Like anyone who wants to see tyrants defied, liars exposed and narcissists deflated, I enjoyed Zohran Mamdani’s storming victory in the race to become Mayor of New York. Donald Trump’s full-diaper response has been a cheering spectacle – evidence, perhaps, that the gangster in the White House is feeling fear as well as spreading it.
Not that I’m getting carried away. Any politician greeted with such self-validating glee by the most unconvincing figures on the British Left must be doing something wrong – or, more to the point, must have promised to do things that will be undoable or, if done, will have unadvertised adverse effects.
We shall see. But in the meantime, the manner and the focus of the Democrat’s triumph contain lessons for London’s politicians. Their guaranteed revulsion at the very idea confirms that its Conservatives could learn the most.
Mamdani’s campaign was full of optimism. Contrast that with the unrelenting, year in, year out, sometimes comical negativity of Tory characterisations of London, including by the dwindling number elected here.
This is personified by the London Assembly Conservative group. Last year, one of its members, Susan Hall, became the third Tory candidate in a row to be defeated by Sir Sadiq Khan following yet another hapless and dishonest mayoral campaign.
And yet, untroubled by the hammering she took, the ridicule she received for imagining she’d had her pocket picked on the Tube, or the opprobrium she attracted for egging on some of social media’s foulest gutter trolls, they elected her their leader.
Hall is now even more a creature of Elon Musk’s X cesspit, the online ally of conspiracy theorists, ethnonationalists and fascists for whom cosmopolitan, global London is an object of daily hate.
Where is London Tories’ love for their home city? Where is their defence of its international make-up, its cultural energy, its human variety? Where are their positive solutions for its problems?
The biggest election issue by far for New Yorkers was the cost of living, including the cost of housing, followed by crime. Mamdani addressed these skilfully and directly. We can discuss the viability of his policies another day. The point is, he had some that captured imaginations as well as reflecting concerns.
London’s Tories have no idea how to do that. On housing, they are right to be wary of private sector rent controls, and their argument that lighter mayoral regulation of private private developers can lead to more, rather than fewer, “affordable” homes being supplied has always deserved house room.
But their default Nimbyism and blind faith in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to bring prices down cuts no ice with the increasing number of Londoners living in unsuitable, unaffordable and unacceptable accommodation.
As the “party of business”, can it not make a more attractive, persuasive case for housing for low and middle-income Londoners close to places of work? For a professionally-run private rented sector, tailored to labour market need? For a mayoral affordable homes programme, backed with government funding, that helps the widest possible range of employees and families, consistent with the needs of London’s employers?
And their approach to crime is risible – a dismal, repetitive, scaremongering chorus of doom that apes Nigel Farage’s sinister false claims and pretends that only quasi-military solutions work – more stop-and-search and “bobbies on the beat”.
Where is their recipe for a more accomplished, effective, public-serving Met? How would they make a better job than Khan of getting the recommendations of the Casey review implemented, assuming they even care about them? Why should those in London most at risk of being victims of crime – not wealthy visitors wearing expensive watches, but residents of poorer neighbourhoods – believe Tories have their interests at heart when Tories show no interest in them?
Any read-across from Mamdani’s New York win must be sane and realistic. Historically, like London so far, it has tended to choose Mayors from the Left, not the Right so, to some extent, Mamdani was pushing at an open door (the Republican candidate was crushed). It was, though, the way he pushed that enthused so many New Yorkers.
He was upbeat, he was likeable, he was tuned-in. What was more, he ran a campaign for New York, not for the Democratic Party nationally, whose attitude to him was, at most, lukewarm. London Conservatives, in City Hall and everywhere else, should learn that lesson most of all.
They should establish a clear distance from London-bashing Reform impersonators like the opportunist populist Robert Jenrick or the under-educated Katie Lam. They should provide an alternative to their party’s national attitude to London in general, and in the process differentiate themselves from – and more effectively oppose – the London-hating parasites of Reform. They need to learn some lessons from Mamdani. After all, they haven’t got much more to lose.
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Hendon is the most marginal parliamentary seat in the country, Labour’s David Pinto-Duschinsky winning by a margin of only 15 votes over his Conservative opponent Ameet Jogia in the July 2024 general election. The Hendon ward of Barnet Council, however, has long been one of the most Conservative parts of the constituency. This dominance, though, was undermined by the December 2024 defection of one of their three Hendon councillors to Reform UK and further tested in a high-profile by-election on Thursday in which the Tories and Reform went head to head.
The contest was caused by the disqualification of Conservative councillor Joshua Conway, who had represented the ward since 2022, after an unusual chain of events for which he cannot be blamed. Conway is employed by the Nancy Reuben Primary School on Finchley Lane, within the ward. Formerly its head of Jewish Studies, he was promoted to head teacher in 2023.
The independent school’s business model was apparently unable to survive the imposition of VAT on school fees, so in order to continue operating, the school’s governors applied to become a voluntary aided state school and were accepted in September. This meant Conway became an employee of a school supported by the borough of Barnet, and under the terms of Section 80 of the Local Government Act 1972 this was incompatible with membership of the council. His seat became vacant.
Conway and his Conservative colleagues were annoyed about both VAT on school fees and the disqualification. Conway issued a statement, reported by the Jewish News, saying:
“I am deeply saddened. I love serving both my school and my community. It feels wrong to be forced to choose, when both roles only strengthen one another. This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the Labour government’s envy tax on independent schools.”
VAT on school fees is a reasonable point of political debate – the House of Commons Library has the details of the background and implementation of the change from January 2025. The evidence so far suggests that it has raised more money than expected and, perhaps predictably, there have been greater consequences in terms of pupils moving into the state sector than official expectations, though not as great as scare-mongering early estimates.
Conway’s Hendon ward colleague Alex Prager dismissed the disqualification rule as “bureaucratic technicalities”. This is surely wide of the mark. It is not a new rule – it has been a basic part of the local government scene for over 50 years. Neither is it a bad principle to prevent councillors from having a direct financial interest in what they are voting on, inconvenient as it sometimes is to dedicated local representatives like Conway – and, indeed, to Louise Couling in Barking & Dagenham, who had to re-fight her Goresbrook seat in 2010 because her job as a lollipop lady made her ineligible to sit on the council.
Hendon is a well-defined ward on the map. It is bounded by major roads. Going clockwise from Junction 2 of the M1 at the top it follows the A1 Great North Way, turns right at the A406 North Circular Road, then right again onto the A41 Watford Way at the Brent Cross junction (Britain’s first triple-deck intersection, opened in 1962), and then a hop at Colindeep Lane to follow the M1 north back to where we started.
By public transport, the ward is served on its western edge by Hendon Central on the Northern Line. There are two large open spaces, Hendon Park and Sunny Hill Park, and the smaller but surprisingly pleasant Brent Park, squeezed next to the North Circular. It borders two other wards where there have been by-elections this council term: Golders Green (2023) and Finchley Church End (2025).
Hendon ward is part of the heartland of the Barnet and, therefore, the British Jewish community. Its population is 33 per cent Jewish by religion, a proportion which underestimates the extent of community identification. The community is growing – 47 per cent of Hendon children are Jewish. There are at least 14 synagogues within its boundaries – fewer than in neighbouring Golders Green, but still a lot by most standards, covering a range of types of observance.
One of the largest and oldest is the Hendon United Synagogue at Raleigh Close. The Hendon community tends to the conservative side of the aisle in religion as well as in politics – as in Golders Green, Orthodox rather than liberal or ultra-Orthodox. The election came at a time when the entire Jewish community feels anxiety following the terror attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.
The ward is otherwise a typical London suburban mixture of late Victorian and inter-war housing. As well as its Jewish community, there are other ethnic and religious minorities including Muslims (nine per cent), Hindus (four per cent) and black people (seven per cent). London suburbia is always diverse.
Hendon’s most unusual feature for a suburb is the amount of its accommodation that is privately rented (47 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for London as a whole). It has been Tory for the long term: no other party has won a seat there in the entire existence of Barnet Council, the closest call being a 67-vote lead over the Liberal Democrats in 1998, or even in pre-Greater London Middlesex County Council elections going back at least to 1952.
Despite the ward boundaries looking neat on the map, there was a battle over them when Barnet’s wards were reorganised in the run-up to the 2022 elections. The area at issue was Shirehall Park, a heavily Conservative and Jewish district in the south west corner of the ward.
The principal meetings of Barnet’s elected councillors take place within the ward at Hendon Town Hall on The Burroughs, although the main administrative centre for the council has moved to Colindale. The civic buildings there were at the centre of a planning row about the previous Conservative administration’s wish to develop what was called the Hendon Hub in partnership with Middlesex University.
