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Richard Brown: Will London be the government’s place of refuge from its ‘asylum hotels’ problem?

The capital has been accommodating more and more claimants and the Epping ruling could see that trend grow stronger
Richard Brown

At the time of writing, no London borough has formally announced plans to challenge asylum seekers being housed in hotels. And while there have been recent protests at hotels in Canary Wharf and Islington, protestors objecting to “asylum hotels” in the capital have often been outnumbered by counter-protestors.

This might seem typical of a city characterised by diversity, one which has welcomed people fleeing persecution through the ages – from Huguenots, to Jews, to Ugandan Asians, to Vietnamese “boat people”. London is already doing its bit, and more besides, in accommodating asylum seekers. But any shift in national policy in response to this week’s Epping court ruling could have big impacts.

According to a Migration Observatory briefing issued last week, the number of asylum seekers in London grew more than fourfold between 2018 and 2024. Its share of the UK total rose from nine to 19 per cent, part of a broader shift to southern England from the rest of the UK. Any connection to the distribution of marginal seats may be coincidental.

Use of hotels and other short-term “contingency accommodation” (rather than “dispersal accommodation”, including rented houses and flats) increased from five per cent to 45 per cent of asylum seekers from 2019 to 2023, but has fallen back since then, to 30 per cent at the end of last year. The big exception is London, where hotels still housed approximately 12,000 asylum seekers, 60 per cent of the city’s total, in early 2025.

Both the total number of asylum seekers and the proportion housed in hotels are highest in Hillingdon and Hounslow. They are the London boroughs closest to Heathrow Airport, one of the UK’s most important ports of entry (though less popular than the Kentish coastline as a location for performative blimpism by the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe). These boroughs are two of the six in the UK where the number of asylum seekers housed locally is higher than the maximum specified in national agreements.

So London, as ever, is something of an outlier. Meanwhile the government is clearly in a fix. It has pledged to phase out the use of hotels to house asylum seekers and may be forced to speed up the process in response to court cases and protests. What part is London likely to play in their thinking?

The government could decide that “London can take it”, and load more asylum seekers into the city. This would encourage those who want trouble to stir it up, not helped by the fact that the Epping court judgement took (cautious) account of local protests. On the other hand, the move away from hotels could be accelerated, raising questions of where 12,000 temporary Londoners are to live.

The problem is that until claims are processed housing asylum seekers really is a zero-sum exercise. If they are not accommodated in hotels, where do they go? Military camps have been tried but proved controversial, as did the now-abandoned Bibby Stockholm barge. Aside from raising questions about their humanity or lack of it, such proposals are complex to put into effect – camps need to be fitted out and barges need to be procured. There are few obvious quick fixes.

Outside London and the wider south, the last two years have seen a shift away from hotels towards longer-term “dispersal accommodation”, often private rented sectors homes in multiple occupation (HMOs). But these are in short supply in London. Asylum seekers would be lining up alongside homeless families, who number 70,000 (half of the English total) in the capital. It is also notable that some local authorities (outside the south east) are already reported to be tightening controls on using HMOs in this way.

So the risk is that local authorities, already struggling with the costs of homelessness, would be left to support any asylum seekers evicted from hotel accommodation. Hillingdon Council has already written to MPs to protest about the Home Office planning to “evict 2,300 asylum seekers into the borough without secured accommodation or support” and has claimed that supporting asylum seekers is adding £5 million a year to already-stretched budgets. The BBC has reported a rise in rough sleeping and a spread of tented encampments in the borough, and Hillingdon is now reported to be reviewing the Epping decision.

London has the capacity to welcome and absorb thousands of people, and it does so, year after year. I do not think the capital is about to erupt in protest. But there is a question of how much the nation asks of it. London is the economic engine and the fiscal float for the UK. Should its boroughs also be expected to support an ever-growing share of people in urgent housing need, while funding is diverted to other parts of the country?

Follow Richard Brown on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Hillingdon Council, housing, immigration, refugees

Patrick Hess: The Right’s attacks on London misrepresent reality

Reform and the Conservatives have been portraying the capital in ways unrecognisable to Londoners and ill-supported by facts
Patrick Hess

I didn’t know I had it so bad. For all of my 30 years living in London, I have thought my home city to be, while flawed and having been to some extent misgoverned over the years, a pretty good one. Yet listening to some recent the commentary about the city from the right-of-centre you would think I am practically living in Third World conditions.

