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Vic Keegan’s Lost London 77: The moving statues of Trafalgar Square

We think of it as fixed and timeless, but history tells a very different tale
Victor Keegan

Few things in London look less lost than Trafalgar Square, with its imposing column commemorating one of Britain’s genuine heroes, Lord Nelson. But even here nothing is what it seems. Nelson’s column was never intended to be there. It was an afterthought, imposed by a parliamentary committee to the chagrin of the architect Charles Barry. He had intended to build the Royal Academy in the square to complement William Wilkin’s National Gallery on its  north side. It then took 30 years for the column to actually built – a solid construction unlike the Duke of York’s column nearby, which is hollow with an internal staircase.

The name Trafalgar Square was an afterthought too. It was originally going to be called King William IV’s  Square. Poor William. He not only lost his square but his plinth as well. What is now called the Fourth Plinth on the north-west side of the square – these days a permanent home for temporary statues – was originally intended for a bronze statue of him, but no one could raise the money for it. The plinth therefore remained empty until 1998, when the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) suggested the idea of rotating a series of modern sculptures. They generate praise and scorn in equal measure, but have the exhilarating effect of starting open air conversations about art in the middle of a capital city.

It goes on. The National Gallery itself was never intended to look quite like it does. Wilkins was very miffed when forced to incorporate columns and capitals from the nearby Carlton House (roughly where the Duke of York’s column now is in The Mall), which had been lying in storage since its demolition. This gave rise to widespread criticism at the time that the square lacked grandeur.  Well, you can’t win every battle.

The little noticed bronze statue of George IV on the north-east of the square was never intended to be there either. It was originally planned for the top of the Marble Arch – at a time when the arch itself was going to be outside Buckingham Palace – but George was plonked on this plinth as a temporary resting place and has been there ever since.

Another statue that has gone walk-about is that of General Gordon. There used to be an 18 foot high (pedestal) statue of him in the square between the two fountains before it was removed in 1943 and re-sited on the Victoria Embankment a decade later. And the fountains themselves are not the original ones, which were erected there to prevent large numbers of potential rioters assembling. They were given to Canada as a gift and replaced by new ones, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1937-39. A shorter journey was made by the earth excavated from the square – it was taken to nearby St James Park to level the land.

If Trafalgar Square is beginning to look like a game of musical statues, we may be tempted to look for continuity at the statue of the executed Charles I situated at the southern end of the square looking down Whitehall to his place of execution outside Inigo Jones’ Banqueting Hall. It is the oldest equestrian statue in London, created by a French sculptor Hubert La Sueur in 1633.

Except that it hasn’t been there for the whole of that time. After the Civil War, Cromwell’s parliament ordered it to be melted down. For its present presence we have to thank a brazier – a man appropriately called Rivet – who, instead of melting it down, hid it and sold it back to Charles II after the restoration of the monarchy. The statue too was restored to its original location has remained there ever since, on the site of the original Charing Cross, created by Edward I in the early 1290s as a memorial to his wife Eleanor. It can be regarded as the geographical centre of London, as distances from the capital are measured from a point beneath the statue.

A royal presence there is fitting, because Trafalgar Square is actually owned by the Queen, though the roads around it are controlled by Westminster Council. The square is now a revered place, especially since the northern end has been pedestrianised, transforming it overnight into a bubbling public space for gossiping and entertainments of all kinds from opera to food markets and celebrations of the Chinese New Year.

There may be a moral to this story. Maybe we should rotate all our statues on a regular basis, so that new ones can replace the giants of old who have long-since faded from the popular imagination.

The previous 76 instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here. Follow Vic on Twitter either as @VicKeegan or @LonStreetWalker. The man gets everywhere.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Buckingham Palace, Fourth Plinth, Marble Arch, The Mall, Trafalgar Square, Victoria Embankment

Lambeth: Labour wins Thornton by-election, but Lib Dem comeback bodes ill for Corbyn Brexit strategy

The seat was comfortably retained, but the ward has swung back to marginal status
Lewis Baston

The first London council by-elections of 2019 took place yesterday, on Thursday 7 February, in Lambeth and Tower Hamlets. The Lambeth contest was in Thornton ward and, unusually, it will soon be followed by another one. That is because two of the three councillors who’ve been representing the ward have recently resigned to take up politically-restricted jobs elsewhere. The first to step down was Jane Edbrooke, previously Labour’s Chief Whip on the council and a cabinet-level figure for several years. She has become senior head of policy and public affairs for the Big Lottery Fund and it is her seat that was up for grabs first too.

