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Londoners want more housebuilding but wary of Green Belt development and high-rise, says new survey

Dave Hill

A majority Londoners support the principle of new housebuilding in their local neighbourhoods, but many don’t accept that using Green Belt land or constructing more high-rise flats are necessary to achieve this, according to a new opinion poll.

The survey of 1,151 adults living in Greater London found that 62.1% of them would be either “likely” (36.6%) or “very likely” (25.5%) to support increased housing development in their neighbourhood amid widespread pessimism among renters that they will own a home within the next five years (70%).

Asked about their priorities for new housing developments, the largest percentage of respondents placed affordability first, followed by protecting green space as a whole, while increasing housing supply overall came bottom of a list which also included job creation, family-sized homes and social housing. However, a separate part of the poll which asked people if they thought increasing the supply of homes of all types would “make housing cheaper for everyone” produced a small majority of 51% in agreement.

More than half of those surveyed believed that or their local council (25%) or other “social housing organisations” (26%) were most likely to deliver their development priorities, with local businesses (14%), national government (14%), private developers (13%) and the Mayor of London (8%) lagging behind. Labour was seen as the political party

The poll, conducted by Forefront Market Research for communications agency Forty Shillings found strong support (over 70%) for the propositions that it is “more important to build homes that local people can afford even it it means fewer homes built” and that “we need to build low-rise, attractive housing that people actually want to live in”.

Labour was the party Londoners expressed most confidence in to provide the housing they want, securing 36% support compared with 20% for the Conservatives and 10% for the Liberal Democrats.

The poll follows research by YouGov for business group London First and property giant Grosvenor Britain and Ireland conducted in April, which found that 57% of Londoners agree that more homes should be built in their local areas.

Both Forefront’s Alex Crowley and Wyn Evans of Forty Shillings commented on the mismatch between Londoners’ apparent desire for more homes to be built and the approaches to fulling it advocated by many policymakers and developers. “The industry must do more to make the case for the housing projects they are currently delivering,’ said Evans, while Crowley said they needed to listen more carefully to Londoners concerns if they were to build “a new consensus around what’s needed to crack this problem.”

Siobhain McDonagh, Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, has been leading a cross-party campaign to have Green Belt land around London stations re-designated, arguing that at least a million homes could be built on it.

 

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, council housing, Green Belt, Grosvenor Britain & Ireland, housing, housing associations, London First, Mitcham, Morden, Siobhain McDonagh, YouGov

Labour wins well in deferred Brent council ward election

Lewis Baston

The very last contest of the 2018 London borough elections was held in Willesden Green ward in Brent on Thursday 21 June. As with the one that took place the previous Thursday in Southwark, this was a deferred election brought about by the death the weekend before the full election day of 3 May of a veteran councillor. Willesden Green’s loss was Lesley Jones, who had been a Labour councillor for Willesden Green since 1998 and also served a term as Brent’s Mayor.

Willesden Green ward is based around the High Road in Willesden, south of the Jubilee Line between Willesden Green and Dollis Hill stations. It is a hyper-diverse tract of a very diverse borough, with communities from all over the world represented amid its late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces. In the local elections of 2006 and 2010, when the Liberal Democrats were doing well against Labour in areas like this, the ward was very competitive – indeed, the Lib Dems were its leading party, with Jones taking one of its three seats for Labour. But Lib Dem strength had shallower roots in Brent than in north Southwark, and the party was severely punished for joining the coalition national government with the Conservatives. In 2014, Labour gained both the Willesden Green Lib Dem seats. The latter lost all but one of their Brent councillors in that year and she subsequently went Independent.

There was no sign of any Lib Dem revival in the deferred election result in Willesden Green or of any other challenge to Labour’s dominance. The party won nearly 70 per cent of the vote, a swing of (depending on how exactly one calculates it) seven t0 eight points from the Conservatives and more from the Lib Dems. The council team for Willesden Green now comprises Fleur Donnelly-Jackson (who won 1,683 votes), Elliott Chappell (1,679) who replaced Lesley Jones on the ballot, and incumbent councillor Tom Miller (1,618), who was elected alongside Jones in 2014. Shaka Lish of the Green Party was their closest competitor, a long way behind with 289 votes. Valid turnout was 25 per cent, which is significantly lower than that in the other Brent wards in May.

