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Dave Hill: Dramatising estate regenerations requires more than attacking ‘luxury’ Towers

A play about the redevelopment of a London housing estate reflected how reductive populism has drowned out productive debate about London's housing problems
Dave Hill

A proper goal for housing policy in London is not too hard to define. Ensuring that as many people as possible in the city are housed as well, as securely and as affordably as possible might serve as a foundation principle. A focus on maintaining an income and social mix within neighbourhoods that is both economically and culturally desirable would build on it usefully. The hard part is pursuing those goals effectively. Doing so has not got any easier in recent years by the embedding in mainstream discourse of certain “housing crisis” narratives that hide more than they explain and drown out productive debate.

The extent of this penetration into, in particular, the London liberal mindset was confirmed to me last week by a play called Towers, presented by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Though performed with great energy and containing some nice lines of satire, it mostly reproduced the now standard monochrome clichés. On the one hand, greedy property developers and callous or ineffectual politicians and, on the other, defiant residents of a housing estate facing demolition to make way for an oppressive, high-end tower block. The demarcation of characters into heroes and villains was close to absolute. The routinely untold parts of these regeneration stories, which are often the ones that matter most, were kept that way.

It has become an almost unchallenged Protest Left habit to screen out the dilemmas, complexities and inconvenient realities of getting more and better homes built in a city whose population continues to grow at the same time as land to build them on is in short supply and public money scarce. The year-in, year-out drain on shrinking council budgets of patching up blocks of flats built on the cheap 50 years ago, soaking up money that could be spent more productively on something else, does not interest them. The uncomfortable fact that what have come to be called “poor doors” – different entrances within mixed tenure housing developments for social housing and other “affordable” housing tenants – result from pragmatic trade-offs designed to maximise the amount of affordability within a project rather than gratuitous upper-class sadism, continues to evade them. The unsatisfactory reality that the bigger, flashier and more expensive the private housing consented to, the larger the amount of “affordable” housing likely to be derived as a by-product is one they continue to ignore.

Most damning of all is the absolute refusal to acknowledge even the existence of council estate residents for whom being rehoused in a new home could be the solution to the biggest problems in their lives – problems like thin walls, condensation, erratic heating, vermin infestations, adult children sleeping on sofas and crack addicts camped in tents on stairwells. There are residents of the Northumberland Park estate in Tottenham, which would have been demolished and rebuilt had the financial mechanism for doing so not been gloatingly stopped by a self-righteous alliance of middle-class Corbynites and Guardian journalists, who would pack their bags tomorrow given the chance.

All of the above form strands of estate regeneration stories across this city – strands that are every bit as strong and valid as those that make the headlines. They are part of the same complex weave that includes frightened, powerless people being evicted against their wishes, important, informal social networks being disrupted, developers pleading “viability” in order to go back on prior commitments, net losses of social housing and politicians motivated by “small state” moral objections to such homes even existing.

It is the tensions inherent in these scenarios that reveal the bedrock truths of estate regenerations: the difficulty of judging the case for demolition and rebuild against that for refurbishment or just leaving well alone; residents’ often sharply differing opinions and desires; the assessment of financial practicalities within the context of demands from many quarters; the pros and cons of competing good intentions. The interplay of local circumstance, political priorities, power, money and motivation is what determines the outcomes, and they are far too tangled and contradictory for any Good versus Evil portrayal to do justice to.

That interplay is also where the potential for enlightening drama lies, but Towers was not greatly interested. One of the more diverting characters was the architect of the proposed luxury skyscraper, torn between her desire to create a beautiful building and the requirement to class stratify its very structure, but she was also one of the less fully developed. The result was a new style piece of old fashioned agitprop, a play to confirm prejudices rather than challenge or examine them and that neglected issues it could have explored. In that respect at least, it accurately mirrored the sorry state of London’s housing debate and the wider political temper of our times.

Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, Guildhall, housing, social housing, Tottenham

Haringey: Planning committee faces crunch over Wood Green redevelopment plans

Councillors' decision about a revised redevelopment scheme they have previously rejected will be discussed behind closed doors
Charles Wright

A special meeting of Haringey Council’s planning sub-committee will take place on Monday night with the entire agenda deemed confidential under the Local Government Act 1972. What’s going on?