Thornton is an in-between sort of place, geographically at least. It lies east of Balham, south of Clapham and north west of Streatham, and has aspects of each of these places rather than a distinct identity of its own. As a whole, the area was known at one time as “Clapham Park”, but that name’s reach has shrunk so that it now applies only to a smaller area to the north. Somewhat unusually, Thornton neither contains nor borders a London Underground or a main line railway station. The South Circular road – a concept built from suburban cut-throughs rather than an actual highway – goes through the ward at Poynders Road.

The ward’s variety could be a microcosm of the “middle London” that one finds at the radius marked out by the Circular Road. The residential areas are a real mixture. There is less private renting than usual for London, but an even split between owner-occupation and social renting. Both types of housing are themselves very varied. There are some red brick council-built blocks and some striking post-war modernist estates.

Because the area was originally planned out as a model villa suburb by Thomas Cubitt in the 1820s, the estate bears the names of some of his other developments, giving one block the incongruous name of Belgravia House. The owner-occupied areas include typical Victorian terraces but also some spacious interwar houses in the area along King’s Avenue and even a sprinkling of mock-Tudor. Thornton residents tend to be industrious (it has a high rate of economic activity and of working age population), relatively high-earning, and comfortable with a mixed and ethnically diverse neighbourhood.

Politically, Thornton is quite interesting. The two most recent sets of borough elections produced massive Labour majorities, but these were exceptions in the ward’s electoral history. When the politics of class and housing was simpler, one could read off Thornton’s status as a Labour-Conservative marginal from its demographics. It switched back and forward in 1968, 1971 – when one of the defeated Tory candidates was future Prime Minister John Major – and 1978. In 1986 and 1990, it split its favours between the two main parties. Then, almost from nowhere, it went Liberal Democrat in 1994, but its marginality has continued – Labour in 1998, split in 2002 (the first time on the current boundaries) and narrow Labour wins in the elections of 2006 and 2010. As a footnote, according to the declared results, UKIP came second in 2014 but this was almost certainly the result of a counting error.

Yesterday’s by-election was a test of how well Labour’s metropolitan voting coalition is holding together. The answer was “not very well”. On a turnout of 27 per cent, the party’s share of the vote fell from 63 per cent in May 2018 to 45 per cent. The Liberal Democrats recovered their position as the main challengers following their coalition-era slump, rising from 10 per cent last year to 33 per cent. Their candidate, retired NHS worker Rebecca Macnair re-established Thornton’s status as a marginal ward with a hefty swing of 21 per cent from Labour. She was still 309 votes short of the winning candidate Stephen Donnelly, a young LGBT Labour activist who contested St Leonard’s ward in Streatham in 2018 where he lost to the Green Party.

Even though Donnelly himself is a pro-European, according to local MP Chuka Umunna he suffered from Labour’s “incoherent Brexit policy which constantly came up on the doorstep”. The national polls have not picked up much movement from Labour to Liberal Democrat or Green among Remain voters, but the Thornton result – in a ward that was probably over 80 per cent Remain in 2016 – is sobering nonetheless. In a divided ward like this, it is reasonable to conclude that there must have been an enormous swing in the middle-class areas.

Given how central to Labour’s electoral strength places like Thornton now are, this outcome is a worrying straw in the wind. It sets up an interesting backdrop for the next by-election in the ward caused by the January 2019 resignation of council leader Lib Peck to take a senior job at Sadiq Khan’s City Hall (Jack Hopkins has been elected by the Labour Group to be her successor). The Lib Dems will seek to capitalise on their strong Thornton result. Knowledge of the ward’s electorate and local issues gained from the first campaign will help to give them a realistic chance of victory in a seat where they looked dead and buried less than a year ago. But Lambeth Labour is a formidable campaigning machine, and the only safe prediction for that election is that it will be a battle royal.