The full plan would have brought up to 1,000 more students to the area, adding to the 13 per cent of the ward’s residents who were students in 2021. The development was a controversial issue in the 2022 elections and Labour’s victory in the borough meant that most of it was scrapped. Statutory planning approval was granted in December 2024, but this was a legal formality because the Labour administration had decided to “halt the scheme indefinitely” after consultations with the university and residents.
Six candidates stood in the by-election; those of the five main parties were joined by Ben Rend of Rejoin EU, who had contested the Hendon parliamentary constituency in 2024. The Conservative candidate, Shimon Ryde, had previously been councillor for the Childs Hill ward from 2014 until 2022, sitting for a while as chair of strategic planning, but he left the Conservative group in 2021 over a still unknown “personal matter”.
The Reform UK candidate Yosef David can be described as a character. He stood for the Brexit Party against Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North in 2019, and fought Cricklewood ward in the Conservative interest in 2022 before switching to Reform, the Brexit Party’s successor. David was described by Dave Hill in a recent On London Extra as “very much the Full Nigel, waving a flag at any opportunity”. He has a lively social media presence and has appeared on the Farage-promoting GB News channel.
The Hendon race was always going to be between the Conservatives and Reform. Labour was just over 1,000 votes adrift in May 2022, and the party’s popularity is well below what it was then. Despite this, the Conservatives leafleted Hendon ward with bar charts illustrating the irrelevant and misleading Hendon constituency result, arguing that it was a choice between them and Labour.
A high-pressure campaign brought in shadow cabinet members, including party leader Kemi Badenoch (in picture, centre), undaunted by failure in Bromley Common. In the past, it was unusual for high-level Westminster politicians to descend on local by-elections, but it now seems to be the pattern when a London ward is being defended by the Tories.
Reform tried to cover a lot of issues in their populist campaign, including local matters such as potholes, grumbles at the council and the state of the high street (Brent Street) in the old part of Hendon, as well as Jewish community issues such as protecting shechita (ritual slaughter in kosher butchery). David argued that diverse identities, including his own Jewish faith, could be united in Reform’s “civic patriotism” and traditionalist vision of Britain, although the party in general hasquestionstoanswer. Even very conservative Jews have tended to be resistant to the appeal of the populist Right, for obvious reasons.
The Conservatives emerged the winners. Ryde polled 1,656 votes (46.8 per cent), well ahead David received 1,069 (30.2 per cent). Labour trailed in third: Harrison polled 426 votes, representing 12 per cent – a better share than Labour got in Caerphilly last week. The other parties lagged behind: the Greens with 201 (5.7 per cent), the Lib Dems with 107 (three per cent) and Rejoin EU with 81 (2.3 per cent). Turnout was 25.2 per cent, down nine points on 2022, but par for the course in a local by-election.
The Conservatives have cause for satisfaction in holding the seat, of course, but it is not an entirely pretty picture for them. Their vote share was a bit down on 2022, and if one measures the swing from Labour to Conservative it was only six per cent. If repeated in the marginal Barnet wards next May, that would be just about sufficient for the Tories to eke out a narrow majority, but it was not a commanding performance, adding to the evidence from Whetstone and Finchley Church End that Barnet Tories might find it tough to win in one of their top target boroughs.
Reform will be pleased with their result, despite falling well short of winning. It was only the second time since they gained Bromley’s Common & Holwood ward in July that they have topped 30 per cent in a London by-election. Hendon had less obvious demographic and geographical potential for the party than Bromley, but they ran a prominent, punchy campaign.
David must have made inroads into the Orthodox Jewish community, which has usually been a reliable if sometimes low-turnout bank of Conservative votes. Nor did voters seem to be put off by revelations about the existing Reform (ex-Conservative) councillor for Hendon, Mark Shooter, who stood accused of being a “rogue landlord” for renting cramped bedsits to, among others, the then future Green Party leader, Zack Polanski.
***
Returning to the Local Government Act 1972, Section 89 establishes what is called the “six month rule”. If a vacancy occurs in a council seat that is up for election in less than six months’ time, the seat remains vacant until it comes due to be contested in the ordinary local government calendar. The next London borough council elections being scheduled for 7 May 2026, the six-month cut-off comes down on 7 November.
There are, at the time of writing, no by-elections pending before that date. If Hendon is indeed the last by-election in the current term, the next OnLondon by-election coverage will take a broad look at the last three-and-a bit years and what we can learn in advance of the full borough elections next year.
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. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack
As is well known, On London is a stickler for accuracy. And when I met Amy Poon 14 months ago to report that she was imminently to bring back the legendary name of Poon’s as a Chinese restaurant brand in a Russell Square hotel in Bloomsbury, she and I were both sure we were right. But we were wrong on both counts. The pain of dealing with a massive hotel group’s snail-like bureaucracy killed the project.
But now Poon’s really is back in town in the splendour of the new wing of Somerset House. The menus are printed, the walls covered in stunning modern takes on Chinese murals, the tables, crockery and cutlery are in place. The kitchens have been retrofitted within the restrictions of a listed building (no external ventilation is allowed, so all the kitchen heat has to be cooled and recirculated internally).
So a dream delayed but a dream come true for Poon to give a proper public face to the family name again after running pop-ups and a wonton, sauce and condiment business from a railway arch in Bermondsey.
For those of a certain age, the Poon’s name will bring back happy memories of her parents’ restaurants across the West End, which were very much The Places To Be Seen in the 1980s. But, as Poon says, you can’t rely on that demographic any longer.
“The people who remember Poon’s are beginning to fade and there’s a whole new generation out there who know nothing about us,” she says. “So it’s how to tell the story without being too much an old fogey going, ‘Oh, do you remember what it was like in my day’?”
She is doing that through a romantic melange of homeliness and fun. You won’t come to Poon’s for Peking Duck, Dim Sum or other Chinese classics. There’s no shortage of places on Gerard Street for those. Instead, it’s all about replicating what a Chinese mother would make at home.
“What I will have here is just very simple, very clean and very seasonal,” she says. “Nothing tastes as good as nostalgia, right? It’s just about wholesome, nourishing food. Stuff that makes you sigh with contentment,” she says. “We’re not going for a Michelin star. I’m not my father [who did achieve said recognition].”
Nor does Poon feel the weight of any strictures to be 100 per cent faithful to any Chinese cuisine canon. Growing up in a time when fresh Chinese vegetables were hard to come by, she adapts British produce in season into her own recipes. It’s a reflection of her upbringing, scampering around her parents’ restaurant kitchens by night while attending archetypal English private schools by day. “I grew up between two cultures. And I’m sort of equally comfortable in either.”
The fun parts are dotted around the restaurant, on the walls and on the menu. There are “if you know, you know” jokes on the classical murals painted by a prep school friend: a reclining lobster smoking one her father’s beloved cigars. On the menu, there’s a dish called “The hill that Amy didn’t die on”, described as a “hertiage recipe for sesame prawn ‘toast’.”
She had resisted including this culinary trope because, well, it can be found in every bad Chinese restaurant across the land, but backed down following a lecture from her mother (“Darling, there are things that will pay the bills, pay your rent, pay your staff”) and workshopping an idea with her father to create a heritage version using lardo fat rather than toast. Another dish appearing soon – crispy chilli squid – pays homage to one of London’s most beloved chefs, whose first date with the woman he later married was at Poon’s.
Absent the Chinese classics, the menu brings together the familiar – steamed fish and steamed pork with shrimp paste – along with some intriguing elements of Poon’s homebrew cuisine, such as Magic Soup – “a fortifying broth of granny wisdom to soothe, restore and nourish”. I can vouch for this one. There’s also Siu Yeh, a post-theatre light supper of noodles or pot luck rice.
Poon faced opening day with a mixture of excitement and trepidation: “We’ve had so much love, which is incredible and quite humbling, but at the same time it feels like an awful lot of pressure. You just feel like, God, I can’t mess this up. So that’s the challenge. Don’t mess it up, baby.”
Poons is at New Wing, Somerset House, Lancaster Place, London WC2R 1LA. will be open from Tuesday to Saturday, serving lunch 12:00pm-4:00pm and dinner 5:00pm-10.30pm. Bookings can be made at opentable.co.uk. Photo from Poon’s Gallery.
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. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.
I never leave home without my headphones. My soundtrack to London is whatever is playing in my ears, and that’s the film I’m in, usually daydreaming on the Tube. Today, the soundtrack is Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s. “Don’t Go” kicks off the album as I walk to the Jubilee Line, then jump on the front carriage as it glides off to take me partway to Lancaster Gate.