There has been an increasingly relentless campaign waged from the British political Right against London. The pundits and politicians enlisted on this project, who often moan about political opponents “talking the country down”, appear determined to portray the nation’s capital as some kind of crime-ridden modern Gotham City. Which, as I say, is news to those of us who have lived here for all or most of our lives.

In a press conference the other week to launch his Britain is Lawless campaign, Nigel Farage was asked by a Sky News journalist whether, in doing this he was, in fact, stoking fear to gain political traction. Farage responded that people were already afraid, because of the issues of crime he is raising. “I dare you to walk through the West End of London after nine o-clock of an evening wearing jewellery,” he replied old. “You wouldn’t do it. You know I’m right, you wouldn’t do it”.

The interaction was appropriately ridiculed. If Farage wanted to choose an example of an area of London to portray as a lawless, gang-controlled no-go zone, he could have done better than the West End, which is literally bustling with people – many daring to don their jewellery and even openly use their smartphones – until the early hours of the morning on most nights. Perhaps Farage wouldn’t dare venture into this supposed warzone, but thousands of ostensibly reckless hotheads do.

Another prominent voice in this anti-London campaign is the heterodox professor-come-GB News pundit Matt Goodwin. In June, Goodwin posted on X/Twitter a long list of grievances he apparently experienced on a visit to London, which included paying “nearly £8 for a pint”, buying a tin of instant coffee with a security tag on it, and being asked three times for money by homeless people. Some of which I can sympathise with. But if the professor happened to notice anything remotely nice about the capital on his day trip, he didn’t mention it.

In an essay posted on his Substack shortly after this X post, entitled “London is so over”, Goodwin expanded on his grievances about the capital. In it, he complains of “mass, uncontrolled migration”, high rents and house prices, endemic crime and demographic change, concluding that “a toxic cocktail of demographic change, mass migration and economic stagnation push our once-great city into managed decline and make it completely unrecognizable”. What I find unrecognisable is his portrayal of London.

Then there is the failed Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, whose quest to stay relevant has included releasing footage of himself accosting fare-dodgers on the Tube. During his vigilante video, Jenrick similarly bemoaned the “bike theft, shoplifting, drugs in town centres, weird Turkish barbershops”.

As with much punditry and hyperbole, there are some grains of truth in this highly partial characterisation of London as an ungovernable hot-bed of crime. So, leaving aside the Turkish barbers – what exactly these poor guys are being charged with other than generic “weirdness”? I can’t quiet tell – did Jenrick have a point?

Some categories of crime, covering things such as phone-snatching and shoplifting have indeed risen for a period, and figures for knife crime and violent crime have gone up since dipping during the pandemic. However, the most recent Met figures have shown month-on-month reductions in theft from the person, robbery and knife crime compared with 2024. The murder rate is slightly down since the pandemic to approximately the same level as ten years ago. Admittedly, it is too high. Yet it is half what it was in 2003.

Other stats show that increases in certain crimes over the past decade have not been unique to London, where trends have been roughly in line with an overall increases in crime in England and Wales as a whole, while the Metropolitan Police area has a lower crime rate per 1,000 population than other forces in the country, like Merseyside, West Yorkshire, or Greater Manchester.

The narrative of London’s decline and ghettoisation also ignores how much of the city has been lifted up by gentrification. A host of formerly downtrodden areas, like King’s Cross, Spitalfields, Elephant and Castle, Stoke Newington and Peckham, have been transformed into flourishing visitor destinations over the last 20 years, replete with food markets, hipster coffee shops and pubs serving craft beer. It is partly why rents have shot up in such areas, and why the angry Goodwin had to pay £8 for a pint. Some of the economics that come with gentrification are of course not ideal. But there are trade-offs with such things, and on balance, I can’t say I regret them.

The proof is also there in the tourists, who, not getting the memo about London’s “managed decline”, continue to create footfall here. London was named the best destination in the world in the 2025 Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice Awards. A friend of mine from Brazil utterly adores the city – so much so that she comes back every few years to spend time here. When I’m abroad, I often hear similarly positive impressions of London made on non-Brits, who have been charmed by some specific part of the city. I have yet to meet a tourist who has visited London and said they hated it.

Nor, frankly, have I met many Londoners who believe this. The distortion of London as a degenerating hellscape seems to be a peculiarly British one, pushed by those living in the UK, but outside London itself. Of course, like any city-dweller, we Londoners moan about our city plenty – it would be un-British not to.

