate have been surveyed in the past five years. To find out more about this, see our letter dated 11 June 2024 in Communications (down right hand side or below if using a hand-held device), or contact homeconditionsurveyteam@southernhousing.org.uk

We've included some Frequently Asked Questions in our FAQs section down the right hand side of this page (or below if using a hand held device).

British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) homes

The semi-detached homes across the Rookery Farm Estate are British Iron and Steel Federation (BISF) houses. These are a type of steel-framed house. They were designed to be quick to construct to address the shortage of housing after World War II. The vast majority of BISF houses were built as two-storey semi-detached pairs.

The replacement homes will be built to a similar design that complies with modern standards (in terms of size, safety and efficiency).