It is only a few weeks since I was in the area with my friends Sharon and Sue to see the Dress Codes exhibition at Kensington Palace. Dress Codes (now in its final weeks) is a display of Royal Family clothing that celebrates the best of its ceremonial dress collection, including pieces worn by a young Queen Elizabeth II, Diana, Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret and Queen Victoria.
I like fashion and dresses. The royals aren’t really my cup of tea, but I do like to try other teas, just to be sure. Apparently, most visitors ask to see more of Diana’s clothes – only three of her dresses are on display. Afterwards, we took a stroll through the gardens and reminisced about our (now grown) children climbing all over the pirate ship in the playground.
Today, I’m back in Kensington Gardens, this time at the Serpentine Galleries to see Peter Doig’s House of Music. If you’ve not heard of him, Doig is an award-winning painter, internationally renowned for his inventive style and tropical palate. He is well-travelled, having lived between Trinidad, Canada, the USA and Germany, and is now settled in London. A bonus is that he’s Scottish, born in Edinburgh in 1959. I’d love to hear that accent now.
Doig blends memory, reality and imagination in a new way that encourages viewers to find the narrative behind the scene. As a fiction writer, this appeals to me. But it’s his love and use of music I’m really interested in, and this is an exhibition of his paintings set to it.
I take my headphones out as I arrive – it’s free entry, by the way – and am offered an exhibition guide. I open it, and the first thing I see is this quote: “Music has often influenced my paintings. Songs can be very visual. I’m interested in what they conjure, and I’ve tried over the years to make paintings that are imagistic and atmospheric in the way music can be. Music, being an invisible art form, is open to interpretation within the mind’s eye.”
According to Doig, he can’t paint without music playing, deeming it “impossible”. I can’t travel without music. I have literally just “starred” in a video with Alison Moyet on the way here. Me and Doig are going to get along great.
I walk through to the main entrance and am greeted by a beautiful multicoloured landscape of a mural of flags he photographed near the Prosperity Club in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The flags are unfinished. I notice there are no stars or stripes on America’s. I think it looks better without the boastful detail.
The warm sound of jazz floats through the corridor, filling the air between the paintings. I see it’s coming from enormous, rare and restored Klangfilm Euronor speakers (pictured below). They are themselves beautiful pieces of art, originally designed for use in cinemas and other large auditoriums in the early and mid-20th Century. There are seats available, and the atmosphere is such that I feel like I’m in in Don Draper’s living room and he’s fixing me an Old Fashioned.
With all the lovely colours in the paintings, particularly the childlike shades of pinks and greens, I end up wandering around four times, enjoying Doig’s images of reality blended with imagination. The Lion of Judah is a recurring figure in his Rastafarian mural paintings, representing pride, resistance, and spiritual force.
There’s a “nighttime” room which encourages people to feel a bit more absorbed by the art by shutting out light. In here, almost all the comfy chairs are taken. Nobody is looking at their phones. Everybody is slowing down, allowing their senses to be filled.
The truth is, I don’t like jazz, but I wonder if it’s an added element that’s keeping me here to enjoy the paintings for longer. I see a gallery attendant move from standing by a wall to select another of the 300 pieces of music Doig has chosen – the Joe Harriott and John Mayer Indo Jazz Suite from 1966.
The entire exhibition is wonderful, an illustration of how music can unlock further creativity and add dimension to the senses, creating that extra swirly atmosphere. I see that Brian Eno is playing at one of the invited guest events, and that disco records are welcome too. Quite the spectrum of tea flavours there.
Heading into the shop at the end, I select three of my favourite Doig paintings as postcards. I decide to pay by cash. The woman at the till notices I have a lot of coins. She instructs me, not unlike a teacher, to empty my purse because she wants my change.
She’s full of elder authority, so I tip the purse upside down onto her shelf. She counts out the coins, flicking them off the edge of the counter like a bank teller, and I’m so ensconced in hearing that coin-scratch noise I haven’t heard in years that I don’t notice how much she chucks in the till. She pushes back the rest of the change towards me and says, “Have a good rest of the afternoon.”
Inspired by the Doig experience, (I’ll definitely be back), I remain headphoneless and walk back via the Diana Memorial Fountain, and it seems so much smaller now my children are “big”. As the sound of the water trickles and swooshes around corners, I envision holding little hot hands and paddling in rolled-up trousers many summers ago.
Kensington Gardens is such a lovely part of London, full of wildlife. Swans dunk down, beak deep, bums up. I stand beside two Canada geese as they dig holes in the grass, using their beaks like spades, presumably to find bugs. I later learn it’s called “drilling”, though this doesn’t feel like a good descriptor; these holes were perfectly square.
I end up walking for ages without any music on, all the way under the underpass and into W1, where I find myself in Shepherd Market, not a place I often frequent. The area was originally the site of a fortnight-long “May Fair” (hence the name), which was known for its revelry. The May Fair was eventually banned for being an affront to public decency. Today, it has coffee shops, restaurants, pubs and galleries, and a lot of velvet seats, chatter and clinking cups and cutlery, but who knows what forbidden delights still happen at night.
At the end opening of that lane, I stumble across Trumper, which I’ve passed before but never gone in. I decide to brave it. Would they kick me out for not being a man? On the contrary, I am warmly welcomed. The Victorian curiosity shop and barbers is full of “gentlemen’s items” set out behind polished glass: shaving brushes, herringbone moustache combs, cufflinks shaped like motorbikes or saxophones, fancy soaps, manicure kits, fragrances, and bath salts, and it smells like pencil shavings and pine.
I have to say, I love it. The interior reminds me of an old toy shop in Glasgow, organised beautifully with nooks and crannies for the smaller pieces. In the back, a line of barbers have their own booths, separating every customer with a red velvet curtain. Hairdryers click on and off, intermittently revealing a low hum of hair chat, but the only other noise is my steps on the wooden floor. It is sort of comforting.
I head back to Bond Street (14,607 steps), and as I alight for the final walk home, my feet start to hurt. I pop Yazoo back on for Alison and Vince to take the pain away. For me, music enhances everything, especially imagination and experience (and distraction from sore feet). But London has its own cool soundtrack too. I might enjoy it if I take out my headphones now and then.
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. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.
Handel Hendrix House, also known as numbers 23 and 25 Brook Street, London W1, is a heritage landmark for having previously accommodated two people who came from overseas and made the capital their home. Both of them made music, too.
Hendrix, as in Jimi, arrived from the USA late in 1966 and became famous as one of rock music’s greatest guitarists. He lived upstairs at Number 23. He probably didn’t release two parakeets from a cage while visiting Carnaby Street, thereby introducing them to every park in the city, but it’s fun to pretend he did. He definitely died in 1970 at St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington.
Handel, as in George Frideric, hung around town for much longer. Born in Germany in 1685, he moved to Italy in 1703 and to London in 1710. Like Hendrix, he arrived in the city while in his twenties. Also like Hendrix, he was a renter.
The composer was the first occupant of Number 25, moving in in 1723 and staying put until his death there in 1759. Almost all the work he produced during his Brook Street tenure is thought to have been written and rehearsed at that address, where, Wikipedia says, he kept harpsichords, a clavichord and even a small chamber organ. History does not record if neighbours complained.
When I wandered past Handel Hendrix House the other week, I didn’t realise I was doing it. Not until my eye fell upon a tile mural on the wall of an adjacent alley did I work it out.
The alley is an entrance into Lancashire Court, a Mayfair mews you can also enter from New Bond Street. As you would expect of a mews in Mayfair, it is old, pricey and posh. As you would also expect, Ian Mansfield has had a proper look round. So let’s concentrate on the mural.
It is difficult to photograph, because they alley is narrow and dark. But, look, I did my best. The work is attributed to “M. Czerwinski” who seems to be this guy. I tried checking through LinkedIn. I didn’t get any reply, but everyone else who’s written about this lovely piece of tile work seems sure that the “M” stands for “Michael”.
His surname is Polish and therefore adds a further migration dimension of some kind to the Brook Street scene. The same may or may not apply to Ray Howell, who is credited in the mural for having done “additional work” on it. Around 60 per cent of Londoners were born outside the city, which means the odds are that he, like your correspondent, migrated in from somewhere. It would be fun to know more.
The mural is called London 2001, a year that feels both recent and long ago. As well as celebrating Handel’s local connection, it features images of London landmarks too, from Battersea Power Station to what I think must be the London Eye. There’s also something in the bottom right hand corner that looks like The Shard, though work didn’t even start on that until 2009. So is it Cleopatra’s Needle? Whose bright idea was it to stick a “caution” sign over the tip?