This election was a more encouraging indicator for Labour than the Southwark Council result and the Lewisham East parliamentary by-election also held last week, in that the party’s Corbyn-era coalition of support held up very well. Labour now has an enormous majority on Brent Council, with a group of 60 councillors facing opposition only from three Conservatives. Given that Brent local politics can often seem to involve starting a fight in an empty room (the six-strong Tory contingent elected in 2014 spent most of its term divided into two rival groups of three), managing a group of this size will take skill and luck on the part of council leader Mohammed Butt and chief whip Sandra Kabir.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Borough elections 2018, Brent, Dollis Hill, Elliott Chappell, Fleur Jackson, Jubilee Line, Labour, Lesley Jones, Lewisham East, Liberal Democrats, Southwark, Tom Miller, Willesden

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 46: the Gray’s Inn time warp

Victor Keegan

On December 28 1594 a play was performed in the hall of Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court, by what the hall’s diary described as “a company of base and common players”. After a riotous evening of drunken revelling the official report dismissed it as The Night of Errors. But those “base and common players” were in fact William Shakespeare’s troupe, including Shakespeare himself, and the play was The Comedy of Errors. On special occasions it is still possible to see the play staged in the very hall – albeit reconstructed – where it was once put on with Shakespeare in the cast.

Gray’s Inn could almost drown in its own literary history. Its Elizabethan alumni include George Chapman, the playwright whose translation of Homer were drooled over by John Keats, and Thomas Middleton, who co-wrote Macbeth and is now enjoying a renaissance in his own right. But its most celebrated resident was Francis Bacon, whose statue adorns Gray’s Inn’s South Square (pictured above). It is a tad ironic that the large garden at the back in the Inn which almost certainly inspired Bacon’s famous essay Of Gardens, which began “God Almighty first planted a garden, and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures” was only constructed after he had acquired the neighbouring parkland and cleared the “lower orders” away. Paradise comes at a price for some. 

Gray’s Inn is curious. The footprint of the building is almost exactly as it was in medieval times, but it has been so heavily rebuilt that hardly any of the stonework is original. If you look at the hall and chapel from the north, they are built roughly where the town house or “inn” of its first owner Lord Grey of Wilton (in Herefordshire) would have been. But little remains from medieval times except a holy water font embedded in the wall, recycled bricks inside, some majestic stained glass (not least of Francis Bacon) and possibly some window frames. However it is likely that the screen in the hall – dating to the 1590s – could have been there at the time of Shakespeare’ performance. 

If you come into Gray’s Inn by way of Gray’s Inn Road you will be entering one of the time warps of London. Suddenly, the roar of City’s traffic dims to near nothingness and you can walk through territory little changed for hundreds of years and with barely  a moving car in sight. Every evening a curfew bell is still heard in South Square, one of only two in London (the other being in the Tower of London), that preserve the tradition of a “curfew” or “curfeu”, a word derived from the French “couvre feu” or cover the fire, which, had it been observed in 1666, might have prevented the Great Fire of London. 

These days, the curfew in South Square is generated electronically rather than with an actual bell, but at least an old tradition is being maintained.

Previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here, and Vic’s book of London poems can be purchased here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Gray's Inn, Tower of London, William Shakespeare

Haringey: ‘Corbyn Council’ set to demolish unsafe homes on Broadwater Farm estate

Dave Hill

The Labour local authority elected following the Momentum-led removal of previous councillors who had backed regeneration plans involving the future redevelopment of the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham is set to sanction the demolition of two of the estate’s housing blocks.

A 70-page report to be considered at the first meeting of the new cabinet of Haringey Council, dubbed the nation’s first “Corbyn Council” by a local activist, describes the demolition and replacement of the homes as its “preferred option” after survey work discovered “structural issues” in “a number of blocks” on the estate that make them vulnerable to gas explosions, with the two in question, Tangmere and Northolt, found to be at particular risk.

