Property firm Grainger’s decision to abandon redeveloping the beleaguered former Wards furniture store at Seven Sisters has been greeted by some as a triumph. An entity called The N15 Development Trust is delighted that a dangerously dilapidated building will not now be replaced with new housing and shops and is extolling the virtues of its own “community plan” for restoring it, claiming this will produce “something wonderful for all of Tottenham“.
What kind of wonderful? What are the chances? And what if some local people – maybe quite a lot of them – fear that Grainger’s withdrawal has, in fact, meant the prospect of something wonderful, or at least half decent, finally coming to their area has now gone for the foreseeable future?
Far from representing a grassroots uprising against hostile invaders, this is a classic case of a coalition of protesters, assisted by politicians and journalists who ought to know better, pursuing private agendas against neighbourhood improvements because the changes proposed offend their ideological prejudices, personal ambitions and bourgeois snobberies.
The “community resistance” narrative against the Grainger scheme has been centred on the now-closed Seven Sisters Indoor Market, which occupied part of the old Wards store and is known to some as the Latin Village because many of the small businesses there were run by Latin American Londoners. The claim was that a little gem of ethnic minority London had to be saved from evil developers who, with the connivance of venal councillors, intended to drive them out and build “luxury flats” in their place.
All of that was bullshit. The flats were to be just ordinary ones for private rent, the design for the new building was by high-quality architects, and the value of the Indoor Market and its traders has been recognised by Haringey Council since 2014, with provision built in to the plans to secure their future: a temporary home while redevelopment took place; a new permanent home in the replacement for the Wards building; discounted rents to see them through the disruption and beyond.
Far from seeking to have the Latin Village purged, the council and developer went out of their way to accommodate it at the heart of the new scheme, despite being under no legal obligation to do so.
This miserable saga began way back in 2004, when Haringey joined up with Grainger to breath fresh life into the shabby junction where Seven Sisters Road meets Tottenham High Road. The regeneration of Wards Corner, as it is known, was to encompass two buildings: the old Wards structure itself, built in Edwardian times, which stands on a site above Seven Sisters station; and Apex House, a council-owned building on the other side of Seven Sisters Road.
To cut a very long story short, in 2012 Grainger secured planning consent for the two-part scheme, which was subjected to a string of unsuccessful but time-wasting legal challenges. The last of these was rejected in October 2019 as an “inherently incredible” attempt to block a compulsory purchase order (CPO) made by the council to enable Grainger to take ownership of the parts of the Wards building, which had a number of leaseholders, they had been unable to negotiate individual purchases of. There was also an agreement that London Underground would sell its portion to Grainger (see paragraph 5.4 and ownership plan).
The challenge to the CPO was crowd-funded by members of the public who might as well have thrown their money down the drain. Yet despite their case being laughed out of court, the campaigners sought to appeal. Not until March of last year were they denied leave to do so, and then it was Covid’s turn to get in the way. Now, although, Apex House has been replaced by the brand new Apex Gardens, Grainger have bailed out of the Wards building half of the scheme. After 17 years, everything is back to square one.
Grainger say rising costs are largely to blame, partly caused by the need to bring the plans into line with updated building regulations and new energy efficiency and fire safety standards. The retail landscape has, of course, altered too. All of these factors came into play because of the endless delays. Submitting a revised plan, Grainger said, risked attracting yet another string of legal challenges. They’ve cut their losses.
Instead of the Latin Village being given a fresh start in modern new facilities that aren’t a risk to life and limb, its future is in limbo; instead of local people being provided with a mix of cafes, restaurants and retail, they are doomed to spend yet more years gazing at a once-elegant furniture store that stopped being so in 1972 and is falling apart. After TfL took on responsibility for it last June, they found a state of disrepair so extreme that they could not afford to fix it.
For the “community campaign”, all this is simply splendid. It makes you wonder what their definition of the Seven Sisters community actually is: who it includes and who it prefers to ignore. The rejoicing has been shared by Professor Loretta Lees, one of academia’s most prominent orchestrators of the fatuous and poisonous “social cleansing” chorus and chair of the London Housing Panel, a body that works with Sadiq Khan on housing policy. We should, perhaps, be grateful that it is soon to be scrapped.
Reasons often expressed for opposing the Grainger scheme make you doubt that bettering the lives of the residents and small businesses of Seven Sisters has ever been the priority for the noisy army of objectors, know-nothing hacks and local Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians alike: hear the prim disdain for anything mainstream or “corporate”; note that the Latin Village traders who backed the Grainger plans, possibly a majority, have serious doubts about the motives of those who say they represent them.
What will Haringey do now? Could it buy the building? Some of its less numerate members think it should. But last February, the council’s Momentumite then leader, Joseph Ejiofor, pointed out that Grainger “would expect to recoup at least £19 million they have already spent and we would still not own the land”. Haringey’s finances have not got any healthier since. Ejiofor pointed out that proponents of the “community plan” had “provided no clear explanation of how they propose to pay for the extended life of the building or acquire the site”, mentioning that TfL had described it as having gone “beyond its economic life”.
But now Ejiofor has been deposed and the relevant new cabinet member, more Corbynite than Corbyn, has been sending Labour members a finely-spun history of events, saying the new administration is “supporting the Trust and the community plan” and hailing a new era of “co-production”. This, in her words, means “truly listening to residents” and taking a “bottom-up approach to collaboration driven by our Labour values of community empowerment and collective decision-making”.
Sounds very nice. But how will “the community” be defined and listened to? How will its wishes be acted on? Where will the money come from to put the “community plan” into action? Planning permission for it was granted some years ago, but this idealistic vision will require many millions to turn into reality. Who will risk getting involved with people with a history of fomenting sometimes vicious hostility to anything that doesn’t fit with their requirements?