John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist can be bought here.
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The long-awaited government and City Hall intervention to kickstart housebuilding in London has finally emerged, complete with its the well-trailed reduction in affordable housing quotas for private development from 35 per cent to 20 per cent as its controversial centrepiece.
The package not only reduces that affordable threshold, which gives developers who meet it a “fast-track” route to planning permission, it also cuts by 50 per cent the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) councils charge developers and allows government social housing grant to support half of the new 20 per cent affordable requirement. Some City Hall design rules will be relaxed too and Sir Sadiq Khan will gain new powers to decide applications over the heads of the boroughs.
For the main proposals, a time-limited “use it or lose” approach will apply, giving developers essentially two years, to April 2028, to get 20 per cent affordable schemes approved and underway with that CIL relief and additional grant. Doing so would also spare them City Hall’s current “late-stage” review option, which claws back a share of “surplus” profits to fund more affordable homes, as long as building is well underway by April 2030.
Twenty per cent of something?
Will all that be enough to make developers’ schemes stack up financially? The property industry has broadly welcomed the intervention. It would go “a long way towards resolving London’s viability challenge,” said Rob Perrins, chair of major London housebuilder Berkeleys.
There are reservations though, with some warnings that in current economic conditions even a 20 per cent affordable threshold may not be low enough. Recent high-profile planning appeal rulings on economic viability saw the 1,000 home Stag Brewery scheme approved at 7.5 per cent affordable, and 16.6 per cent affordable agreed for the 434 home Cuba Street scheme.
As a six-week consultation period on the proposals begins this month, the property lobby will also be seeking more relaxation, or even the scrapping of Mayor Khan’s viability rules, which they claim significantly deter investors. The rules remain in place for “20 per cent” developments which do not get underway quickly, as well as for schemes falling short of the threshold.
Further dilution of what has been a flagship policy for Khan since his first election win in 2016 seems unlikely. Ceding the 35 per cent threshold won’t have been easy for the Mayor, and his review mechanism ensuring that extra profit resulting from an improved market benefits the community as well as the developer has been an article of faith too.
Some industry responses have been too downbeat, according to the more optimistic Jon Neale of consultants Montagu Evans. The new measures, he said, “will be much more impactful than many in the market are assuming; while modest individually, acting together, they strongly support viability.”
Town Hall concerns
Councils seem less enthusiastic, though, which will be a concern for policymakers. The cooperation of the boroughs which, as local planning authorities (LPAs) will be the first port of call for developers looking to take advantage of the new incentives, is an essential element of the plan.
Southwark Liberal Democrat opposition leader Victor Chamberlain succinctly set out borough doubts in Inside Housing magazine. In his view, the intervention might boost viability “short-term”, but risked “underwriting private margins” rather than providing more social housing and improving infrastructure over time. And shifting more planning power to City Hall could undermine local decision-making at a time when “public trust in development is already too fragile,” he wrote.
A lukewarm response from the London Councils collective was notable. It said boroughs would be “looking at the proposals in detail to understand the implications for housing delivery in our local areas”. More council funding would be the “quickest and most effective” way of getting more homes built, added the group’s executive member for housing, Waltham Forest leader Grace Williams.
The clock is ticking
But with consultation responses to be considered, London Plan amendments drafted and, for some of the changes, secondary legislation enacted, the package is unlikely to be fully in place until well into the New Year. That leaves already a relatively limited window for action. As consultancy Lichfields puts it, “the extent and speed of change is…reliant on how quickly [the measures] are formally adopted after the consultation and then the response of London’s LPAs: it will be incumbent on the boroughs to embrace the measures…and to apply them positively in their decision-making.”
Uncertainty around next May’s council elections brings added urgency. With Green Party London Assembly member and 2026 Hackney mayoral contender Zoë Garbett already condemning the measures as serving “only to protect the profits of the same developers who got us into this mess”, Khan will want to get the boroughs on board and see some rapid progress.
Enter the Mayor
Perhaps anticipating borough reluctance, the measures include a new mayoral power to rule on schemes of 50 homes or more where councils are “minded to refuse” the application, on top of the existing “call-in” powers. In a clear message to council planning committees, this would allow the Mayor to “review whether the right decision had been reached in the context of the housing crisis”.
There’s new money too – a £322 million “City Hall developer investment fund” to help the Mayor “take a more direct and interventionist role to unlock thousands of new homes”. And on the horizon, a streamlined power to make Mayoral Development Orders approving schemes “upfront” without gaining borough consent.
To date, Khan has intervened relatively infrequently. Now we may see more flexing of mayoral muscle, though with town hall alarm bells ringing reassurance may be needed that this isn’t a permanent shift towards City Hall-level rather than council-led planning.
The elephant in the room…
There are 281,000 unbuilt homes in schemes already given permission but currently stalled. This is the “lowest hanging fruit”, according to leading planning lawyer Simon Ricketts. But the proposal merely suggests that that developers unable to meet the conditions of their permissions should seek to negotiate individual “deeds of variation”.
Will councils be keen to look again at schemes they’ve already approved, allowing developers to water down affordable home commitments that had been accepted in good faith? Ricketts is doubtful: “At the very least we need specific encouragement for local planning authorities to accept developers’ requests to engage,” he argues, coupled with “some sort of oversight, monitoring and/or route for complaint where authorities refuse”.
Dismal demand is another concern, prompting calls for new Help to Buy-style incentives for buyers, though some, notably housing journalist Peter Apps, argue this will simply keep already overinflated house prices too high. Fundamentally, a system pegging around half of affordable supply to the fortunes of private developers needs a rethink, according to the Centre for Cities think tank: “If affordable housebuilding is to increase substantially in the city, public spending to build it has to increase.”
Meanwhile though, the onus, in the government’s words, is on developers and boroughs, to “get on with approving and building the homes that so many Londoners need”. As Landsec’s Chris Hogwood puts it, “they are all going to have to trust each other a bit more. None of this is going to be 100% perfect. But it’s always going to be better than no homes being delivered at all.”
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Teresa O’Neill, who is about to step down as leader of Bexley Council after 17 years in the job, was just too young to vote in the general election of 1979, the one that ushered Margaret Thatcher into Number 10. But she was not too young to be a fan. That was partly because Britain’s first female Prime Minister was a role model, someone who, by her very ascent to the highest office, signalled, as O’Neill puts it when we meet at Bexley’s Civic Offices, “this is open to girls”. But it was also about values: “I suppose my family always believed in working for what they got, being independent and all of that sort of stuff.”
O’Neill’s name gives a clue to her family history, although, as she points out, her textbook south London accent does not. Her parents moved to the capital from Limerick in 1960, seeking work, as many Irish people did in the decades after the war, and settling first in Camberwell. Their daughter was born the following year. Her father worked as a bus conductor and then as a train guard, she recalls, her mother, part-time in Sainsbury’s. When she was four, the family moved to Woolwich, and when she was ten, to Lewisham, where she attended a Roman Catholic, single sex secondary school that is no more.
She could have trained to be a maths teacher, she says. Instead, she went straight into the world of work. “Right place, right time,” she explains. It began with getting a job with an insurance company. Over a period of around seven years, she “worked my way up, and all the rest of it”. The company was absorbed by a larger one. O’Neill considered leaving: “I went in and seen the big boss and said, ‘I don’t know if this is for me’.” Long story short, she left and went into investment banking. She ended up doing 25 years, with Smith New Court, acquired in 1995 by Merrill Lynch. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” she says.
She enjoyed politics, too, becoming active from her teenage years through her family’s involvement with their local tenants’ and residents’ association. Because of that, they got to know local Tory politicians, including Colin Moynihan who, incredible as it may seem today, with the Tories almost wiped off the London parliamentary map, was the MP for Lewisham East. She knew Tory councillors and campaigners, too. “They always wanted to help others,” O’Neill says. “It always felt to me that the Labour ones wanted to help themselves.”
One local Tory, Anthony Salter – the husband of Baroness Patience Wheatcroft, whom Boris Johnson appointed to his forensic audit panel after first becoming Mayor of London in 2008 – persuaded her to run for a seat in Lewisham’s Labour-held Blackheath ward in the borough elections of 1986. “O’Neill T, Ms” finished third, just missing out on gaining one of the ward’s two seats. She had another go in 1990, with the same outcome but a still closer result, finishing just ten votes behind the second-placed Labour candidate.
Her family were council house tenants, which, the way O’Neill tells it, might have boosted her candidacy: “All the council estates had bluebells planted for me, believe it or not, to come up at the time of the election. It was great. I think it was because I worked hard and was trying to represent them and work with them.”