We moan about the gridlock, the crammed Central line, the £5 croissants and £1,500-a-month rooms in shared flats. But most of us are careful not to misrepresent the broader picture. London is flawed and has serious issues that need serious attention. But, on balance, it’s a great city and far nicer than it used to be. London-haters can avoid it if they want – it’s their loss.

Patrick Hess is a London-based writer who covers politics, culture and international relations.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: crime, immigration, Nigel Farage

John Vane: Whiteleys revisited

It was one of London's first and most prestigious department stores and has a rather colourful history
John Vane

In an interview he gave at the time, Michael Caine, a man from Rotherhithe, complained about the cold in Finland, where much of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain was shot. A bit of it, though, was made on location in London, including in Whiteleys department store on Queensway. What was Caine’s famous anti-hero character, Harry Palmer, doing in this deluxe Bayswater emporium? Why did he have a Thermos flask with him?

The flask contained six eggs with a built-in deadly virus, stolen from the Ministry of Defence’s top secret research facility at Porton Down. But when asked to take the flask to Helsinki, the former MI5 agent turned private detective didn’t know that. Curious, he goes to Whiteleys to make use of its shoe-fitting fluoroscope, or Pedoscope, an x-ray machine for determining the shoe sizes of customers.

Shoving the Thermos where feet were meant to go, Palmer detects the outlines of its contents. The flask and the eggs make brief appearances around the one-minute mark in the trailer below.

This landmark moment in cinema history is brought to your attention for two deeply self-indulgent reasons: one, because I’m a fan of Harry Palmer, especially in The Ipcress File (1965), which is a proper London movie that never gets old; two, I either can or cannot remember seeing, and maybe even using, the Whiteleys fluoroscope when I had occasion to hang out in the store a few times something like 45 years ago, either before or after pigging out at the nearby Standard Indian restaurant.

It’s all so tantalising. So when I happen to be in Queensway, as I happened to be the other day, I make a point of staring at the magisterial Whiteleys building and trying to remember. You might be more interested to know that it opened for business in 1911, and that by then the business’s creator, William Whiteley, was dead. Four years earlier, he had been shot in his previous store, round the corner in Westbourne Grove, by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son.

It was a terrible end to an exceptional life. Whiteley was born in a Yorkshire village in 1831, the son of a successful corn dealer who couldn’t be bothered to bring him up, letting an uncle do that instead. Whiteley left school at 14, thinking he might become a jockey or a vet, and paid his first visit to London to see the 1851 Great Exhibition.

There was no looking back. Convinced he could create a retail equivalent of the Crystal Palace (at that time in Hyde Park), he moved the capital and duly founded one of London’s first department stores, buying a row of shops on Westbourne Grove from 1863 and surviving a succession of fires in them before meeting his violent end. The Whiteleys Harry Palmer popped into 56 years later was instigated by the company’s board.

The building has appeared in other movies, too: Bette Davies did her shopping there in Connecting Rooms (1970) and it makes brief appearances in Love Actually and Closer. It shut in 2018 after some years of decline and is now undergoing an ambitious mixed-use revamp. A polite young man at the entrance wearing a uniform allowed me to take the photo of the atrium. I didn’t ask him if he knew about the Pedoscope.

Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE.

Categories: John Vane's London Stories
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Christabel Cooper: If fewer ‘White British’ means a nation in decline, why is London so successful?

Using the capital to paint apocalyptic visions conveniently ignores its contentment with diversity and its economic vitality
Christabel Cooper

In the last few weeks, several high-profile commentators have expressed apocalyptic concerns about the fall in the percentage of “White British” people in the UK. In the Daily Telegraph, Professor Matt Goodwin claimed “the white British will become a minority group in the UK by the year 2063”. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien wrote (also in the Telegraph) that “Britain is heading for utter oblivion”, in part because of high migration and consequent rapid demographic change.

They are fond of citing startling statistics from London to back up their dystopian claims. O’Brien, for example, notes that in Greater London, only a third of private renters are White British. In the Standard, David Goodhart stated that “just over one in five school children are white British”.

What is curious about this is that if you are going to argue that a lack of “White British” people is destroying Britain, pointing to London, the region of the UK which is both the richest and the most tolerant part of the country, is a pretty odd choice.

Take productivity. London remains the most economically productive region in the UK. In 2023, output per hour in the capital was 28.5 per cent higher than the UK average and significantly above every other part of the country. Were ethnic diversity a drag on economic output, this situation would be difficult to explain.