As for a different developer coming forward to rebuild the site, given what Grainger have concluded, perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breath. For now, TfL, freeholders of the land and in desperate financial straits, are politely entertaining the “community plan” as a possible solution to making use of this blighted space. But they will know better than anyone that the hard financial questions haven’t disappeared. For how long will the “community” campaigners of Seven Sisters and their allies think it’s just marvellous for nothing to happen while the Wards store building rots away?
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This is desperately depressing story. There have always been battles over development & the sad reality is the funding required necessitates a partnership approach. I wish it were otherwise. Community initiatives stimulate renewal but tragically tend not to survive a major rebuild with anything like their original energy & attraction (aka the Albany in Deptford, Brixton Village, city farms & many other examples) becoming sanitised & more mainstream & less affordable. For traders it would have enabled not only better conditions but a chance for some to grow their business but the spirit of the place would inevitably change.
We have tipped over into desperate times & more imaginative models of financing have long been needed. We seem to have become a more polarised society, more litigious & generally ruder & more unpleasant too. Our very survival now hinges on concerted joint efforts or we will be facing civil breakdown & descent into dog eat dog.
Thank you do much for this very report on the situation with wards stores,its proper name. I am so pleased to read it,however you have failed to mention how the Latin americans arrived at 7 sisters.they were all paid by southwark council to leave the elephant castle site ,they were paid thousands to leave so that the site could be redeveloped
They came to 7 sisters because the accommodation was cheap. They ousted the west indian stall holders and built dangerous shacks in the store. Maybe you could add this to your report
Can you provide evidence for this claim? My wife is a trader at Seven Sisters since 2006 and had never had a stall at the Elephant. There are still traders at the market who have been there since the late 80s/early 90s.
Yes, Dear councillor Sheila Peacock, the once upon a time left-wing Labour campaigner. ( I still have the photo – kept safely of course.)
It would be splendid to have some evidence for your sour allegations.
But for the sake of discussion let’s assume some trader with a market pitch does get compensation to move from their existing site? Would it be shocking and surprising or in any way illegal if they used this cash to rent and equip premises elsewhere?
What have you got against Latin Americans? As we both know, London is a world city. It has both a shameful history of slavery and colonialism and terrible poverty; and a different proud history of reform and reformers, of science and invention and cultural achievement; of social democracy and of opposition to wars. A city offering shelter and new lives to refugees and others who came and still come here. Making enormous contributions and adding to the richness of our amazing town.
I certainly am – and perhaps you too – proud of being a descendant of refugees who only a few generations ago came to London escaping persecution. Speaking other languages, cooking other foods; and singing different songs to different music.
When you were a Haringey headteacher you welcomed and took pride in the achievements of all the children in your school. Whatever their heritage, mother tongue, beliefs, size, shape, or skin colour. And if they and their families spoke Spanish or Portuguese didn’t you bid them bem-vindo, bienvenido Benvingut to your classrooms?
I’m sure you’ve read the late Jane Jacobs, the campaigner who blazed a trail for valuing the tapestry of diversity in cities. With her famous “ballet of the sidewalk” in New York. Dance of the traders, the shoppers and strollers, young and old. In her marvellous book ‘Life and Death of Great American Cities’, among many insights Jane wrote.
“Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial”.
What a shame that neither Grainger nor Dave Hill appear to understand this.
Long ago I had a friend whose parents were refugees from dictators: Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. My fried spoke both his parents’ languages. Telling me that in Europe the words sing. But that in South America they dance.
A scheme could have been built years ago
if Haringey Council and Grainger had not both been so tin-eared and arrogant. Regardless of what other decent work they had produced, Grainger’s scheme for this site was boring, generic and already dated the day the planning permission went in. If they had come up with a truly exciting and high quality building, the Wards Corner Coalition would have been much weaker. Or if they had had the common sense to retain that small part of the site which is of real interest (the rather lovely and rare Edwardian retail survival on the actual corner, then all of the rest of the undistinguished Victoria red brick site could have been demolished without demur. Or if they had made the retention of the Latin Market central to the development and its ethos, again the coalition would have been fatally weakened. But they managed to unite both conservationists and anti-racists (both powerful camps in N London) against them. And have not budged an inch on their crap design, nor on conserving even a small part of the original.
The tweet of “vicious hostility” you linked to no longer exists. Of the 3 most abusive accounts, two have been deleted today. https://twitter.com/MatthewStiles2/status/1425890893513609221
The idea that Haringey Council, Grainger et al are somehow the innocent wronged victims in all of this, and local campaigners are the villains, is at best a cynical rewriting of the facts. It’s worth remembering that the original Ward’s store was pushed out in the early 1970s because of a redevelopment scheme that never happened. Any wonder that locals have an ingrained suspicion about plans for the site? Further, the Apex House site which is now filled with a monstrous overdevelopment of what could have been a wonderful location, used to be filled with a very early cinema, later dancehall – which was demolished for a truly dreadful building. Thus Haringey’s involvement in Seven Sisters has for decades been disastrous for the area – and their talk of “building a gateway” to Tottenham is just planning bullshit – it means nothing. All the Grainger scheme would have done would be to add significant pressure onto an extremely busy transport network without giving anything back. Grainger have been backing away from their obligations to the existing traders for some time, and I presume they worked out then umbers no longer stacked up for them, so they’ve walked away.
The 2 abusive twitter accounts were only temporarily taken down so the tweet of “vicious hostility” you linked to is back