In 1992, by then in her early thirties, she unsuccessfully contested Lewisham Deptford in the general election, finishing second to Labour’s Joan Ruddock. She says she had serious designs on a parliamentary career, but recognised that being an MP could have its drawbacks, notably a lack of job security: “I decided that, being not married, etcetera, that actually the career path was the one to take.” Prospering in her job, she concluded it was time to buy a house. “It was either buy it in Bexley or buy it in Bromley,” she says. “Someone persuaded me Bexley was the place to be.”
She completed her home purchase the day before the 1997 general election. The property was in the newly-created constituency of Bexleyheath & Crayford, which was nominally Conservative. Tony Blair’s landslide ensured that by the time O’Neill was moving in, she was living in a Labour seat. Having previously decided to retire from politics, she changed her mind. Within a year, in May 1998, she became a Bexley councillor, helping her party recapture it from No Overall Control.
The rest is not entirely history – Labour secured a rare and very narrow victory in 2002, having previously won Bexley only in 1964 and 1971. But the Conservatives roared back in 2006. And in May 2008, O’Neill became its leader. Her predecessor, Ian Clement, who, along with other Bexley Tories, had played a significant part in Johnson’s drive to become Mayor with the help of a “doughnut strategy” of mobilising outer Londoners, resigned to join the new Mayor’s mayoral team. In a press release, O’Neill pledged to do “everything I can to serve the best interests of all the people of Bexley” and went on to describe herself as “a south London girl”.
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The public eye hasn’t often rested on Bexley in the years since O’Neill took the helm. Electorally, the borough has been consistently undramatic: Tory majorities have fallen from a resounding 41 seats in 2010 to 21 in 2022 as Labour’s strength across London grew. But the trend has been partly due to a reduction in the number of seats, and the borough has never looked like changing hands.
Meanwhile, scandals in which Bexley’s name has been mentioned have done next to no damage to its reputation. Clement was forced to resign from his City Hall post after just over a year for misusing a corporate credit card (and later given a suspended jail term), but his time at Bexley was over. Much more recently, Bexley councillor, PR man and former London Assembly Tory group chief of staff Adam Wildman left the Bexley Tory group after it emerged that he’d attended the notorious December 2020 lockdown campaign party of mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, which he helped run.
But O’Neill’s administrations have been regarded in London government circles as solid exemplars of a suburban Conservative way of doing things, and O’Neill herself as a wise head who has brought an important, distinctive perspective to London-wide bodies and debates from which outer boroughs often feel excluded.
Following her party’s last borough win, O’Neill challenged characterisations of the Tories being wiped out in London, a media narrative largely derived from their loss of high-profile fortresses Westminster and Wandsworth. Writing for Conservative Home, she portrayed Bexley Tories as “quietly” delivering “our fifth landslide in a row”.
The secret, she explained, was simply and resolutely honouring pledges to local voters and caring about the place where they lived. She highlighted tree-planting, recycling, building new libraries, children’s services rated “outstanding” by Ofsted and “financial stability, which underpins everything”.
Like several other London boroughs in recent years, Bexley has sought emergency help from national government to balance its books, but though granted that provision in 2021, later withdrew its request. She has long argued that Bexley has had a raw deal from national government and hopes the Fair Funding Review will work out well for the borough.
In her article, O’Neill stressed candour and transparency with residents, saying the borough’s 2021/22 budget planning – an exacting process, as it was for all local authorities amid the disruptions of the pandemic – underwent a full four months of consultation, prompting thousands of responses, all of them read by the members of her cabinet.
Similar themes come to the fore when she is asked to define the principles that have guided her leadership of Bexley. She speaks of “old-fashioned integrity, being straight with people, never forgetting you’re spending other people’s money, that sort of thing. I’m a very straight talker and I want to do right by people. And I think we have done right by people.”
This is an approach, she continues, that she impresses, in person, on new people who come to work for the council, pointing out to them that “a fair slice” of its money comes directly from residents in the form of Council Tax, and that most people will diligently pay it, even if “that might mean them going without eating and heating. If you never forget that in local government, you never waste a penny”.
For O’Neill, that is essential to being a good public servant. But, she adds, those duties don’t end there: “There’s always other things you can be doing. We are here to deliver for others. And I think that’s driven me in a lot of things.” The part of our conversation where she is most animated and speaks at greatest length concerns a project called Bexley Box, launched in response to the Labour government’s reduction of eligibility for winter fuel payments.
When first announced in July 2024, the one-off sum was to be withdrawn from all but the very poorest. O’Neill describes her reaction: “The announcement came out, and I say, ‘How many of our residents is this likely to impact?’ I had a sleepless night We aint got the money to just give them a replacement. How do we help them?”
Eventually, following a September U-turn, 75 per cent of pensioners across the country received the payment last year, as before (£200 in most cases). Even so, the Bexley Box scheme, already in preparation, was announced on 6 November, resulting in 770 people receiving a cardboard carton “rammed full of goodies” to help them keep warm and fed through the coldest months. “These people needed a bit of help, but also they needed to know that we cared. Some of the messages that came back, you would have cried,” O’Neill says.
The whole thing was funded by private donations, some of goods, some of money, including from a local businessman who stumped up £25,000 to underwrite it. The boxes, the majority sent out before Christmas, were distributed to residents known to be housebound or coming out of hospital. Voluntarism and philanthropy, signature virtues and alternatives to state dependency for many Conservatives, were vital to it. “A by-product,” O’Neill says, was “that we contacted the most vulnerable people in our borough at the worst time of year, when they are feeling low.”
That valuing of local knowledge, including of grassroots support networks, is also apparent when she speaks about Bexley’s response to the pandemic. “We were the best vaccination team in London,” she claims. “We set up community champions before anyone else did.” The latter, she says, were in touch with about 70,000 of the borough’s roughly 250,000 people, “covering all the ethnic groups, age groups and geography”. She has lately described local health services as a consistent priority, and has personally encouraged Bexley residents to get flu jabs.
Of course, political opponents have bones to pick with her. Only last week, the most prominent of these, the current Bexleyheath & Crayford MP, Labour’s Daniel Francis, alleged that government money given to the council for fixing potholes was not being put to use. Bexley, not amused, wrote to Sir Keir Starmer, claiming that Francis had given him false information.
Other criticisms have been non-partisan. Last May, following an inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission, the government issued the council with an improvement notice requiring it to “take steps to improve its special educational needs and disabilities services”. The council points out that the inspection was of all SEND provision in the borough, not only the part delivered by the council within a wider partnership, and says it believes its services will soon be shown to have improved.
O’Neill has also been accused of failing to get as much housing built as she could have, particularly the “affordable” kinds. The council’s housing strategy for 2020-2025, in line with its 2017 Growth Strategy, said it would “play a key part in helping London grow sustainably while we continue to respect the borough’s overall character and identity”. There was a very traditional Conservative emphasis on facilitating home ownership in a borough where over 70 per cent of households fall into that category. What has Bexley’s policy meant in practice?
South London website The Murky Depths has highlighted City Hall figures showing that Bexley was the only borough to register no “affordable” starts during the financial year 2024/25. And although the same data show that 92 were completed, 63 of them for social rent, Bexley was still near the bottom of the borough league table. Last month, Sir Sadiq Khan’s deputy for planning, Jules Pipe, overturned council planners’ rejection of a 228-home tower near Abbey Wood Elizabeth line station. Bexley’s reasons included the tower’s height and its proximity to a historic building. It will now go ahead with 35 per cent of the dwellings “affordable”.
O’Neill, though, defends her record on housing and planning issues, pointing to the demolition of the system-built 1960s Larner Road Estate in Erith, now replaced by Erith Park. She takes pride, too, in the Park East development, also in Erith, replacing an old high-rise scheme: “I had a lovely conversation with a lady in a wheelchair, a motorised wheelchair, riding around. She said there is such a lovely community here now. She said, ‘I come out every day and I will always find someone that will have a chat with me’. That, for me, is a success story – you’ve created somewhere people want to live.”
The ongoing regeneration of the Thamesmead Estate, part of which lies in Bexley, is something she has supported, too. But she has rules about getting behind new housing schemes. “I’m a big believer that you need to put the infrastructure in before the housing,” she says, “or else it becomes a dead end”.
As Sir Sadiq Khan and Transport for London try to persuade the government to back extending the Docklands Light Railway to from Newham to Thamesmead in Greenwich, O’Neill would like to see a further link added, taking it to Belvedere, in the north of her borough, by the Thames: “If you put the transport in place, the developers will come forward.”