Behind closed civic centre doors, the matter to be debated provides a snapshot of key London housing story issues – affordability, viability, profit versus social housing – which in this case dates back to June 2015, when Marks and Spencer announced the closure of its 77-year old Wood Green High Road store.

With the nearby branch of British Home Stores also closing a year later, the borough’s local plan allocated a significant stretch of the High Road for comprehensive redevelopment. An application for the M&S site duly came forward last year.

The developers proposed new ground floor retail space plus 128 homes above it, ranging from three to nine floors in height. Just nine per cent of them were rated “affordable”, and even that low level was deemed “unviable” in an assessment by property consultants Savills. The council’s independent assessment by BNP Paribas challenged a number of the applicant’s assumptions, but it was nonetheless agreed that the plan was not commercially viable.

Council officers discussed changes to the plan with the applicant, and this resulted in a revised, slightly smaller scheme, that was still technically unviable but had fewer one-bed units and an uplift to 25 per cent affordable housing, with the council having first refusal on the purchase of those for rent, achieved by reducing profit levels.

It still wasn’t good enough for planning committee councillors, and in October they rejected the revised scheme by seven votes to four against officers’ recommendations and despite warnings that the council’s 40 per cent affordable policy applies across the borough as a whole, not to every individual site.

Now, with an appeal against that rejection pending, legal advice contained in confidential reports apparently describes the committee’s stance as a “doomed case”, with no arguments available to counter the viability assessments and therefore “no realistic prospect of success” should it seek to resist the appeal.

With the risk of legal costs awarded against the council possibly reaching £300,000 and the applicant reserving its right to alter the affordable housing offer, tomorrow’s closed doors meeting will seek councillor agreement to drop its objection to the affordability level as it stands.

A second reason for refusal, on the basis of “overdevelopment” of the site, would remain. Will councillors settle for 25 per cent of something rather than 40 per cent of nothing, or stick to their guns? We’ll know by the end of Monday night.

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, Haringey Council, planning, Wood Green

Unmesh Desai: London’s biggest football clubs must lead the fight against racism in their grounds

Making it easier for fans to report hate crime incidents would be an important short-term remedy
Unmesh Desai

The spectre of racism continues to haunt football stadium stands in London and across the country, yet the extent to which it goes unreported is extremely concerning. Sadly, footage that has recently been circulating in the news and on social media of players receiving abhorrent abuse from fans is just the tip of the iceberg. This is a burning issue that we can longer ignore and one that is turning the beautiful game ugly.

At the start of the month, during West Ham’s home game against Liverpool, we saw shocking Islamophobic abuse hurled at Mo Salah. Following this, I wrote to West Ham’s Chief Executive, Baroness Karren Brady, to commend the club’s instant condemnation of the incident alongside their close work with the police to bring those responsible to justice. I have also asked West Ham to go a step further and issue a statement denouncing the far-right organisation, the Democratic Football Lads Association (DFLA), which is purportedly linked to individuals involved in the club.

West Ham has one of the most dedicated fan communities in the country and carries out a huge amount of vital outreach work across my constituency in East London. As a life-long anti-racism campaigner, it is incredibly disappointing to me that a small group of fans is tarnishing the otherwise positive image of the club.

However, it needs to be reiterated that many other clubs in the capital are grappling with similar issues. In December, on a visit to Stamford Bridge, Manchester City midfielder Raheem Sterling was subject to alleged racial abuse from a small group of Chelsea fans. In North London, Arsenal continues to be shamed by incidents of anti-Semitic chanting from among their supporters, and the list goes on.

If robust action isn’t taken against perpetrators, they are likely to go on spreading hate much further beyond the grounds of their football club with a sense of invulnerability. Whilst most Premier League teams will impose lifetime bans upon those caught spreading hate, we clearly aren’t seeing enough of them being brought to book.

From Clapton CFC to Leyton Orient, London teams at all levels are putting in the work to enact cultural change around this. To give credit where it is due, top flight teams are also leading by example and co-operating with organisations such as Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card, and setting up educational initiatives to ensure the next generation of fans grow up aware of the dire consequences of hate crime.

All of these are important longer-term solutions. In the shorter term, the issue of under-reporting continues to hamper the efforts of police and communities to tackle all of the other forms of hate crime.