Last updated at 14.27.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Brexit, Chuka Umunna, Conservatives, Green Party, Jeremy Corbyn, John Major, Kate Hoey, Labour, Lambeth, Lib Peck, Liberal Democrats, Sadiq Khan, South Circular, Steve Reed, Thornton ward, Ukip

Onkar Sahota: In health policy, social prescribing can help make many more Londoners truly well

The capital already knows there is more to good health than providing medicines, so let's build on our successes so far
Onkar Sahota

Social prescribing, the focus of a new draft vision from the Mayor of London, may sound like another healthcare fad. However, it has the potential to change how we think about looking after people.

A couple of years ago, an in-depth study with a group of East Londoners set out to discover what people thought of as a good life and what health services could learn from that. The answer was simple. Those Londoners told the researchers that they wanted three things: to feel good in themselves; to be connected to others; and to give and get back in equal shares.

Social prescribing is the new mission for the NHS to build this three-legged stool. If it is successful, new ways to recover and stay well will open up for people across the country. But we must be vigilant against the risk of merely tagging social prescribing schemes onto our existing, creaking health system. To really benefit Londoners, the Mayor’s draft vision must ensure this speeds up a deeper change in healthcare.

At its heart, social prescribing follows the simple ethos that there is much more to living well than not being unwell, and says that the NHS should help people do this.

In practical terms, this could mean, for example, that a GP treating a woman suffering from stress discovers that it arises from financial concerns and instead of just prescribing a medicine, could also connect that woman with a debt advice specialist. Or, if a child keeps showing up with bad asthma, then perhaps the answer isn’t to give out more powerful drugs, but to get the borough’s housing department round and fix the damp that’s causing the asthma problem in the first place.

The Marmot Review into health inequalities, published back in 2010, asserts that “taking action to reduce inequalities in health does not require a separate health agenda, but action across the whole of society”. These words are just as relevant today. The NHS should be as determined to reduce inequality as it is to cure specific diseases.

It’s not rocket science that health is shaped by the world around us. As the head of the Royal College of GPs, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard says: “Social prescribing is not a new idea – good GPs have always done it, it just didn’t have a name”.

We are now starting to see politicians develop the framework to enable GPs to give out social prescriptions, and City Hall is setting out its ambition for all Londoners to have easy access to them.

To realise this, we need to learn from noteworthy case studies in the capital. For example, you can’t talk about social prescribing with mentioning the Bromley-By-Bow Centre, which has turned an old church and a run-down park into a community hub running everything from employment advice to gardening clubs alongside GP appointments. There is also the Lambeth GP co-op, where patients grow food on NHS land, and the Guys and St Thomas’ charity, which has pioneered healthy high streets in Walworth.

Three things unite these pathfinders. Firstly, they ask what each individual they see needs from them in order to be truly well – not just how to fix what’s immediately in front of them. Secondly, the make the buildings themselves part of the project. Finally, each runs schemes that help their patients but also help develop the area where those people live, improving the wider determinants of health.

The Mayor and NHS bosses need to capture this radical and innovative spirit. Social prescribing is too big an opportunity to patch on as an addendum to a health service focused on hospital procedures, crucial as those are. This is a promising new path for our fractured welfare state. Let’s not miss it.

Onkar Sahota is the London Assembly Member for Ealing & Hillingdon and has been a family doctor in West London since 1989. 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Bromley-by-Bow, Guys Hospital, health, Lambeth, NHS, Sadiq Khan, St Thomas's Hospital

Devolution and nationwide investment key to strengthening London’s bonds with rest of UK

Mayor's policy chief says people in Bermondsey are as remote from central government as those in Barnsley
Charles Wright

Devolution is the key to boosting economic performance across the country and tackling “London-centrism”. That was the clear message as thank tank Centre for London this week launched its London, UK report on the increasingly fraught relationship between the capital and the rest of the country.

“London’s economy is crucial to the rest of the UK,” the report concludes, boosting jobs and investment across the regions and nations and, by running a “fiscal surplus”, effectively subsidising them to the tune of £32.6 billion in 2016/17.