She’s “absolutely delighted” that the Elizabeth line has come to Abbey Wood, where Greenwich and Bexley quite literally meet – “it has been a game changer, there are people that travel right across the borough to go on the Lizzie line” – but says she would like to see more. “If we could replicate that at Belvedere, Erith and Slade Green, there is so much opportunity to create quality housing that people want to live in.” She adds: “We are always very keen in Bexley, that we like to offer to Bexley people first.”
On transport, she is mindful of local motorists’ interests, saying that in a borough with limited rail connections, she tries to keep parking fees as low as she can, because “you don’t want to stop people from getting around. You want them to use their town centres, etcetera”.
Bexley was one of the four London boroughs, all of them Tory-controlled, to try and fail through High Court action, to stop Mayor Khan extending the Ultra-Low Emission Zone to the whole of Greater London. However, going back, Bexley has also acted on local anxieties about congestion when opposing the Thames Gateway Bridge project that was backed by London’s first Mayor, Ken Livingstone, but canned in 2008 by his successor and Bexley ally Johnson.
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It isn’t hard to see why some regard O’Neill and Bexley as parochial blockers, reluctant members of the Greater London club and spiritually more aligned with Kent, with which, on its eastern side, it shares a border. O’Neill, though says it is important to be in dialogue with next door local authorities, Labour Greenwich and Tory Bromley and Dartford alike. And she has had considerable input into London government far beyond her borough’s boundaries and immediate neighbours.
She had a role advising Mayor Johnson’s City Hall about relations with the outer boroughs as a whole. and has held senior positions with both the Local Government Association and London Councils, the body that represents all of London’s 33 local authorities. In that capacity, she was made a member of the London Finance Commission, which Johnson set up to examine how London government could have more control over taxes raised in the capital.
Her LFC experience and, it seems, her input into London-wide politics and policy more broadly, have reinforced her view that Greater London as a whole is too often seen as homogenous, with the needs and personalities of the outer boroughs, themselves diverse, filtered out: Bexley is very different from Westminster or Southwark, economically, socially and so on. As for the mayoralty, she is clear that, after 25 years of its existence, it’s time “to have a conversation” about the Greater London Authority and “how it works”.
In this, she declares herself a backer of the London Councils proposals for boroughs to be given a joint role with the Mayor in making City Hall decisions over policy and funding – a so-called combined board model, made up of the Mayor and the London Councils executive committee. “I think the Mayors can’t do the job on their own,” she says.
It may be unsurprising that she names Johnson as the best of the three Mayors so far at collaborating with the boroughs, but there are others who share that view, not all of them Tories. O’Neill maintains that there is plenty to be said for “a really good working relationship between the borough leaders and the Mayor, a bit like they’ve done in Manchester”.
The London Councils plan insists a role would remain for the largely powerless London Assembly. “That was very diplomatic wasn’t it?” chuckles O’Neill, who is known to not be a fan. “It does cost quite a lot of money,” she observes.
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In November 2022, O’Neill received a life peerage to add to the OBE she was awarded in 2015, becoming Baroness O’Neill of Bexley. When she announced that she would be stepping down as council leader, she pledged to keep on “fighting Bexley’s corner” in the House of Lords, but would be focusing on her parliamentary work.
After 17 years, wanting a change of scene does not seem unreasonable. Inevitably, though, there was talk in London government circles that O’Neill had decided to jump the council ship before she was removed from its helm – not by a member of her Conservative crew, but by the self-styled pirate ship of Reform UK.
Nigel Farageism, with its cheap nationalism, dark nostalgia and populist bombast, has made few inroads in London in the past. But recent borough by-elections and opinion polls suggest that next May’s full borough elections could see Reform make significant advances in some parts of the capital. Bexley looks at risk of being captured.
History tells us why. In 1989, the British National Party opened a bookshop in Welling, in the west of Bexley. An increase in racist attacks in the area was follow by demonstrations and, in 1993, a riot. The council closed the bookshop in 1995, but a sense that some in this part of outer London are receptive to far-Right ideas in one form or another has endured.
In 2014, when its popularity was at its peak, Farage’s UKIP won three Bexley Council seats. Bexley then voted Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum. Last year, Reform won 22 per cent of the vote in the Old Bexley & Sidcup parliamentary seat, 15 per cent in Erith & Thamesmead and 23 per cent in Bexleyheath & Crayford. Now, the party enjoys big leads in national opinion polls. The omens for the Tories and O’Neill’s successor as Bexley leader, David Leaf look ominous.
O’Neill demurs. She says she had decided on being elevated to the Lords to step down as Bexley’s leader towards the end of her current term, rather than because she feared defeat. And she contends that the Tories’ track record in the borough will see them through. “I think we’ve got a very good reputation with our local residents,” she says. “They know that we deliver some fantastic things.” Reform’s big talk about cutting local government waste does not impress her: “The things they may be offering, we already do. We transform services all the time. We’re always looking for ways to make things better for people and make our money work harder.”
She also express belief in the electorate’s judgement: “I think that people are actually quite mature nowadays in how they think about things. They can tell the difference between national politics and local politics. And normally when you ask people what they think about the council, they say, yeah, they’re happy with what it’s doing.”
I walked to the Civic Offices in Watling Street from Barnehurst station along an Erith Road where lamp posts were hung with flags of St George. Asked about this, O’Neill answers with care: the council has removed flags at roundabouts, judged a danger to road safety; in other cases, it has not. Its approach has been “to take the temperature of our residents, especially those we thought might be at risk”. It has received “a handful of complaints”.
Summing up the resulting position, she says she hopes it’s a reflection of her long tenure as Bexley’s leader: “You want to be sensible, you want to do what’s right by people, and that’s kind of where we’ve got to.” It’s a philosophy that has worked well for her and Bexley Conservatives for a long time. But her once mighty party is now in desperate decline. Her leaving is fittingly timed.
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The government's new Index of Multiple Deprivation has usefully revealed concealed hardships in the capital, despite some distorting elements and misleading political debate
The new English indices of deprivation, published last week, provide an important snapshot of the complexities of poverty and other forms of deprivation faced by communities across the country. They are also unavoidably political, as they feed into local government funding formulas. This lends a strange tone to the debate about them: nobody wants to be called the most deprived place in England, but nobody wants to lose out on the funding that comes with it.
So, when the composite Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) placed seven London boroughs among the 20 per cent (60 out of 297) most deprived districts in the country, some anti-London moithering was inevitable. Quoted in the Financial Times, North Durham MP (and former Hackney councillor) Luke Akehurst complained that the indices could result in “leafy southern suburbs and the most exclusive parts” of central London receiving more government funding: “That can’t be right,” he said. Clearly, the poverty faced by more than two million Londoners isn’t real poverty.
The IMD combines seven different indices which are themselves drawn from more than 50 indicators, mostly measured at the level of lower super output areas (LSOAs) – small geographic units with populations of 1,000-3,000 people. These are then aggregated and weighted to show results by local authority. London’s most deprived boroughs are in the arc from Enfield to Barking & Dagenham in north east London, plus Brent in the north west. This is a similar position to 2019, when the indices were last published, though greatly improved from 2004, when London boroughs made up 14 of the most deprived 20 per cent.
The index measures relative deprivation, so London’s improving position over time may reflect deterioration outside the M25 as well as improvements in the capital. But a closer look at the six sub-indices gives a more rounded picture of where Londoners face the biggest challenges.
The two most heavily-weighted scores are for income and employment deprivation, which together make up 45 per cent of the IMD. Five of the six worst-scoring local authorities for income are in north-east London, though there are pockets of income deprivation across the inner city – from north Kensington to West Wandsworth. By contrast, only one London borough features in the 20 districts scoring worst for employment.
The difference is, as so often in London, about housing. The income index includes a count of people living in households receiving benefits (including in-work benefits) with an income below 70 per cent of the national average after housing costs; in 2019 it counted people living on less than 60 per cent average incomes before housing costs. As a result of these changes, which better reflect the reality of living in London, the number of people counted as facing income deprivation in the capital has almost doubled, from 1.1 million in 2019 to 2.2 million in 2025.
This change illustrates how London’s housing costs impoverish many working people. They also have an acute impact on children and older people. Three London boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney – have the highest levels of children and older people living with income deprivation. Many people who can afford to are choosing to leave London to start families, which means the population staying in the city is disproportionately made up of those affluent enough to afford its family housing, and those who don’t have the luxury of choice.
In other areas, London scores relatively well. Its impressive record on school attainment and university progression is reflected in low scores for education and skills deprivation, albeit with some “not spots” of relatively poor performance in parts of outer London (for example, Enfield, Brent and Ealing). Londoners are also relatively healthy, with no boroughs in the ten per cent of worst performing, but some pockets of ill health concentrated in an inner-city arc from Camden to Newham.
