Ship Street Folkestone: Old Gasworks Still Looking For A Buyer While Affordable Homes Remain On Paper
shepwayvox
Still for sale. Still fenced off. Still no affordable homes.
Ship Street is one of those Folkestone promises that’s been round the houses without building any. The live sales page still calls it a“Housing led development opportunity”, still lists it as freehold, still says the site is 1.56 hectares / 3.855 acres, and still says an outline application has been submitted for up to 135 units. The “Enquire Now” button is still there too, bright as brass, like a bell nobody’s quite rung hard enough.
And there’s the rub: FHDC says the proposal is for up to 135 homes, “22% of which would be affordable”. At full tilt, that’s roughly 30 affordable homes. But they’re not homes yet. They’re not keys in anyone’s hand. They’re not rent accounts, washing lines, stairgates, or a kettle on in a kitchen. They’re still conditional words on a council webpage: “up to”, “would be”, “being considered”. For families on the housing list, that’s not a roof; it’s a rain cheque.
Cabinet set the disposal hare running on 22 January 2025, when officers sought authority to market the site, dispose of it, and agree commercial terms while seeking best value. That was the council saying: we’ve got the plot, now we need the market to take the spade.
The reason wasn’t pretty. The Cabinet report says Ship Street had “complex issues around the site viability”, and the council’s previous planning strategy was ditched after work on viability and value engineering. It’s council-speak, yes, but the meaning is plain enough: the old gasworks wasn’t a neat little building plot; it was a pig of a site, and developers weren’t queuing round the block to take it on.
Then comes the dirt under the fingernails.
FHDC’s own report says the former owner had carried out some remediation, but Ship Street “requires further remediation” before it is suitable for housing. It also identifies “residual gasworks infrastructure and soil and groundwater contamination”, plus major retaining walls and level changes. That’s not a minor snag list. That’s the old gasworks past coming back like a bad smell through the floorboards.
The estate agent’s page puts a softer tie on the same problem. It says the site was formerly occupied by a gasworks, operations ceased in 1956, gasworks structures came down between 1960 and 1964, the remaining gasholders were removed in 2001, and large-scale remediation happened between 2009 and 2011. Then, almost casually, it adds that Brownfield Land Release Fund money is available for “further remediation and to enable construction on-site”. In other words: yes, it was cleaned before, but no, the job still isn’t done.
The ShepwayVox Team has already taken a torch to the contamination issue. Its January 2026 piece, based on Arup’s Land Contamination Report and Health Impact Assessment, says asbestos fragments were detected in about 40% of samples tested, and says Arup identified “data gaps” needing further investigation. That isn’t tittle-tattle. That’s exactly the sort of thing residents deserve to see nailed down before anyone starts talking breezily about new homes, green links and pocket parks.
The planning-condition language is hardly soothing either: it talks about surveying the “extent, scale and nature of contamination”, assessing risks to human health, property, adjoining land, waters, ecological systems and archaeology, and then requiring a remediation scheme before development if the investigation shows it’s needed. That’s planning law in steel toe-caps: find it, measure it, clean it, prove it.
Which is why the affordable homes line needs treating carefully.
Cllr Connor McConville (pictured) said the site would deliver “much-needed homes” and called the planning submission “a significant step forward” for a brownfield site largely derelict for more than 50 years. Fair enough. But a step forward isn’t a staircase. Ship Street can’t be sold to the public as if those affordable homes are already halfway up the walls. Right now they’re still in the paperwork, and paperwork doesn’t house anybody.
Biggins Wood is the warning label stuck to the tin.
The ShepwayVox Team reported that Biggins Wood (Cheriton) was bought by the council in December 2016 for £1.5m and sold eight years later for £4,518,000. FHDC’s own release says it was sold to Wickhambreaux Developments Ltd in early 2025, with Orbit Homes and Chartway due to build 77 homes for social rent and shared ownership. That’s the point: Biggins Wood eventually moved, yes, but it took the scenic route, stopped for chips, missed the last bus, and left affordable homes waiting for years.
Ship Street has the same whiff of municipal patience about it: awkward land, contamination, public money, consultants, viability problems, marketing, and a developer still needed to turn the promise into bricks. The live particulars say the site benefits from a Brownfield Land Release Fund grant for remediation, while the Cabinet report says the council’s overall approach is to “derisk the site” so it becomes viable to the market. That’s not regeneration galloping over the hill; that’s regeneration being coaxed along with a carrot, a spreadsheet and taxpayers’ cash.
There’s money tied to the mast as well. The Cabinet report says the agreed project budget was £695,000, Homes England grants took it to £770,000 excluding the site purchase, and the £2.5m Brownfield Land Release Fund grant was meant to support remediation and housing release. It also warned there was a risk the grant would need to be paid back if the scheme didn’t progress. That’s not a footnote; that’s a klaxon in the cupboard.
So the questions are simple, and they don’t need a glossy CGI to answer them.
Ship Street remains open to buyers, so the questions don’t soften; they get sharper. How many serious bids have come in? Has FHDC got a preferred bidder, or is the site still sitting in the market’s window like a difficult old suit nobody’s quite ready to buy? What price does the council expect for the land? Has the £2.5m Brownfield Land Release Fund deadline been met, extended, or missed? What contamination risk still sits beneath the old gasworks site? What legally protects the promised 22% affordable housing if a future developer says, as developers so often do, that the sums don’t stack up? And when will the “up to 135 homes” stop being a sales line in a brochure and start becoming front doors, rent levels, tenancies and keys in local people’s hands?
For now, Ship Street remains a hard old lump of Folkestone history: part eyesore, part liability, part opportunity, part gamble. The council may yet pull it off. Biggins Wood shows these awkward plots can eventually shift. But Biggins Wood also shows the public shouldn’t clap too early, because “sold”, “marketed”, “remediated”, “approved” and “built” are very different beasts.