In the report, the council’s deputy leader Emine Ibrahim, who is also its cabinet member for housing and estate renewal, acknowledges its finding that “it is possible to strengthen the two blocks to bring them up to habitable standard” but also writes that although “we don’t like the idea of demolishing homes” the cost of strengthening work would be “very high indeed” and in any case would not by itself “offer our residents the decent council homes we are committed to ensuring our tenants live in” (page 31, paragraph 2.2).

The cabinet is to recommend that residents of Tangmere are temporarily rehoused immediately and piped gas removed from the block by October. Ibrahim, whose cabinet responsibilities include Broadwater Farm resident engagement, also writes of Tangmere and Northolt that “the decision on the future of these blocks will not be taken now” because of a commitment to consult their current inhabitants. “We will fully take their views into account before taking any final decision either to demolish the blocks or to strengthen” (page 31, para 2.3). Ibrahim’s cabinet responsibilities include

The financial estimates for this early “key decision” for the new council says that “a total estimated cost” of strengthening  the “ziggurat” style Tangmere would be £19m or £164,000 per flat when other immediate investment needs are taken into account” and £14.6m or £145,000 per flat in the high-rise Northolt. The alternative of rebuilding the homes would also be expensive – in the range of £32-£54 altogether, according to the report, though this would “represent an investment in high quality new homes with a longer life and lower maintenance costs” and some of the cost “would likely be eligible for external grant which would reduce the cost to the council”.

Ibrahim, is a national vice chair of Momentum and was closely involved in the the candidate de-selection programme, which saw her replace her predecessor with the cabinet housing brief Alan Strickland as candidate and now councillor for Noel Park ward. She had previously represented Harringay ward, but chose to challenge Strickland instead having earlier put herself forward as an alternative to the then council leader Claire Kober in Seven Sisters ward without success. She sometimes spells her forename “Emina”, as in her Twitter profile.

The de-selection campaign focussed on the attitude of sitting councillors to the proposed formation of a 50/50 joint venture company with regeneration specialists Lendlease with the aim of redeveloping the council’s current civic centre, offices in Wood Green and commercial properties as well as housing stock the previous administration considered to be of low quality at higher densities and with a wider tenure mix. Broadwater Farm was expected to eventually be included in the programme. The survey work into the safety of its blocks began under the previous administration.

 

Categories: News
Tags: Claire Kober, Emine Ibrahim, Haringey, housing, Jeremy Corbyn

Regenerating London: building a better city means winning more hearts and minds

Dave Hill

Such is the allure of London protest politics for media of every type and size that the city is now routinely depicted as a place where venal politicians, rich foreigners and grasping property tycoons conspire on a daily basis to destroy neighbourhoods and “push out the poor” against the wishes of “the community”. From this crude simplification of a vastly more nuanced reality – one often perpetuated with the greatest fervour by, of all people, academics and journalists with supposedly “quality” news organisations – flow populist fatuities about so-called “social cleansing” and the iron certainty, often found among people of truly good intentions, that the word “regeneration” can only ever stand for unalloyed evil that must be resisted at every turn.

It was then, a relief as well as a pleasure to chair the recent sold-out On London/London Society event about regeneration and “good growth” at the office of architects Squire and Partners in Brixton with a panel of people who are daily immersed in the practicalities, challenges and dilemmas of making this fast-expanding city grow in the best possible way for the largest possible number of its inhabitants. From them, we heard a rather different version of London’s recent evolution and the barriers to making it proceed in ways that secure and sustain public support and better serve the common good.

Lisa Taylor, chief executive of Future of London, spoke of the struggle faced by boroughs and other “placemaking” agent to mobilise the involvement and optimism of residents in processes of change they often end up welcoming when mistrust, frustration and anger can be more intense and conspicuous – a struggle made no easier when local government cuts are resulting in overwork and the loss of experienced staff at a time when energy and know-how are particularly needed due to a greater reliance on private finance to get things done. Colin Wilson, a former senior GLA strategic planning officer now with Southwark, spoke about that borough’s Old Kent Road project and the value of planners getting out more to meet local people, even if those encounters can sometimes be uncomfortable.

Clare Coghill, the leader of Waltham Forest, expressed bold ambitions for her Outer London borough: “There is no option to stand still. You have to decide if you’re going to be part of active change, or don’t bother. If you’re in politics, particularly if you’re a Labour politician, and you just want to defend the status quo, then frankly you should have a word with yourself.” And Tim Gledstone from Squires, our generous hosts, spoke about developing the company’s own building in Ferndale Street in a way that married past and present with as much local support as possible.