In fact, many of the city’s key sectors – from finance, to tech, to hospitality – are powered by migrant labour. A 2017 PwC report estimated that each migrant worker contributes an additional £46,000 in Gross Value Added to London’s economy per year. With about 1.8 million non-UK-born workers, this translates into around £83 billion annually – around 22 per cent of the city’s economic output.

Education tells a similar story. Inner London schools, notorious for low achievement and disorder in the 1980s, are now among the best-performing in the country. This turnaround occurred as the city’s schools became increasingly ethnically diverse. Today, school students in London, many of them from low-income or immigrant backgrounds, routinely outperform their peers elsewhere.

Researchers point to targeted investment (such as the London Challenge) and high-quality leadership, but also the ambitions of immigrant families, which place a strong emphasis on education. Rather than pulling down standards, demographic change appears to have helped raise them.

Although the city has large ethnic minority populations that could form concentrated enclaves, London is less racially segregated than any major US city and not especially segregated by UK standards either, according to analysis by John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times. Surveys show that Londoners – crucially including white Londoners – are more positive about immigration and multiculturalism than residents of less diverse areas. This aligns with social science research showing that proximity to diversity leads to familiarity and tolerance. A 2014 Demos study found that White British people who live in diverse areas are less opposed to immigration and less supportive of far-right parties.

Of course, none of this is to say that London is without problems. High levels of migration have contributed to London’s rising population and therefore become a factor in its housing supply problems and pressures on public services, with many poorer migrant families having high levels of need. However, perceptions that migrants are routinely prioritised over longer-established residents for social housing are mistaken, with borough allocations based on need within a legal framework that encourages a requirement for recipients having been residents for at least two years.

London has not been immune from racially divisive politics: in 2006, the British National Party won 12 council seats in Barking & Dagenham and although they were ousted four years later, some parts of Outer London could be fertile ground for Reform UK in next year’s borough elections. The politics of Tower Hamlets provide another cautionary tale. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as the borough’s Mayor in 2022 due largely to the continuing support of fellow local Bangladeshi Londoners, despite having served a five-year ban on seeking office after an election court found him to have previously benefited from “corrupt and illegal practices”.

Still, the idea that the rest of the country is about to follow London’s demographic trajectory – and plunge into dramatic social decline as a result – does not hold up. London is a clear outlier: in 2023 around 41 per cent of its residents were born outside the UK, compared to just 13 per cent across England. Goodwin’s claim that the “White British” are on the verge of becoming a minority relies on a particularly narrow and contentious definition – one that excludes anyone with one foreign-born parent. By that logic, both King Charles and Winston Churchill would not count as “White British.”

The more sober reality is that the UK is a patchwork of cities with large migrant populations and varied ethnic backgrounds, which will continue to exist alongside less diverse areas. Meanwhile, the insistence that London is a kind of multicultural hellscape is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality. In his Standard piece, Goodhart claimed: “I heard nobody saying ‘rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London’.” But maybe more people should be looking at London. The capital has shown that diversity and change does not have to mean decline. Instead, it can  mean adaptation, ambition and success.

Christabel Cooper is Director of Research at Labour Together. Follow her on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE. Photo: Londoners enjoying Granary Square, King’s Cross,

Categories: Comment
Tags: demographics, economy, education

Stephanie Pollitt: The building safety process is blocking homes in London. That has to change

New regulations introduced after the Grenfell disaster aren't being applied quickly or efficiently, making the capital's housing crisis worse
Stephanie Pollitt

Even those of us already familiar with the extent of London’s housing crisis have been shocked by figures released in recent weeks highlighting the scale of the challenge.

Fewer than 1,000 new homes were registered in the capital in three months to June according to the National House Building Council, down by more than half on the same period last year. That follows no new housing starts taking place in 23 out of 32 London boroughs in the first quarter of 2025.

These figures follow the setting of a revised 88,000 new homes a year target for London by central government. Ministers have rightly prioritised planning reform and improved funding for affordable homes, but their vital interventions are yet to translate into shovels getting into the ground more quickly.

That is because although revamped legislation and direct funding are a must for accelerating housebuilding, a creaking regulatory system that is causing significant delays and confusion is another key issue holding back developers.

The Building Safety Regulator was established in 2022 following the Grenfell tragedy, a move wholeheartedly welcomed by the industry. No developer wants to build an unsafe home. It quickly established a “gateway” approval process for any residential project more than 18 metres or seven storeys high, consisting of three stages. The first relates to obtaining planning consent, the second to starting work on site, and the third to approving full completion.