There are obvious practical problems involved in notifying the police about such incidents in the middle of a football match in a crowded stadium and it is extreme difficult for them and  for clubs to respond to allegations made in “real time”. This means that both the reporting and the investigation of incidents are likely to occur long after the final whistle. And that is why having the sufficient evidence and available witnesses to back up allegations is absolutely integral.

It is vital that Premier League teams lead from the front on this and work closely with the police to ensure supporters can come forward with information with complete confidence and through the most straightforward route possible.

In addition, the more profitable clubs in London could certainly do more to financially support match day policing at their grounds. Last season, taxpayers had to hand over £5 million to meet the costs involved in keeping fans safe, exposing a large deficit in the contributions of teams such as Tottenham, Arsenal and Chelsea.

At City Hall, I have asked the Mayor for the most up-to-date figures on reports of match day hate crime made to the Metropolitan Police. Once it is possible to assess and confront the scale of under-reporting, I will be working closely alongside the Mayor, who has made tackling hate crime a priority, to turn the tide on abuse at football grounds.

Unmesh Desai is London Assembly Member for Barking & Dagenham, City of London, Newham and Tower Hamlets and a member of the Assembly’s police and crime committee.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Arsenal FC, Chelsea FC, Leyton Orient, Metropolitan Police, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United

Gareth Bacon: London should accept Brexit and lead the country to further greatness

Leaving the EU should be seen as a progressive step on a par with Chartism and the Suffragette movement
Gareth Bacon

If, three years ago, you had tried to have a discussion with almost any Londoner about hard borders, the difference between a customs union and the customs union or about backstops to backstops, it is likely that you would have been met with a look of bewilderment. Yet turn on a radio or TV in 2019 and you’d be lucky to go five minutes without hearing these now everyday terms.

You would think from the shift in discourse that our politics had been radically transformed since 2016, but the truth couldn’t be more different. In reality, many of our politicians are simply using this new language to conduct the same debate that should have been settled by the EU referendum. Stay or go. Remain or Leave. Brexit or not Brexit.

Among others, Sadiq Khan is guilty of this. He will wax lyrical about the merits of the UK staying in the single market, but he is just raking over old ground. The British people, in their wisdom, decided that we should diverge from the EU, but staying in the single market would mean that we would be tightly aligned. The London Mayor is still banging on about the merits of Remain.

It’s nothing new to say that some Remainers haven’t accepted the referendum result, but little focus has been given to why they haven’t. These Remainers, many of whom are “children of Blair”, view Brexit through a narrow economic prism and are both the architects and disciples of Project Fear. Politicians like Mayor Khan cannot understand why anyone would ever want to commit such reckless self-harm and wholeheartedly believe that this country will be nothing less than an economic basket case outside of the EU.

The Mayor is fond of saying that “nobody voted to be poorer”, but during the referendum campaign he and other Remainers spent the whole time loudly claiming that Brexit would be an economic catastrophe. The fact that Leave won demonstrates two things: one, people didn’t buy Project Fear, two, more importantly, they didn’t vote to leave for primarily economic reasons.

Remainers who constantly push the economic argument, underpinned by their Project Fear rhetoric, have fundamentally misunderstood what Brexit is about – it is not about economics, it is about democracy. It is about restoring faith that the politicians they send to Westminster actually have the power to govern the country and that it will be British courts that enforce the laws passed by the British parliament, without the interference of institutions that are wholly unaccountable to the British people.

The fact is, those who voted to leave the European Union did so in the hope of restoring and renewing democracy – it wasn’t the economy, stupid.

Brexit is all too often seen as a regressive, backward-looking movement spearheaded by xenophobic Little Englanders. But the reality couldn’t be more different. Those who voted Leave were mostly optimists who felt that this great country could be greater still. As the polls carried out straight after the referendum showed, voters put their X in the Leave box in order to have more control over the laws that effect their lives by restoring their ability to hire and fire those who govern them. Far from disparaging Brexit, we should be holding it up as one of the great progressive movements, alongside those of the Suffragettes and Chartists.

If certain Remainers are reluctant to understand why the country voted to leave, they are even more unwilling to acknowledge the democratic benefits that leaving the EU will undoubtedly bring. Instead, they insist on being cheerleaders for the unelected and thoroughly unaccountable European Commission and European Court of Justice, while trying to overturn the result of the greatest democratic exercise in Britain’s entire history. This toxic cocktail puts them on the wrong side of history, desperately trying to defend the status quo and stop the evolution of democracy. Yet, incredibly, it is the Leavers who are derided as the reactionaries.