There was no sidestepping the tensions that regeneration projects can create or the nature of some attacks on them. The articulate audience saw to that. Bill Linksey, chair of the Brixton Society, expressed the familiar concern that too much change is to the detriment of current residents, especially with regard to housing. From another point on the compass, one victim of the Momentum-driven campaign to de-select Labour councillors in Haringey characterised it as the work of just a handful of people and a national newspaper, and therefore not remotely representative of the communities who would have been most affected by the previous administration’s regeneration programme.

Both of these contributions and others on the night underlined how regeneration has become a political minefield. At its most extreme it produces an account of the city that reduces a complex weave of local and global factors and social and economic forces to placard-friendly slogans that casually depict anyone and anything that questions it as corrupt, lying and out for themselves. It is the internal manifestation of modern day London-hating, as ignorant and reactionary in its way as the loathing of the capital inherent in Nigel Farage’s Little England view of what is wrong with Britain.

But perhaps some good can come of this. At a time when cynicism about politicians and their actions is running high, the only proper response is to work harder at dispelling it. As London’s population rises toward 10 million, more and better homes, offices, other kinds of workspace, shops, transport capacity, health care facilities and schools are going to be needed, not only for today’s Londoners but for tomorrow’s too. Those things have to go somewhere and they do not pay for themselves. Clare Coghill was right: the status quo is not an option. But now, maybe more than ever, building that bigger, better city requires winning Londoners’ hearts, minds and consent.

The next On London/London Society joint event is The London Brexit Debate on 13 September. Buy your tickets here.  

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brixton, Clare Coghill, Colin Wilson, Future of London, Lisa Taylor, Squire & Partners, Tim Gledstone

Community Lands Trusts: small is beautiful…but still very small

Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan’s announcement that two pieces of land owned by Transport for London are to be developed by the London Community Land Trust is a significant step forward for a campaign that has battled long and hard to make progress in the capital. The CLT development model, which, simply put, guarantees that the purchase price of homes remains connected to the earning levels of local people, is well established in different forms in other parts of the world, not least in the United States, where the idea originated. But London has proved resistant.

The driving force behind efforts to change that has been the London wing of Citizens UK, a primarily multi-faith campaigning organisation that also battles for the rights of asylum-seekers and for the London Living Wage. The London CLT is a product of London Citizens, and established London’s first CLT site as part of the redevelopment of the former St Clement’s hospital on Mile End Road. It was not a straightforward process and just 23 of the 252 dwellings on the site as whole are CLT properties.

However, the first residents moved in last summer and the successful bids for small TfL sites at Cable Street in Tower Hamlets and Christchurch Road in Lambeth were made by the CLT on its own. It intends to build in the region of 70 homes on the two sites, all of them expected to be for sale at between a third and a half of local market values with prices linked to average local incomes. This meets the Mayor’s definition of “genuinely affordable” housing and easily satisfies his requirement that 50% of homes built on TfL and other publicly-owned land should do so. The two TfL sites are the first of ten to be allocated through the Mayor’s “small sites, small builders” programme.

A big day, then, for London’s dogged CLT movement. And Lewisham has recently given permission to the Rural Urban Synthesis Society (RUSS), another CLT, to embark on a 33 home project on a one-acre site in Ladywell, described by RUSS as “London’s largest ever affordable self-build housing project”. But let’s keep these victories in perspective. The numbers of dwellings are very small in the context of the draft new London Plan calculation that 65,000 new dwellings of all tenures need to be constructed every year to meet demand. And history shows that it remains very hard to get CLTs established in London.