Unfortunately, this approach rapidly ran into several problems which have been allowed to fester, meaning the gateway process is now one of the biggest blockers of new development across the city.

The absence of fully rubber-stamped guidance around what information homebuilders must provide to make it through the process has been a problem from day one. The result has been many applications for approval being delayed way beyond the BSR’s self-imposed 12-week deadline for decisions – stretching into months and even years – or simply rejected.

The BSR says delays have been caused by poor quality applications, but developers highlight the lack of formal guidance about how to navigate this arcane process. The Construction Leadership Council has now stepped-in to provide guidance in this area with input from the BSR. Their efforts are very welcome but will take time to bed in.

Another big difficulty is insufficient provision of resources. Even if all applications received by the BSR were of the standard it is seeking, the regulator lacks the capacity to turn around large volumes of complex approval requests efficiently. Before an application is considered, the BSR assembles a unique “multi-disciplinary team” to assess it. Just bringing together one of those teams, which draw on external building, fire and safety experts, can take weeks. As such, delays to the decision-making process have been inevitable.

The government has now promised to increase funding for the BSR, shake up its leadership and bolster in-house expertise. It’s another welcome move, but will take time to yield results. And time is of the essence: close to 30,000 homes are currently stuck at the second stage of the gateway process.

That logjam is a particular concern for the capital, where building at density is the only way to solve our housing crisis. The risk, already in part reality, is that developers that would have delivered 18 metre or above projects decide not to do so, further slowing down the supply of desperately needed homes. Urgent action is needed now. That’s why we at BusinessLDN are calling for a three-step process to accelerate decision-making and housing delivery.

The first relates to engagement, specifically prior to applications formally entering the gateway process. To date, the BSR has not entered into conversations with developers prior to submissions, an approach that has served to widen an existing information gap. That needs to change.

The second centres on getting shovels in the ground. With so many homes stuck in the works there’s a clear case for allowing foundations to be laid at sites whilst non-crucial elements of delivery plans are finalised. The BSR must take a pragmatic approach and allow more applications to be “approved with requirements”, ensuring that non-essential design aspects do not stand in the way of progress.

Thirdly, the legislation that sits behind the BSR, and the way it is being interpreted, is not fit for purpose. A thorough review of the Building Safety Act should be undertaken, potentially with a view to mandating improved engagement by the BSR, establishing greater scrutiny of turnaround times for applications, or expanding its remit to include housing delivery.

Developers across London stand ready to provide thousands of new homes that meet the highest safety standards. Only if the BSR’s gateways are unlocked can they can deliver.

Stephanie Pollitt is programme director for housing at BusinessLDN. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: BusinessLDN, Grenfell Tower, housing

Earls Court Special: The Story So Far

A compilation of in-depth coverage of ambitious plans to renew a famously wondrous part of London, including a new long read
Dave Hill

I’ve been writing about attempts to redevelop the heart of the Earl’s Court area since 2009. Like any large project of that kind, it was never going to happen quickly. But it has taken a very long time for truly constructive progress to be made.

The main achievements of the first set of plans for transforming the famous and distinctive inner west London neighbourhood were to provoke local opposition to them and to demolish the Earls Court Exhibition Centre complex that had defined the neighbourhood’s character for decades, without building anything in its place.

So when a different developer came on the scene, the Earls Court Development Company, it was encouraging to learn that it was taking a very different approach – not only to the use it wished to make of the land, but also to the people who lived near it and to the area’s remarkable history.

My continuing interest has been expressed in a variety of forms and, with a new vision for Earl’s Court’s future set to reach a crucial stage in the planning process later this year, this article pulls together the most substantial recent examples.

The very latest has been to embark on writing what I hope is a pretty definitive account of the evolution of the current plans, put together in collaboration with the developer’s chief executive, Rob Heasman. The first instalment of that account, entitled Earls Court: The Story So Far, has now been published. I’m pleased to reproduce the first section of it below:

In 2020, at the end of the first year of the pandemic, the Earls Court Development Company opened its office next door to one of London’s most sadly abandoned spaces.

For well over a century, the site in question had been the core of one of London’s most beguiling neighbourhoods, a place of imagination, excitement and entertainment, known across the globe.