Crime is much less concentrated in London than right-wing demagogues might suggest. Only one borough – Hackney – features in the ten per cent worst districts (compared to seven in 2019). However, the two English LSOAs with the highest rate of theft (one of the constituent indicators) are in the area of Westminster stretching from Fitzrovia down to Embankment, probably reflecting the epidemic of phone snatching that plagues parts of central London.
Two final indices mix indicators that give an ambiguous picture of London and its challenges. A “Barriers to Housing and Services Index” seeks to balance indicators of how easy it is to access housing and other services. London boroughs score well on “connectivity”, but much less so on access to housing, homelessness and overcrowding. As a result of these latter indicators, London boroughs account for seven of the ten worst performers on this index.
The final “Living Environment Index” is a bit of a wild card. London boroughs make up eight of the ten worst performers, but the indicators include whether houses are deprived of private outdoor spaces, their energy performance, levels of noise pollution, and traffic casualties among pedestrians and cyclists.
These all seem to penalise dense places with busy roads, places with lots of older buildings and places near airports. By this measure, Mayfair, Primrose Hill and Knightsbridge are among England’s 10 per cent most deprived LSOAs. Here, you can see Luke Akehurst’s point, though this Index makes up less than ten per cent of the composite IMD.
Even if the Living Environment Index doesn’t seem quite right, the bigger message of the new indices is that deprivation and disadvantage are genuinely multi-faceted, and can’t be simply be summarised as “pampered south, neglected north”. London is not a bad place to live, and does a lot better on measures such as crime than many of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic would argue. However, as so often, housing costs are a pervasive drag on liveability, pushing people into poverty, hobbling aspiration and jeopardising the UK’s prosperity.
Update, 6 Nov 2025: This excellent article originally said there are eight London boroughs among the most deprived 20 per cent of areas in the country. In fact, there are seven (Islington fell just outside). That tiny blemish has been corrected.
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Tory MP Katie Lam, ascendant in her sunken party, has been in a spot of bother for telling a newspaper that “a large number of people” who live in Britain entirely legally “need to go home”, because she happens to believe they should not have been allowed to live in Britain in the first place. Realisation of this deportation vision would, she continued, leave “a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people”.
Less attention has been given to a remark she had previously made at a Conservative conference fringe meeting about immigration:
“There are schools now in London boroughs where more than three-quarters of children don’t speak English to a serviceable school standard.”
It was quite a claim. Which schools? Which boroughs? How have London’s schools been as successful as they are at equipping children with good qualifications if an inability to speak “serviceable” English has been as commonplace among them as Lam seemed to suggest?
I made some inquiries. The event was organised by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), a well-known right-wing think tank. Could it provide the source for Lam’s assertion? I asked Lam’s office the same thing.
Both replied with a link to a 13 year-old article in what was then the Evening Standard. Drawing on a Greater London Authority report, this said that more than 70 per cent of primary school pupils in two of London’s 32 boroughs, Newham and Tower Hamlets did not speak English in their homes. It had nothing to say about London primary school pupils’ proficiency at speaking English, which is a different matter and was the subject of Lam’s remark.
The CPS also suggested I read an article by Neil O’Brien MP, another pugnacious Tory protagonist in the current hostilities about what Britishness is or ought to be. And Lam’s office also pointed me to an item on the right-wing TV channel GB News, which mocked a London council’s video made to assist people with poor English skills navigate its housing allocations scheme – housing which a perky presenter described with relish as “subsidised” in a very expensive area. That wasn’t about London school children’s proficiency in spoken English, either.
I contacted Lam’s office again. Surely they could do better than that. And, fair play, they tried.
A second response informed me that it is an “uncontroversial fact” that “a number” of schools in London “now host a large majority of pupils who do not speak English as a first language”. As with Lam’s assertion, it didn’t say what size that number was. However, the reply graciously acknowledged that, as I had pointed out, “EAL [English as an additional language] status alone does not necessarily reflect degrees of proficiency”. But it went on to refer to the Department for Education’s most recent report on the English-speaking prowess of EAL pupils in English schools. This, the reply said, showed that “English fluency” was put at 12 per cent among Reception class EAL students (four and five year-olds) rising to 22 per cent among those in Year 2 (six and year year-olds).
Earlier in the reply, an east London primary school had been described as “the first school in England where no pupils speak English as a first language”. The school in question, I was told, had been the “subject of reports” earlier this year. There was, I was assured, “no strong reason to believe” that a school like the one named “would differ significantly from these national norms”. As such, the reply concluded, “it is extremely likely [their emphasis] that more than three-quarters of pupils” at a school “like” the one mentioned “do not speak English to an EAL level of fluent”.
There’s quite a lot to sort through here.
The essence of Lam’s assertion, as expressed in her CPS event remark and the replies from her office, is that in an unspecified number of London schools of unspecified types – Lam and her office didn’t say if they were talking about primary schools, secondary schools or both – there are large majorities of pupils who do not speak English to a level Lam regards as “serviceable”, and that is because English is not their first language. Yes, EAL pupils can be or become proficient at speaking English, but the rates of such attainment were low.
Behind all this, of course, lie contentions about immigration, integration, and a “coherent culture” that Lam would soon after articulate in her newspaper interview.
Let’s look at that most recent DfE report about the spoken English proficiency of school students for whom English is an “additional language” – the one to which Lam’s office directed me. Assuming I have the right one, it was published in 2020 and refers to the situation in 2018.
It says that 19 per cent of all school pupils in England at that time had English as an additional language – 1.6 million out of 8.1 million. It adds that 36 per cent of those EAL pupils were judged “fluent” in English and a further 25 per cent as “competent”.
Lam’s office referred to “fluency” but not to competence. Lam herself used that word “serviceable”. Things described as serviceable are considered “good enough to be used and to perform its function“. A child judged “competent” at speaking English is quite obviously able to do so to “a serviceable school standard”. So that’s 61 per cent (36 plus 25) for all ages across England as a whole out of the 19 per cent who have EAL whose English is fluent or competent and therefore “serviceable”.
If, for the sake of discussion, we assume that the non-EAL 81 per cent are fluent or competent in English – something the report itself says we cannot – that makes an average of 92.5 per cent of all pupils, covering the entire age range, who are fluent or competent in English and just 7.5 per cent who aren’t. That’s a long way short of the “over three quarters” Lam claimed can be found in “some” schools in London.
What about London in particular, as distinct from England altogether? London has by far the largest number of EAL pupils of any region: 560,206 in 2018, according to the DfE report, and 578,833 in 2023, according to an Oxford University study funded by the Bell Foundation, a language education charity, published earlier this year. That number represents 44.3 per cent of all London school kids (1.31 million in total). How many of them are fluent or competent English speakers?
The DfE report notes that, among EAL pupils of all age across England as a whole, “English proficiency levels are highest in the South East (66%) and London (65%)”. So although Lam picked out London for special mention at the CPS event, as a region it has one of lowest levels of not “serviceable” proficiency at speaking English among EAL pupils – about one third of them, accounting for about 15 per cent of all London school kids – again, a lot less than the three-quarters of them, the at least 75 per cent, Lam said “some” London schools contain.
The DfE report also provides a breakdown of fluency and competence levels by local authority area as of 2018, including all 32 London boroughs and the City of London (pages 23-26). The highest combined levels of fluency and competence among EAL pupils in London, at 77 per cent, were found in Camden and Bromley. The lowest were in Lambeth (54 per cent) and Barking & Dagenham (56 per cent). So even at the bottom of the London borough league table, more half of EAL pupils across the full age range spoke English to a standard that is “serviceable”.
Does this evidence prove that there are absolutely no schools at all in London, of any kind, where “more than three-quarters of children don’t speak English to a serviceable school standard”. Of itself, no. But it does rather suggest that if such schools exist at all, there are vanishingly few of them.
The DfE report contains a national (not London) breakdown of EAL pupils’ proficiency by year group (table 4, page 8). It shows that by Year 11, (GCSE time), 57 per cent had been fluent and 24 per cent, competent, making at least 81 per cent speaking English to a “serviceable” standard, with a further 13 per cent assessed as “developing competence”. Of those who continue to Year 13 (A-levels), 79 per cent of EAL pupils were fluent in English and another 17 per cent were rated competent – highly “serviceable” pretty much wall-to-wall.