There was talk of one being piloted in the Olympic Park a few years ago when Boris Johnson was Mayor, and his 2008 mayoral election manifesto envisaged releasing land held by mayoral bodies to them on a significant scale (see page 10). That it’s taken the best part of ten years for this to start happening tells its own story. CLTs are a good thing, not only as mechanisms for producing affordable housing but as vehicles for constructive community activism. They are, though, just a tiny part of the much bigger London housing delivery picture and likely to remain so for some time.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Boris Johnson, community land trusts, housing, Lewisham, Mile End, Sadiq Khan

Lib Dems win council seats in deferred Southwark election

Lewis Baston

In two small parts of London the 3 May borough elections have been unfinished business for weeks after the results were declared everywhere else. In these wards, one in Southwark and the other in Brent, the deaths of candidates during the campaign period meant that the election was countermanded, nominations were re-opened and another election day was set.

In the the case of Southwark’s London Bridge & West Bermondsey ward, Conservative candidate Toby Eckersley MBE, who had served for 37 years for other wards on the council and was well-liked across political lines, died during the weekend before the election. He was going to be a “paper” candidate as Tories were not expecting to be returned in a ward where Labour and the Liberal Democrats were the main contenders, but he was a paper candidate of a rather superior kind.

The deferred election eventually took place last Thursday, 14 June. London Bridge & West Bermondsey ward is one of Southwark’s new electoral units, designed largely to accommodate population growth in the north of the borough. Built from parts of the old Grange and Riverside wards, it contains the sparkling, refurbished London Bridge station, the Shard and the Thames frontage down to Tower Bridge, but most of the electors live in terraces, estates and developments down Bermondsey Street. As with other wards in north Southwark, the area used to be dominated by a formidable Lib Dem election machine headed by Simon Hughes, the area’s MP from 1983 to 2015. Riverside ward remained a Lib Dem stronghold even in 2014, though Labour gained one of the three Grange seats that year. 

The result in the new ward was a 3-0 win for the Liberal Democrats, with Humaira Ali topping the poll with 1,340 votes, followed by party colleagues Damian O’Brien (1,281) and William Houngbo (1,270). Labour’s three candidates filled the next three places, with Julie Eyles finishing a close fourth (1,239 votes).  The Lib Dems took 45 per cent of the total votes cast to Labour’s 42, followed by 8.3 for the Tories and 4.7 for the Greens. 

The three newly elected councillors increase Lib Dem representation on the council to 14. Labour still has a big majority of 35, but the outcome London Bridge & West Bermondsey showed that the Lib Dems are still capable of grinding out a win on the basis of local hard work in this area, which – a decent result in the parliamentary by-election in Lewisham East notwithstanding – is beyond them in most of Inner London. The turnout was 28.4 per cent, which sounds poor but was only a few points less than that in some neighbouring wards in the main elections last month. 

The deferred council election in Brent takes place next Thursday (21 June).

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Borough elections 2018, Conservatives, Damian O'Brien, Humaira Ali, Julie Eyles, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Southwark, The Shard, Toby Eckersley, Tower Bridge, William Houngbo

London On Film: Blow-Up, Mr Tulip and Michael Caine

Dave Hill

Tony Travers in an essay for Centre for London:

New York may be the definitive celluloid city but London has a distinctive place in filmmaking, both as a location and as one of the world’s leading centres of production and post-production. Like New York and Paris, London’s image is affected by the way it is portrayed in the cinema. Equally, feature films often capture the city’s zeitgeist in a way that make it accessible forever as an historical record of the appearance, political concerns and social attitudes of the time.

Tony goes on to select some highlights from London’s long and fascinating history on film, ranging from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Bedazzled (1967), to The Long Good Friday (1980, which I wrote about last year) to Love Actually (2003). I’ve found some decent YouTube clips to give a taste of some of the others.

First, a nightclub scene from Sapphire (1959), directed by Basil Dearden.

Dearden’s earlier Pool of London (1951) followed the progress of a black sailor in the capital, when it was still a working port. His subsequent Victim (1961), also set in London, was about the persecution faced by gay men. Next, the trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

Love without meaning, murder without guilt. Dear me. And the Yardbirds. Finally, the closing Thames-side scene from the original Alfie (1966), starring Michael Caine as the cad of the title role.

They don’t make them like those anymore. Do they? You can buy Sapphire, Blow-Up and the original Alfie on DVD. You can read the whole of Tony Travers’s essay here.

 

 

 

Categories: Culture
Tags: Alfie, Basil Dearden, Blow-Up, Centre For London, Michael Caine, Pool of London, Sapphire, Tony Travers