Until as recently as 2014 it had been home to one of the world’s most famous exhibition centres, a London landmark that drew entrepreneurs, innovators and visitors from far and wide.

But now it was a levelled domain of ghosts. How could it be brought back to life?

For chief executive Rob Heasman, envisaging a new tomorrow for this forlorn part of Earls Court meant marshalling his and his team’s powers of imagination.

London, still absorbing the impacts of Brexit, had been hit first and hardest by Covid-19. From the start, the pandemic had damaged its economy, wreaked havoc on its cultural venues and institutions, underlined the importance of green space and green technology, and shone a sobering light on health, wealth and housing inequalities across the city.

Any major new development scheme in London would need to be alive to this new chapter in the capital’s history – a chapter only just beginning to unfold.

What would planners, investors, employers, workers, visitors and local communities be looking for that they hadn’t been looking for before? What would London as a whole – and, indeed, the whole of the country – need from the future, new Earls Court?

As well as getting to grips with these big, new international themes – to which have since been added the uncertainties caused by the invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of trade wars – the development company team had to seek answers to some large practical questions located quite literally outside their office’s front door.

The development area was large and some of it was flat, but it was also a bit awkward. Since the 1930s, it had spanned a cat’s cradle of London Underground and other railway lines. They would still have to be accommodated. In addition, it was partially bisected by a linear raised platform above the north-south train tracks. That wasn’t going anywhere either.

A section on its western side contained the Lillie Bridge London Underground maintenance depot, where Tube trains were serviced and repaired. The A4 Cromwell Road roared past it to the north. The Old Brompton Road-Lillie Road continuum bounded it to its south.

Though the largest mostly-cleared site in the capital, it was also a peculiar shape, a rogue rectangle with a bulge and an offshoot, its contours tethered at three points to West Brompton station at the south, Earl’s Court station at the east and West Kensington station at the north-west.

A structure of particular significance stood just outside its south western boundary, next to a bus depot on Lillie Road. The 31-floor Empress State Building, completed in 1962, was one of London’s earliest skyscrapers. It had been built as a hotel, replacing an ice rink called the Empress Hall, but ended up being used by the Admiralty and the UK security services. Its name was a tribute to New York’s Empire State building.

It was a striking but perhaps incongruous presence amid an otherwise low and medium-rise residential landscape, some of it 1970s council housing, some of it Victorian terraces. However, like the rail tracks, it wasn’t for moving. And, because of its size, its presence would influence the developer’s thinking.

The local political landscape presented another sort of challenge. The site straddled the boundary between two borough councils, both of them planning authorities. One was under Labour Party control, the other was run by Conservatives. Both wanted something to fill the Earls Court void, but each would have their own priorities.

There would also be a range of views among Earls Court residents and businesses about the best way forward. They had seen an earlier redevelopment project come and go, leaving behind only a wasteland. Its failure was hastened by objections ranging from anger about demolitions to concerns about architectural design.

Such was the panoply of issues facing the Earls Court Development Company, or ECDC for short, as its personnel got to grips with their task – issues ranging from the implications for London’s development sector of a worldwide health emergency, to the peculiarities of the Earl’s Court development site.

Read rest of Earls Court: The Story So Far HERE.

After you’ve done that, and if you haven’t already heard it, listen to what was the very first episode of The London Society’s London Explained documentary podcast series, which I research write and present. Produced by award-winning BBC Radio producer Andrew McGibbon and released in September 2023, it drew heavily on archive material that captures the area’s vivid and varied cultural life, going back at least 100 years, along with the voices of local people. Listen to it HERE.

And for an excellent update on the Earls Court Development Company’s plans, enjoy the recent Talk About London podcast, co-hosted by me and London Society chief executive Leanne Tritton, in which our guests were the Earls Court Development Company’s Rebekah Paczek and Sharon Giffen. Listen to it HERE or watch below.

Still wanting more? Try a piece I wrote last October about an event at ECDC HQ, featuring cultural commentators Peter York and Travis Elborough. Read it HERE.

And then there’s my vast back catalogue of coverage of the previous redevelopment scheme, some it quite bad-tempered, for the Guardian. Find that HERE.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Pay using any “donate” link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s personal Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: Earl's Court, planning, regeneration

Talk About London: Places for London – TfL’s property company

On London and the London Society talk to the firm's chief executive, Graeme Craig, about building homes and improving neighbourhoods across the city
Dave Hill

Transport for London got serious about developing its very large property portfolio ten years ago, when it began forming partnerships with private developers and housing associations in order to build homes, improve stations and create new amenities. It announced that it owned about 5,700 acres, making it one of London’s biggest landowners. The plan was to bring 50-odd sites to market and produce £3.4 billion in extra revenue for TfL over the coming decade.