This behaviour hasn’t just been frustrating for the majority who voted Leave, it has also been deeply damaging to our national interest. A polarised Westminster, clearly split on whether to deliver on the June 2016 vote, has given Brussels the distinct impression that we are not entirely serious about leaving. What kind of incentive does this give the EU to, for example, make concessions on the backstop?

The majority of Londoners voted to Remain, and Sadiq Khan has consistently drawn on this to justify his continuing opposition to Brexit. London, as the nation’s capital, enjoys a deserved prominence on our political scene, but Brexit was a national decision, and it is vitally important that London is seen to accept the national result and plays a leading role in building for the future with energy and optimism. For the Mayor or other Londoners to continue to undermine Brexit will ultimately benefit no one, including the most ardent Remainers.

There is still the danger that, given parliament’s ambivalence, this could culminate in a half-baked, half-in-half-out deal which would fail to satisfy anybody or finally resolve this crucial question.

It could all be so different. If, rather than continuing to fight the Stronger In campaign, politicians of all stripes had focussed their efforts on making Brexit work, we would now be in a much stronger position. Entirely sure that the UK was serious about leaving, the EU would be working to get the best Brexit, not playing divide and rule in an attempt to condemn our country to a state of vassalage.

We have now reached the eleventh hour of the Brexit negotiations, but the question remains the same. Should the UK leave the EU? The people gave their verdict in June 2016. It is time for the politicians to honour it.

Gareth Bacon is London Assembly Member for Bexley & Bromley and leads the Assembly’s Conservative Group.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, Conservatives, EU Referendum, Sadiq Khan

Thamesmead Waterfront development joint venture plans announced

Thirty-year project is expected to see thousands of new homes built on the banks of the Thames in south-east London
Dave Hill

One of London’s biggest housing development sites is set to be delivered through a partnership between a leading housing association and a major international property developer, it has been announced today.

Peabody, London’s oldest housing charity, has selected Australian regeneration giant Lendlease as its preferred bidder to form a joint venture company to plan and build the 250-acre Thamesmead Waterfront development, in which 11,500 new homes are expected to be built over the next 30 years.

The site, which includes 2.5 kilometres of undeveloped land along the banks of the Thames in south-east London, anticipates having a new Docklands Light Railway station at its heart, better connecting a relatively isolated area with the rest of the city.

The project will also “rejuvenate the existing town centre,” according to the two organisations, who say they will “create one million square feet of new cultural, community and commercial space for Thamesmead and for London”.

Peabody has been the principal landowner in the wider Thamesmead area since 2014, and is already engaged in a major regeneration programme in partnership with the boroughs of Bexley and Greenwich, whose boundary the area straddles, Transport for London and the Greater London Authority. A new building provided as part of the Crossrail project was opened at Abbey Wood station, which serves another part of Thamesmead, in October 2017.

Thamesmead as a whole is characterised as spanning an area the same size as Central London, from King’s Cross to Charing Cross and Bond Street to Liverpool Street.

Peabody chief executive Brendan Sarsfield describes a “shared vision” of creating “thousands of new homes by the Thames” and powering the local economy with new commercial spaces and employment. His counterpart at Lendlease, Dan Labbad, said, “We are excited to collaborate with Peabody, the local community and businesses” and anticipated offering “a fresh approach to living in London,” aided by the area’s proximity to water and wildlife.

Details of the joint venture will be finalised by the summer, the two parties say.

Categories: News
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Vic Keegan’s Lost London 78: Mapping the slave traders’ homes

Some of Fitzrovia's most handsome homes were built from the profits of sustained and brutal human trafficking
Victor Keegan

The blobs in the image above look like something that has escaped from a Damien Hirst painting, but they represent something much more serious. Each marks the location of a house once owned by someone who made a fortune from the slave trade. They cover a very small area of London – just the streets around Portman Square and Welbeck Street – but they are part of a much bigger London map. 

Britain’s involvement with the slave trade was, at least until recently, rarely taught about in schools, having been in effect airbrushed from our history and almost totally lost from memory. But we are now becoming more aware of our shameful role in it, not least because of research done at University College London (UCL), which has been listing all the houses – and there are lots of them – in Central London and elsewhere that were owned by slave traders. 