But the capital’s dominance is also perceived as fuelling division, with London, eight times the size of the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, seen as too powerful a magnet, getting more than its “fair share” of resources, sucking in investment and talent and making life harder for other areas.

While survey findings show 77 per cent of non-Londoners agreeing that London contributes a lot or a fair amount to the UK economy, just 16 per cent recognise any significant benefit in their local area. Meanwhile, the polarised Brexit debate has highlighted differences and sometimes misconceptions – London’s households are poorer on average than the rest of the UK after housing costs – alongside a media conflation of “London” and “Westminster”.

“Hyper-centralisation” is the key problem, said Professor Tony Travers, director of the London School of Economics London research team, speaking at the report launch. “The persistent perception at the core of government that politicians at sub-national level could not be trusted to govern their areas properly.”

The devolution call was supported by Yorkshire MP Caroline Flint, co-chair of the Northern Powerhouse All Party Parliamentary Group. “The big issue is about how we devolve power and decision-making and funding,” she said. Successive governments had failed to address regional inequalities, said Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. “We need powerful city regions. If you are closer you make better policy.” 

And City Hall policy chief Nick Bowes reiterated London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s devolution call. “People’s views of Westminster are twisting their view of London,” he said. “But it’s a common cause. People in Bermondsey are as remote from Westminster as people from Barnsley. City Hall is three stops from Westminster but sometimes it feels like 300 miles. How are going to break the logjam?”

The report, written by On London contributor Jack Brown, calls both for London’s leaders to continue to make the case for further devolution, and for central government to appoint a cabinet minister to reboot the policy. “The UK must see more power devolved to a local level, with decisions taken as close to those who they affect as possible, in London and across the country,” it says. “This would not only enable the UK’s distinct localities to better shape policy to suit their own particular needs and specialisms, but will also help to reduce the sense that regions are competing for one ‘pot’ of funding, and lessen the impact of the perception that national government has a ‘London-centric’ mindset.”

The report also underlines the need for continued investment, particularly in transport. The government’s current “lock-step” commitment both to London’s Crossrail 2 and to Northern Powerhouse Rail is vital, it says. “Neither regional growth nor infrastructure investment across the country need be a ‘zero-sum game’. Growth in London does not need to come at the expense of other parts of the country.”

Leaving the EU heightens the urgency, with forecasts predicting regional economic divides getting worse, and Leave-voting regions expected to be worst off. Murison concluded: “We have to change now as there is no other option. Post-Brexit, the idea that the country can live on London’s credit card any longer is not sustainable.”

Categories: News
Tags: Brexit, Caroline Flint, Centre For London, Crossrail 2, Henri Murison, London School of Economics, Nick Bowes, Northern Powerhouse, Sadiq Khan, Tony Travers

Craig McWilliam: London’s property developers must help restore public trust in their contribution to the city

With strong public sector leadership, we can contribute to improving and opening up public debate about the challenges of good placemaking
Craig McWilliam

I’ve long believed London’s two greatest successes – its ability to attract and retain talent and its capacity to cater for a growing population with a growing quality of life – depend on its ability to create great places: urban neighbourhoods with rich histories and homes for people at all stages of life with mixed incomes and backgrounds.

To create and manage such places in London is profoundly challenging. We need closer and more creative collaboration between government and the real estate industry. But bold public sector leadership must be the starting point for success. Our civic leaders should be judged on the quality of the places their policies create. We need placemaking leadership with a compelling vision for growth as well as an honest depiction of the trade-offs required to deliver it.

Where we have seen that kind of public sector leadership, the private sector has delivered fantastic places in the last 20 years as London’s population has grown. But it’s also true to say that the benefits of these places are rarely associated with the actions of developers, who are often perceived to be the problem, rather than part of the solution.

The space and enterprise for new jobs, homes, schools, parks and public spaces − the infrastructure and amenities that allow communities to thrive − are often judged in a poor-quality public debate about development. It seems to me that this is partly the result of a failure of leadership. The truth is, at Grosvenor, like many property companies, we have failed to tell our story in clear enough ways. We have historically failed to describe development that is valuable in terms of the environment and society. And we have also failed to open ourselves up enough to public opinion.