How has it been going? A lot has happened since 2015, of course, including Brexit, the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and all the other things that have made getting stuff built more difficult. However, Places for London – a name adopted by the company two years ago – has been making progress in various ways, from Covent Garden to Kidbrooke and from Edgware to South Kensington. A joint venture, Connected Living London, has been formed with Grainger. The TfL company has also been investing in construction skills and recently celebrated a big milestone.

On London and The London Society were very pleased to have Places for London director and chief executive Graeme Craig as the guest for our latest Talk About London podcast, co-hosted, as usual, by me and society chair Leanne Tritton.

There is also an audio-only version available through at the London Society website.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Pay using any “donate” link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s personal Substack. Photo shows Places for London development in Waltham Forest.

Categories: News
Tags: Graeme Craig, Places for London, Transport for London

Charles Wright: On its 25th birthday, what has the London Assembly achieved?

The scrutiny body still struggles to secure recognition, but its best work has often made a beneficial difference to the city
Charles Wright

As the Greater London Authority celebrates its 25th birthday, the focus has been very much on the mayoralty and its three high-profile incumbents. But another part of the institution gets much less attention – the London Assembly, also set up in 2000 to scrutinise and hold the Mayor to account.

In the words of 2024/25 Assembly chair Andrew Boff, the 25-member directly-elected group is not just a “crucial check and balance” on a Mayor with wide powers and a budget now topping £20 billion a year, but also an “important enabler of good government in London”, providing a “vital link between strategic decision-makers and our communities”. Twenty-five years on, how’s that going?

In 2000, “no one had any idea what the Assembly was,” according to the capital’s first Mayor, Ken Livingstone. That was understandable then, but not so far from the truth still today. In polling last year, fewer than one in five Londoners could name their local Assembly member (AM). As the Standard’s City Hall editor Ross Lydall told its annual meeting in May, the Assembly “still struggles for awareness amongst Londoners”.

A recent Assembly meeting, which considered Sir Sadiq Khan’s plan to take Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) powers to pedestrianise Oxford Street, illustrated what’s often seen as the big problem – the body doesn’t have enough teeth, and even when it can in theory veto a mayoral decision, it has to muster a two-thirds majority to do so. That has never happened.

The power of veto covers the Mayor’s annual budget, statutory strategies such as the London Plan, certain mayoral appointments, and, interestingly, City Hall’s power to create MDCs, making it the only body, bar the judiciary, that had the power to block the controversial Oxford Street scheme. But in its crunch vote last month members followed party lines. Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green AMs voted in favour, the Conservatives and Reform voted against, enabling the Mayor to proceed.

The difficulty of constructing that two-thirds majority is down to an electoral system which is, paradoxically, one of the Assembly’s strengths, too. It combines First Past The Post voting for 14 constituency members alongside proportional voting for 11 “London-wide” seats, which are allocated by party vote share. That makes single party control effectively impossible, but guarantees that the Assembly is broadly representative of the city. In the past, UKIP and even the Britsh National Party have won seats. Today there are 11 Labour members, eight Tories, three Greens, two Lib Dems and one from Reform UK.

That was positive, in Livingstone’s view. “Because no party was ever going to have a majority, they had to cooperate, debate and get stuff done,” he once said. In 2024/25 that meant 86 committee meetings putting mayoral policies under the spotlight, 22 investigations on matters of concern to the city, 408 witnesses giving evidence and 18 reports containing 307 recommendations. Assembly members also quizzed the Mayor at 10 three-hour Mayor’s Question Time sessions and submitted 4,147 written questions. They took up casework and local issues too. They certainly work for their £62,761 annual allowance.

The committee hearings give a platform to a wide range of experts and interest group, and ordinary Londoners too. They raise the profile of key issues: violence against women and girls, the needs of disabled Londoners, water quality and net zero targets to name just a few. And they can make a difference. The Assembly’s recent annual report highlights the “lasting impact” of its 7/7 review committee recommendations on emergency service procedures, and its investigation prompting new procurement rules after Boris Johnson’s £43 million Garden Bridge debacle. It’s effectively snapped at the heels of successive Mayors, and those of Transport for London over Crossrail.