This was made possible because when slavery ended in 1833 (26 years after it was officially abolished in 1807), slaveowners – ludicrously – were able to claim compensation. The transatlantic trade led to the deaths of at least 10-12 million Africans and quite likely many millions more over a period of more than 300 years. 

UCL researchers have identified 45,000 claims worth an amazing £20 million – over £2 billion at today’s prices – paid out by UK taxpayers, half of which can be linked to London properties. The map shows those occupied at that time by slave owners in Fitzrovia alone. Details of the project, including an interactive version of the map complete with names, can be found here.

James Blair of Portman Square was one of the biggest beneficiaries. He received £83,530 (worth tens of millions today). UCL say that about 40 per cent of the recipients were women and a very small minority were “of colour”, presumably the sons or daughters of slaveowners.

Most of them would have been churchgoers, rarely questioning what God up there might have thought of what they were doing to his fellow creatures down here. The fact is that many of the stately homes in London and elsewhere in the country were financed by the slave trade and subsequent compensation for its ending.

The trade wasn’t, of course, confined to London. Liverpool became the global centre of the slave ship trade and made many people rich, including Sir James Penny – after whom Penny Lane of the Beatles song was inadvertently named – who was one of the most prominent shipowners and defended the slave trade in parliament right until the end.

It is eerie to walk about these parts of London knowing that some of the finest homes in them were built with wealth created by the slave trade. So many people were involved: some directly as plantation owners and many others simply as consumers of sugar and spices which were produced by slave labour. Once you discover this part of their history, walking those streets of London never feels the same again.

All previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Fitzrovia, Portman Square, University College London, Welbeck Street

The deep political roots of the London Underground staff red tabard dispute

Reforms kicked off by Ken Livingstone 12 years ago are still facing union opposition
Dave Hill

Londoners using the Underground will have noticed station staff wearing a new item of uniform this week – or if they haven’t, the change isn’t working. In line with a recommendation by LondonTravelWatch, the capital’s official transport users’ watchdog, those providing passengers with help and advice have begun wearing bright red vests or tabards to make them more visible. I spotted my first one yesterday at Bank (see photo above).

This seems like a good idea. However, the RMT union, to which many station staff belong, is not happy about it and has decided to ballot its London Underground staff members for “industrial action short of a strike”. The union’s case is that the tabards are essentially a crude fig leaf designed to conceal a reduction in the number of station staff to a level it thinks unacceptable. In its words:

“This attempt at tackling the shortage of station staff by ‘enhancing’ their visibility is a pathetic and detrimental approach by the company that is creating new potential operational safety problems on station platforms, discomfort and overheating of staff due the construction of the red tabards and renders them a target for anti-social behaviour.”

Those puzzled that a quite modest sartorial reform should attract such opprobrium can find an explanation in history. The change was one of a number suggested by London TravelWatch resulting from its review of the effects of a programme of Tube station ticket office closures implemented under Boris Johnson in his second mayoral term.

The review was requested by Johnson’s successor Sadiq Khan in September 2016, shortly after his election, and published near the end of that year. As TravelWatch says, they have since worked with Transport For London to implement their recommendations and most of them have now taken place. The introduction of the red tabards, or vests, as TravelWatch calls them, is one of the last items on the list.

However, the RMT has opposed the entire ticket office closure programme and its associated affects on staff employment and duties from the start. Ructions have continued into Khan’s mayoralty, with strikes taking place and Jeremy Corbyn asking the Labour Mayor to reopen some of the ticket offices closed.

Yet the roots of the struggle over ticket office closures and the deployment of Tube station staff goes back even further, to Ken Livingstone’s time at City Hall. The first London Mayor was also the first to argue that staffed ticket offices on many stations were an anachronism that could not be justified financially. In June 2007 he published closure plans that were more much more extensive than those Johnson initially brought in. The latter even fought the 2008 election opposing them, with a carefully-worded pledge to ensure “there is always a manned ticket office at every station.”

Here’s what Livingstone told the London Assembly at the time he came up with his closure proposals:

“The huge success of Oyster cards has dramatically reduced the demand for tickets from ticket offices, which means London Underground can reduce ticket office opening hours so as to redeploy staff to other parts of the station where they can better assist customers, provide direct assistance and reassurance, and be visible to help address security issues.”