Across London, you will have seen public trust in the planning process and the intentions of developers deteriorate. Creating and managing great places is complex. Clearly developers need to make profits and their investment needs to be socially beneficial. Like much in life, achieving both requires difficult choices and trade-offs to be made. These trade-offs must be explored and better understood − what the Resolution Foundation called the need to “animate the debate”. But when there is no single solution − particularly to the housing crisis − complexity makes simple assertions attractive. Too often we end in a stand-off between communities, councils and developers.

The result? Old homes become obsolete, fewer new homes are built, infrastructure becomes unfit for purpose and the space for new jobs, schools and public spaces is not delivered. Quality of life in our city deteriorates.

So what’s the way forward? The first condition for success is public sector leadership to cut through this binary debate. We need greater confidence from that leadership and stable policy to encourage private sector investment at scale − with a recognition that development cannot solve all of society’s challenges. And the industry needs to play its defining role. How can we be more transparent so that the choices being made and the outcomes being achieved are understood by everyone? How can we collaborate more creatively with the public sector so that the benefits of our investment are felt more quickly by local people? And how can we demonstrate our social and environmental purpose, and build public trust?

At Grosvenor, as part of broader efforts, we will commit this year to an experiment. We will take our plans for a new development and throw ourselves open to public opinion – so that we better explain ourselves, seek a wider range of views… And cede control. By opening ourselves up to scrutiny and new ideas, we want to see if − over time, and with others − a fuller, more representative democracy can characterise planning and development in London, in place of the febrile, oppositional debate today.

We will start with the largest ever canvasing of public views of trust in placemaking. Shaped by conversations with the industry and politicians, we will take the question of trust to the public. In the largest ever survey of its kind, we will test appetite for new ideas: new ways of working together to create great places.

We will discuss the options we all have − our councils, their communities and developers − to hold the public and private sector to account. Because it seems to me both public and private sectors need to change. People too often feel planning decisions are done to them, not with or for them.

I think we all have an enormous and positive opportunity to recast the approach to creating and managing great places in London, with a bold public sector vision for growth with politicians, as community leaders, understanding the cost and benefit of development and communicating both, and with a fairer balance of power between community, planning authority and developer that brings to life pragmatism, honesty and creativity from all sides.

Craig McWilliam is chief executive of Grosvenor Britain and Ireland. This article is an edited version of a speech he gave at London First’s recent Building London summit.

Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, Grosvenor Britain & Ireland, housing, planning

Dave Hill: Where are the national politicians who will speak up for the UK capital?

A reluctance to champion London's strengths or help it address its problems has infected the top end of Westminster politics
Dave Hill

We knew it was coming, but the blow is no softer for that. National government has confirmed that London local government budgets are to go on being squeezed while authorities elsewhere are favoured. Minister James Brokenshire, a London MP, has come up with a bit more money, but less than a third of what the boroughs say they collectively need to avoid reducing services still more after cutting, cutting, cutting for nearly a decade. The poorest of them have been hardest hit. The calculation seems to be that beating up London pays. It’s a flirtation with national calamity. Why is no one on the national political stage saying so for the whole UK to hear?

London, or shall we say “London”, now serves as a multi-purpose metaphor for all that Brexit Britain dislikes. Portrayals of the city as a worshipper of greed and hogger of taxpayer pounds flourish alongside its depiction as a crime-ridden “hellhole”, pocked with “no go zones”. These do not come solely from outside. Internal critics bring their own variations on these themes, railing against inflows of foreign wealth and foreign labour alike. Centre for London’s new report on the capital’s relationships with the rest of the UK found that “London” has increasingly become an unflattering shorthand for the home of national government and its failings, including indifference to the rest of the country.

There are issue of proper concern in some of this, but for the most part, they are populist distortions, misinformed and sometimes chillingly extreme. Yet national government and national opposition alike make no strong attempt to challenge them. Theresa May’s administration and many Conservative MPs, though wracked and riven over how best to depart the European Union, seem instinctively as one in regarding London as a politically hostile and even somewhat unBritish place, notwithstanding its increasingly vital role in powering the UK economy (for which, inconveniently, Margaret Thatcher was largely responsible). The Labour opposition, with its closet Leave leader and fractured electoral base, shares common ground with the Tories in signalling disquiet over regional disparities, with the crowd-pleasing implication that “rich London” is too powerful and indulged and therefore responsible for the “north-south divide”.