Little-known it may be, but there’s no shortage of applicants for seats. More than 200 candidates stood last year, though conventional politicians prevailed. Today’s Assembly line-up includes one peer and 15 current and seven former borough councillors, along with just two AMs new to public office. It’s been a launch pad for national politics too. Over the years, 17 MPs have been graduates from City Hall, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and current and former foreign secretaries David Lammy and James Cleverley among them.

However, if its committee proceedings feel consensual, its higher profile Mayor’s Question Time set pieces can look more like a training ground for PMQs. That’s been noticeable recently, with Tory AMs, led by last year’s mayoral contender Susan Hall, regularly attempting a pile-on which can seem designed to produce point-scoring “gotcha” moments for social media.

Predictable political rough and tumble perhaps, with just those 10 opportunities over the year to interrogate the Mayor directly. But it can make for unedifying viewing. Others of a Conservative persuasion are advocating a more moderate approach, rather than what one has called “uninspiring populism”, while other AMs say less confrontation is more productive.

“We are able to persuade the Mayor to do things that Londoners are telling us that he needs to shift,” Green AM Caroline Russell told Politico in June. Her work on road safety and public toilet provision are cases in point. Witnesses at the Assembly in 2023 agreed, saying they found it most effective “when it worked in a more non-partisan way”.

Calls for reform persist though. In 2023 the Assembly suggested the Mayor should produce a “forward plan” of decisions coming up, and when. That would make its work more effective, they argued, and allow AMs to “call in” decisions, putting them on hold pending scrutiny. Extra powers to summon witnesses, veto more appointments and amend the budget in more detail were also proposed.

Those changes look unlikely to take place. The previous government labelled the proposals “additional bureaucracy”, undermining the “benefits of the strong mayoral model”. Labour doesn’t seem inclined to tinker either, pledging to maintain London’s “bespoke arrangements”, which polling suggests Londoners remain broadly happy with.

To get more recognition, as Lydall suggested, AMs might be better off looking in the mirror. Get quicker and more “punchy” in your work, he said, but also “remain professional and elevate the standard of debate”. And perhaps be just a little less tribal too.

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Image shows AMs Hina Bokhari (Lib Dem, left) and Andrew Boff (Conservative, right) speaking to local people during a visit to Oxford Street. Watch the video it is taken from here.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Andrew Boff, Caroline Russell, London Assembly, Sadiq Khan

My Beautiful Laundrette: The possibilities and perils of 1980s London

A special screening of the classic movie in its original form is coming up, combined with a walk around the places where it was set and shot
Dave Hill

On the evening of 7 October, On London and urbanist Denean Rowe will be presenting a very special screening of the rightly famous 1985 London movie My Beautiful Laundrette – in original 16mm format – preceded by a guided walk through the area where the film was set and shot. The walk will take in some of the film’s key locations and also reveal the ways in which the cityscape around Battersea and Vauxhall has, in the past 40 years, both radically changed and stayed very much the same.

You can buy tickets for either or (best of all) both parts of the event via the website of the Cinema Museum in Kennington, where the screening will take place. There’s also a separate Eventbrite for the walk, which Denean, who grew up and still lives in that part of London, will lead.

My Beautiful Laundrette broke new ground in several ways. Written by Hanif Kureishi, then a rising London literary star, directed by Stephen Frears and starring, among others, Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis in the role that made his name, Saeed Jaffrey and Shirley Anne Field, it explores racism against and conflicts among Pakistani Londoners, as well as being considered a gay classic.

It is easy to forget – or not to know if you weren’t yet alive – how real and ubiquitous the extreme far-Right was in London in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. It was nothing to see the initials “NF” – for National Front – scrawled on bus shelters or lavatory walls, and the overtly fascist party even secured significant vote shares in elections in some parts of east London. Homosexuality was still widely frowned on and reviled. To go on a Pride march during those times was a radical act.

My Beautiful Laundrette drew on all those threads of London possibility and peril and wove them vividly together into a story that also explored the social aspirations of Pakistani Londoners (of which Bromley-born Kureishi was one), how they interacted with popular capitalist fervour of the Margaret Thatcher era, and where women did or didn’t fit in too. It also showed how much could be achieved by a movie with a small budget in a big city, fired by mischievous and generous imaginations.

I hope you will join me and Denean on 7 October. Once again, tickets for both parts of the event can be bought separately via the Cinema Museum website.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The bulk of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE

Categories: Culture
Tags: Battersea, cinema, Vauxhall