However, London’s schools do, on average, contain considerably higher percentages of EAL pupils than other regions of England (more than double its average figure, the Oxford study says). Could there be “some” schools where the percentage of EAL pupils is so high and their fluency or competence in spoken English so low that they do indeed contain “more than three-quarters of children [who] don’t speak English to a serviceable school standard.”
Here we return to Lam’s office drawing my attention to “the first school in England where no pupils speak English as a first language” – a primary school in London which had been “the subject of reports” earlier this year. The reports in question turn out to have been by right-wing media organisations, though one of them was good enough to recognise how popular it seems to be with parents and children. The school in question was also subject to a different sort of report earlier this year – an Ofsted, which praised its “calm and respectful environment” and provision of experiences that help to “build leadership, teamwork and communication skills”.
But what about the spoken English capabilities of its pupils? The Ofsted report makes no mention of that. But Lam’s office claimed it is “extremely likely” that more than three quarters of pupils at schools “like” the one concerned “do not speak English to an EAL level of ‘fluent’.” To buttress that point, it said there is “no strong reason to believe” that the school “would differ significantly” from the “national norms” for EAL pupils it had drawn my attention to in the DfE report.
Well, Lam didn’t say “fluent”. She said “serviceable”. And her office only mentioned the “national norms” for Reception and Year 2 pupils. Primary schools go up to Year 6. So let’s accept that every child in the primary school in question is an EAL child, and see how proficient we might expect them to be at spoken English if the DfE report data from 2018 in Table 4 is taken as a predictor, as Lam’s office suggests.
I’m not the best at maths. But by my ready-reckoning, this shows that the average fluency level for EAL pupils in Years 1 to 6 in England is 26 per cent, or just over a quarter. So even by that strictest definition of “serviceable”, slightly fewer than three-quarters – not “more than” – would fall short. And if we include “competent” within “serviceable”, as we surely should, that average rises to 51 per cent.
So even if every child in a primary school is an AEL pupil, fewer than half – not more than three-quarters – will lack “serviceable” spoken English, if the DfE report figures are any guide. Moreover, by the time EAL pupils England-wide have reached Year 6, those fluent and those competent add up to 71 per cent nationally. Stick on a London top-up, and any school in the capital with no non-EAL pupils at all would have, in its highest age group, around three-quarters of pupils whose English was “serviceable” as opposed to not, and on course to grow.
What Lam did at the CPS event (pictured) and what her office has tried to justify, was spin out a line based on cherry-picked statistics and partisan media coverage in the cause of making a larger argument about the virtues of requiring everyone living in Britain to conform to a narrow set of norms she deems acceptable and essential – an argument whose dark, authoritarian, Trumpian logic she has gone on to make explicit.
Apart from anything else, it revealed an alarming ignorance about the strengths and human character of the UK’s capital city, her country’s global beacon and economic powerhouse. It is she who is culturally incoherent. She needs to learn London’s language. To put it kindly, she really must try harder.
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I first visited the Seven Sisters market in January 2009, noting its value and its charm. An improvised, warren-like affair within the dilapidated former Wards furniture shop by Seven Sisters station, it had a defining Latin American, particularly Colombian, flavour and offered everything from hairdressing to clothing to property services to, most of all, food: I bought chocolate from Argentina, coffee from Brazil and seasoning from Peru. Spanish was spoken. Salsa played. To some, it was fondly known as the Latin Village. Its future, though, was uncertain.
That was because Haringey Council wanted the site redeveloped, along with a building it owned on the other side of Seven Sisters Road at its junction with Tottenham High Road. The full scheme, devised in partnership with residential property firm Grainger, foresaw the demolition of the Wards building and its replacement with flats plus some ground level shops. The “Latin Village”, though, was not forsaken. Grainger agreed to provide new spaces for the market traders on the same spot, initially at discounted rents, and even to house them temporarily in the other half of the project while the Wards building was knocked down and replaced.
But that part of the story was among many elements omitted from what became a widely-accepted version of events, created by “anti-gentrification” activists and sold wholesale to processions of journalists. In this heroic narrative, the traders circled their wagons in united defence of what one “urban geographer” dubbed “working-class space” against dark forces of capitalist “displacement” by “luxury flats”.
The reality was messier. The adapted-for-outrage narrative made no mention of the affordable dwellings included among those being constructed across the road or the promised reprovision of market space. And the traders did not, in fact, speak with one voice – there were some very sharp divisions. Even hardcore Corbynites on the council, which was captured through a Momentum purge in May 2018 after a ruthless deselection campaign, found the conduct of some of those representing one group of traders unpleasant.
Crowdfunded legal challenges were mounted and failed, with one of them rejected in court as “inherently incredible”. Extreme and unproven allegations were made against council employees trying to maintain basic trading safety standards. Pearl-clutching horror was directed at a computer-generated image of the proposed redevelopment that showed a branch of Costa. Yet in real life the chain had long since inhabited a block almost next door that was routinely packed with “locals”, much like the large Tesco supermarket just down the road. Resistance tellings of the Latin Village tale were cleansed of such inconvenient impurities.
Then came Covid, with all its disruptions. The market closed and was unable to reopen when lockdown rules were eased. That was because in June 2020, Transport for London, the freeholder of the site – the Victoria line runs beneath it – assumed full responsibility for the market and found it had become a death trap. The warren of units was served by improvised electric and gas supplies, falling far short of safety standards.
As with its retailer tenants elsewhere in the capital, TfL gave the traders financial support as repairs got underway with a view to the market reopening in the autumn. But in October 2020, that plan was abandoned. There was just too much to be done. Columns and beams that held the indoor market up had not be treated to protect them against fire. On floors above, heavy fireplaces had no support beneath them. The roof was full of asbestos.
A new plan was made – to create an adjacent temporary market place while the regeneration programme continued. But in August 2021, Grainger pulled out of the Wards building part. For some, that decision represented a glorious triumph. For the market traders, though, it meant yet more uncertainty. And for local people, tired of the eyesore the Wards building had become, the inertia was set to continue. Advocates of a “community plan” for its retention and refurbishment had nice ideas and the support of the council, but no money and little prospect of raising the many millions required. It was clear that the only interested party able to make anything happen was TfL.
***
And that is what has now occurred. Earlier this month, a temporary Seven Sisters Market was formally opened, with spaces for 36 of the 37 traders from the old place. Partly indoors, partly outdoors and straddling land owned by Haringey and TfL, it is managed by Market Place on behalf of Places for London, TfL’s property company. I’ve paid a couple of visits, the first on a Sunday lunchtime, the second, last Monday in the company of Places for London chief executive Graeme Craig.
Despite heavy rain, the outdoor food area was doing steady business, including with a hungry me. The traders will pay no rent for the first three months as they and the revived south Tottenham destination find their feet, followed for 15 months by weekly charges similar to what they were paying before the old market closed. Longer-term, rents will be set in accordance with footfall and business activity. At the end of the day, it has to be economically self-sustaining.
This has been negotiated with a community benefit society (CBS) set up by advocates of the community plan – now under new leadership – along with much else. The configuration and allocation of the market units was a complicated process, partly because some businesses had specific needs – hairdressers and beauticians, for example, need lots of running water – and partly because of the enmities between some of the business owners.
Craig paid tribute to Haringey leader Peray Ahmet and cabinet member for placemaking, Ruth Gordon for their support for his endeavours, and to a Spanish-speaker seconded to Places for London from City Hall, too modest to be named in this article, who Craig considers to have made an outstanding contribution to working out solutions. It would be premature to say that all is sweetness and light. However, the general feeling seems to be one of so far, so good.
What next? The old indoor market is now a cleared, empty space. With its new, temporary replacement up and running, Places for London is looking to work with the CBS to determine the future of both the market and the ex-Wards building. Refurbishment is thought more likely than redevelopment, but the outcome needs to meet economic as well as social objectives – a core purpose of Places for London is to generate money for TfL to help it keep the tube and buses running.
Standing in the vacant space, Craig said the answer would “inevitably be mixed-use”, with “the market at its heart”. Some combination of retail, office and community uses is being envisaged. Places for London hopes a full partnership with the CBS might be established, though the sheer size of the task ahead, financial as well as in design and construction terms, means the TfL firm will continue to be a driving force.
The re-birth of the Latin Village, albeit in a temporary home, is something to be welcomed and enjoyed. At the same time, the bulk of Wards Corner remains in a limbo that might have been avoided had the original regeneration been completed. The old store is still partly propped up by scaffolding. The wide pavement outside, with its entrance to the tube, is still rather scruffy and confused, with one of the most disobliging cycle lanes in London (there is no lack of competition). The potential for a thriving London Latin quarter remains. The job of realising it has just begun.
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. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.