The intellectual poverty of these positions is as depressing as the material poverty of far too many Londoners –  perhaps the most glaring omission from the stream of anti-London sentiment that seems to have gathered strength in recent years. A combination of low pay, capped benefits and sky high housing costs have contributed to London having the highest poverty rate in the whole country. And that is just one example of why London-bashing is a misguided and damaging response to the UK’s current uneasy condition and a disastrous premise on which to build any prospectus for its future.

The other week I sat in on a ward panel meeting in an Inner London borough, with local councillors and police officers, civic-minded residents and a group of teenage boys and girls and youth workers. It was both a heartening and a saddening experience: heartening, because there was so much goodwill and good intention in the room; saddening, because the police were frank about what they can do with limited numbers, because the councillors and youth workers were candid about the difficulties of helping the young, and because the young people themselves were so clear about their fears, and their parents’ fears, about travelling too far from home. Here were problems that could be much more effectively addressed by investing more money in them, but such provision in “rich London” just keeps on shrinking.

This is very bad news for the city, fraying its social fabric and draining the optimism of too many of its people. It brought to mind a report published almost a year ago, commissioned by King’s College, which explored scenarios for London in 2030 and beyond. One was for the capital to become a “super city”, still open and international and boosted by the public investment it needs under a bold devolution settlement. At the other end of the scale, the report sketched a return to the London of the 1970s – shrinking, declining, more parochial, more closed and starved of national government support.

London needs to take steps to deal with its reputation problem and must continue to try to solve its many problems as best it can. But the slighting of the city, the undeclared, perhaps almost unconscious, cross-party consensus at Westminster that it has become politically unappealing to praise and support, whichever “London” that may be, is unfair on the city and its people and an indictment of the fearfulness, denial and myopic calculation that has such a grip at the top of Westminster politics at a time in UK history when the exact opposite is required.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, Centre For London, Conservatives, James Brokenshire, King's College, Labour, Margaret Thatcher

Capital must strengthen relations with rest of the UK, says Centre For London report

Image problem will not be solved by only stressing the city's financial power
Dave Hill

London must act immediately to improve its relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom, including by formalising an alliance of UK city mayors, encouraging cities and regions to make joint pitches for international investment and encouraging a closer embrace of the capital by people in other parts of the country, according to a new report.

Published by think tank Centre For London, the report, entitled London, UK, finds that the capital has “a serious image problem” among both decision makers and the general public, most of whom regard the capital as inaccessible to them and do not recognise the contribution its economy makes to the nation as a whole.

The report’s author, Jack Brown, said that London “has to work to show that it takes its national role as the capital of England and the UK seriously,” and most move beyond stating that it distributes its wealth around the country to “make the case for its place at the heart of the nation”.

Informed by interviews with local government officials, MPs and business and cultural leaders from across the UK and a YouGov poll of 2,000 British people, the report finds that recognition of London as the home of parliament helps confirm the view that national decisions are too London-centric at the expense of everywhere else.

A huge 68 per cent of non-Londoners respondents to YouGov’s poll said they did not believe London helped their local economies. This is despite the fact that London generates a huge annual “tax export”, amounting to over £32 billion in 2016/17, which helps fund public services and investment across the UK as a whole.

The Centre For London report has been welcomed by Conservative Westminster Council leader Nickie Aiken, City Corporation policy chair Catherine McGuinness, deputy London Mayor Jules Pipe and London Councils chair Peter John, and also by Labour Northern Powerhouse all party parliamentary group co-chair Caroline Flint and Northern Powerhouse Partnership director Henri Murison.

Murison said he was “particularly pleased” the alliance of mayors recommendation, saying that London’s Mayors and the Greater London Authority have provided a “good case study” for “metro mayors” in the north of England, and these already collaborate closely to their common benefit. “The concerns expressed by many in the North about the centralisation of our political decision making, and the lack of detailed understanding in Whitehall of the UK as a whole, should not be simplified as being about London,” he added. “Our criticisms of what has led to lower productivity [in the North] are not directed at Londoners or their Mayor, Sadiq Khan.”

