Central Activities Zone.
Central London’s core of national and international activity. Inside it, the policy balance tilts away from ordinary housing and towards the commercial, cultural and civic functions that make the centre work.
- Office and commercial intensification
- Culture, night-time and visitor uses
- Mixed-use schemes retaining commercial floorspace
- Specialist clusters — legal, medical, academic
- Net loss of office floorspace
- Residential-only redevelopment
- Loss of ground-floor active frontage
The London Plan directs that the strategic functions of the Central Activities Zone are given priority, and that development which would compromise them is resisted. Offices, culture, retail and specialist clusters are protected in ways they are not elsewhere.
Residential is not excluded, but it does not have the primacy it holds outside the zone: schemes converting or displacing strategic functions face a harder case, and mixed-use intensification is generally the expected response.
The question inside the zone is rarely whether you can build, but what mix will be accepted. A scheme that replaces commercial floorspace with housing needs a genuine case on viability and function, not just on housing need.
How schemes actually fare inside this designation — approval rates, appeal survival, which authorities apply it hardest — needs the designation joined to the decision record. That join isn’t built, so those figures aren’t published here. We won’t estimate them.
Inside the zone, check the use mix before the massing — that is what the policy tests.