I wrote about all this for the Guardian back in 2010. The bottom line then, as now, was job losses and working conditions. These are legitimate concerns for a trade union and also the context for the RMT’s objection to the red tabards, however absurd some think that is. The implications of what Red Ken set in motion 12 years ago have not played themselves out yet.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, London TravelWatch, London Underground, RMT, Sadiq Khan

Dan McCurry: Cycling can help reclaim the Thames Path for us all

An imaginative scheme to get around the interruptions would benefit cyclists, walkers and all Londoners.
Dan McCurry
The Thames Path has been a frustration to ramblers and cyclists for decades due to the number of private developments that have walled off the route or been built to the water’s edge. Seeking access from landlords has proved fruitless, while the ways around the obstacles are confusing and joyless. However there is a way to make the path continuous and give the river back to the people.

All along the Thames are timber quays jutting out of the water which were once used for mooring shipping. By erecting quays of a similar design along the stretches of the river where the path is obstructed an unbroken cycling and walking route could be made without damaging the aesthetics of the river or its surrounding architecture.

I took a cycle ride from Island Gardens at the bottom of the Isle of Dogs to St Katherine’s Dock at the west of Tower Hamlets to see if this project would be feasible. The first obstacle was an inlet for Poplar and Limehouse Rowing Club. The route around the back of is short and pleasant and so not much of an interruption. However, continuing along the path I reached Ferry Street, where a large and lengthy development completely blocks the way. A quay along the river would be required for to make this section accessible.

Having boxed around via Westferry Road, I got back onto the river and continued up as far as Limehouse where I was forced to divert again. I once again boxed around and came out at Limehouse Basin where I passed over the existing bridge and entered Wapping. It struck me that the building of quays would be feasible all the way up to the western end of Wapping, where obstacles such as the River Police station and the HMS Prescott reach far out into the river, but it wouldn’t be impossible to move them.

I continued my route into Wapping and found myself on the beautiful cobbled streets. I love the heritage value of these, but with my narrow tyres, cycling over them wasn’t a pleasant experience. I don’t propose losing the cobbles, but I think we can overcome the problem for cyclists by taking an idea from the parks department. “Meadowing” is the term used for mowing the border of a lawn but leaving the centre fallow. It looks more beautiful than a standard lawn, and the same idea could be applied to a cobbled street. A strip of smooth tarmac for cycles but with the exposed cobblestones on either side would look lovely and allow access to cyclists too.

I ended my journey at St Katherine’s Dock convinced that this project is viable, but policy makers would have to be convinced. Ramblers are the traditional lobbyists for a continuous pathway, while cycling attracts resources. The two can surely coexist. An unbroken and accessible Thames Path would attract recreational cyclists, as distinct from the fast commuter type. The commuters would rather use the main road, which allows speed and progress, than the scenic but slow route I’m describing here. In fact, a new road route down the Isle of Dogs is already in the planning, so this would be the natural choice for speed cyclists.

Currently, policy makers are overwhelmingly focused on making large roads accessible for cyclists. This is obviously important for safety reasons, but their stated aim of increasing the number of cyclists is seriously hampered by this approach. The number of people who buy a bicycle but quickly abandon it must be huge. This is because cycling on main roads is very intimidating. However, the alternative of using side roads is problematic too, as they are full of bumps and potholes and therefore incredibly uncomfortable.

Policy makers should actively seek to create routes where cyclists can discover the joy of cycling, with the view that some will progress to regular cycling and move onto the main roads later. The Thames Path idea would be a significant contribution to this and wouldn’t be a hindrance to walkers if well managed to keep cycling speeds down. In my experience, speed bumps don’t work for cyclists in the same way as for motorists. For a cyclist, the discomfort of the bump is not much reduced by slowing down to go over them. I would rather avoid a route altogether than endure bumps, so this is not a good solution. A better way to police aggressive cyclists is to hand out fines.

London was born on the resource of the River Thames. It was once the key to our economy and is now a source for our pleasure. The idea that few private properties can stop the many from enjoying this gift of God is a great injustice and a loss to the wellbeing of all Londoners. A project to reclaim the right to walk from the City to the Estuary is beckoning.

Categories: Comment
Tags: cycling, River Thames