Writing for On London, Len Duvall, leader of the Labour Group on the London Assembly, argued yesterday that the capital is being systematically underfunded by national government and that “anti-London sentiment that weaves its way through the corridors of Westminster and into our newspapers is unfair and unwarranted”. Yet he also warned that it will not help other areas “if we start pitching region against region and community against community”.

Jack Brown is a contributor to On London, which will be carrying further coverage of his London, UK report in the coming days.

Categories: News
Tags: Caroline Flint, Catherine McGuinness, Jules Pipe, Nickie Aiken, Peter John

Things the Guardian (still) hasn’t told you about Millwall FC and the redevelopment of South Bermondsey

Claims that led to the abandonment of moves to progress a long-stalled regeneration scheme have been dismissed as groundless, yet this remains unreported
Dave Hill

According to the Guardian:

Millwall Football Club is close to reaching an agreement with its local authority, Lewisham, that would see the club stay in its south London home. The club is now working on its own plans to transform the stadium and the land around it. There had been fears that Millwall would be forced out of Bermondsey by Lewisham’s attempt to compulsory purchase land around The Den. After a lengthy battle the council finally abandoned those plans under huge public pressure, although the threat remained that the process could be reignited to force the development through. However, the Guardian understands that under the new Labour mayor of Lewisham, Damien Egan, club and council have enjoyed increasingly productive discussions.

This is just the latest mischaracterisation by Britain’s most trusted newspaper of what’s been going on in a piece of South Bermondsey that Lewisham and successive London Mayors have been keen to redevelop throughout this century. The reality is as follows:

  • The only “fears” that Millwall Football Club would be “forced out of Bermondsey” have been those alleged as part of the club’s public relations strategy – a strategy for which the Guardian has been a legitimising conduit.
  • There was no “huge public pressure” for Lewisham Council to abandon the compulsory purchase order.
  • Any “increasingly productive discussions” between the club and Lewisham’s new Mayor, Damien Egan, are occurring primarily because of promises Egan made in the aftermath the abandonment of the compulsory purchase move – promises which have now put the club more in the driving seat than before.

Let’s recap in more detail. Lewisham partnered with a local developer, Renewal, in the first place because it had become the principal property owner within the 30-acre area earmarked for redevelopment and was thought able to deliver a scheme to the council’s liking. Renewal secured outline planning consent in 2012 for a scheme called New Bermondsey. Its proposals encompassed land right next to Millwall’s stadium, which Millwall and an associated community trust lease from the council.

Renewal was unable to reach a deal with the club, whose ultimate owner is the Boston-based US businessman John Berylson, to buy or jointly redevelop the land, and in 2016 the council decided to make use of its compulsory purchase powers to end the impasse. Millwall protested that losing the contested land would have “a devastating impact” and in early January 2017 the Guardian reported its claim that it might have to move to Kent as a result.

It is a claim that should be approached with care. The regeneration plan envisages Millwall FC being at its heart rather than going elsewhere, and the CPO did not encompass the club’s stadium. In any case, the enduring reputation of some Millwall fans for unpleasant behaviour – the Football Association is looking into reports of it at its recent match with Everton – makes it hard to imagine any town in Kent, where many Millwall fans live, or anywhere else wanting it turning up in its backyard.

Even more circumspection is merited by allegations the Guardian itself made about the council and Renewal when the CPO process got underway, principally that a charity set up by Renewal with council support to finance sports facilities as part of the scheme had made “false claims” about backing from Sport England. The Guardian coverage also made repeated play of the fact that Renewal is registered off-shore and of “historical connections” between the head of the company and councillors and officers.

What the Guardian has yet to do in its Millwall coverage, including in its most recent piece, is inform its readers that the company that owns 70 per cent of Millwall, Chestnut Hill Ventures, is itself registered in a tax haven – Delaware, as the Guardian itself had reported in a different context two years earlier.

