Updated 20 September 2026
Contamination and cleanup
Knocking down the old use, cleaning the ground and keeping gas out of new homes all have to be paid for. The official 2015 cleanup cost handbook is still the reference. On similar sites elsewhere the bill has run from hundreds of thousands of pounds to more than twenty million on one plot.
What cleanup actually costs
A clean field assumes simple foundations. A leftover site has to price demolition, asbestos, dirty ground, ground gas, buried tanks, and sometimes old munitions on former military land. Those extra lines are the bill.
The HCA 2015 guidance remains the official cost handbook. Lichfields' national register work found that much recorded capacity is tied up in complex estate regeneration, is best suited to continued industrial use, is contaminated, or sits where values do not support remediation.
Why the East is exposed
The region's brownfield is not a belt of redundant Victorian factories next to a high-value city. It is a scatter of small yards, former railway land, coastal industry and town-centre leftovers. In Wisbech, Great Yarmouth or King's Lynn the sales values often cannot carry a heavy remediation bill. The site stays on the register. It does not become homes.
In Cambridge, St Albans or parts of Essex the values can carry the bill. Then the cost is paid by the buyer. That is the housing-cost page.
How to read the map
This step takes out sites with a hazardous-substances entry on the register, and sites whose name or notes record a former use that leaves ground to clean: gasworks, tips, refuse, sewage works, tanneries, foundries, smelters, chemical works, filling stations, scrapyards, breakers and the like.
Land still doing an industrial job — depots, docks, sidings, freight yards, working estates — is a different argument and comes out at its own step, still needed for jobs. Earlier versions of this site described both as one flag, which double-counted the reasoning and understated this step.
The hazardous field is thinly filled, which is why the keyword screen exists at all. It is a proxy in both directions: it will miss a clean-looking yard with buried tanks, and it will catch a site that has already been remediated. Treat a blank as unknown, not clean.
Questions people ask
- Does a blank contamination field mean the site is clean?
- No. Part 2A registers are patchy. Absence of a hazardous-substances flag in the national dataset is not a ground investigation.
- Where does this bite hardest in the East?
- Coastal Norfolk, Fenland and other lower-value markets where house prices cannot absorb large abnormals. High-value Cambridge and west Hertfordshire can sometimes carry the cost — and then the cost appears in the house price.
Where the numbers come from
- Guidance on dereliction, demolition and remediation costs — Homes and Communities Agency, 1 January 2015
- Banking on Brownfield — Lichfields, for the Land Promoters and Developers Federation, 1 June 2022. National register capacity equated to 31% of 15-year housing need, with less brownfield where demand is highest.
- Brownfield land dataset — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 20 September 2026. National aggregation of Part 1 registers. Points, not polygons. Coverage may be incomplete. Open Government Licence v3.0.