The Guardian’s Millwall coverage has also not included that its repeated suggestions of questionable “links”, conflicts of interest and conduct by various parties have been closely examined and dismissed by two separate independent inquiries of considerable authority and depth:

  • In August 2017, government watchdog the Charity Commission dismissed claims that the charity had been engaged in dubious activities, such as money laundering. Its investigation concluded that statements about funding from Sport England had been “made in good faith and did not have the intention to mislead”.
  • In September 2017, a judge-led Freedom of Information tribunal rejected every one of a string of “red flag” claims of wrongdoing by Lewisham Council in connection with New Bermondsey made in support of an appeal against the council’s refusal to disclose certain information. The appeal was formally brought by a journalist (not from the Guardian), whom the tribunal’s members noted with “disappointment” had been acting as a proxy for the football club.

Following these findings, in November 2017, Lord John Dyson, then recently retired as the second most senior judge in the country, published a 140-page report, commissioned by the council, which concluded that all claims of impropriety and failure to follow correct processes by council officers were unfounded. Dyson also found “no evidence” to support the Guardian’s “central allegation” about false claims about funding for the sports charity.

But by that time, Damien Egan, who had previously backed the CPO, had declared that the Guardian’s allegations – the ones that have since been successively dismissed – “completely undermine Renewal’s credibility” and announced he was now opposed to the use of CPO powers to take ownership of the land next to Millwall’s stadium and in favour of the club playing “an active part in the future of any development”.

The contest to become Labour’s candidate for the 2018 mayoral election – and effectively mayor-elect – was underway. Momentum, the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting pressure group, is strong in Lewisham. It had formally endorsed a different candidate. Taking the side of an “offshore” property developer in its desire to acquire publicly-owned land was unlikely to endear Egan to that part of the local selectorate. He eventually topped the poll, pushing the Momentum candidate into second place.

So what of the topline of the latest Guardian piece about Millwall, with its assertion that the club is “close to reaching an agreement” with Lewisham? An agreement about what? “The club is now working on its own plans to transform the stadium and the land around it,” the Guardian says. To which some local observers respond that they’ve heard that one before. Serious, detailed proposals for conducting its own development work have never been presented to the council by Millwall.

Last August, it was reported that Millwall “will propose a plan” to redevelop its ground, The Den, and the land around it. The latest Guardian piece admits that “plans are at an early stage”. Stadium architects AFL have been appointed to come up with a design for an expanded stadium fit for a Premier League club, but a design is one thing, financing it and additional adjacent building work and getting it all through the planning process is something else. Millwall’s team is presently near the bottom of the Championship. The scheme is said to be ambitious, and would require outside investment. Talk is coming from the club that an investor is very interested, but nothing has yet been announced.

For now, Egan is being hailed by the club, its supporters’ association and the Guardian as a true people’s leader, demonstrating virtues his predecessor lacked. Others think he’s backed himself into a corner, leaving Millwall to pursue what Lewisham’s barrister depicted at the FoI appeal as its narrow, parochial interests.

In the meantime, two other heroes of the Guardian’s Millwall narrative have long since disappeared from the script. Councillor Alan Hall, who chaired the council’s scrutiny committee, no longer holds that post. Willow Winston, an artist who contested a Lewisham seat in the 2017 general election as a protest against the CPO and whose home was subject to it, reached a settlement with Renewal and moved some time ago.

Winston gave evidence at the FoI appeal. A sympathetic character in this mis-told tale, she expressed concerns felt by many about the rapidity and nature of change in the capital city. Tellingly, however, she was unable to persuade the tribunal team that the “huge public pressure” the Guardian still insists existed actually ever did. At most a handful of people lived in the New Bermondsey scheme area, which is dominated by industrial premises.

As Property Week has reported, Renewal intends to submit a new masterplan which will formally accommodate Millwall’s “emerging plans”. Renewal director Jordana Malik said that the company, the club and the council “are all in agreement that the regeneration of New Bermondsey should happen.” That is nice to hear. The scheme envisages 2,400 new homes, 35 per cent of them affordable, new sports facilities an a new London Overground station. What a shame it isn’t happening already.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Alan Hall, Damien Egan, Jeremy Corbyn, John Berylson, Labour, Millwall FC, Renewal, The Guardian, Willow Winston