Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary Action. On Sunday 4th February 2018 campaigners marked the third anniversary of the announcement by Network Rail of their plans to redevelop the Brixton Arches with a rally and a three minute silence.
Railway Arches are an incredibly important part of our towns and cities. When the railways were being built in the 19th century putting the lines on viaducts was a cheaper option for the railway developers than laying tracks at ground level, so we got long viaducts coming into the centre of London and elsewhere.
Andrew Cooper’s banner for the event and his sculpture of the 4-headed monster that is Lambeth Labour Council
These arches became both an important feature of the city landscape but also a dynamic boost to the economy, providing low-cost premises for small businesses to start and grow until they needed to move out to larger premises and new generations of businesses would take over these spaces. In particular they provided premises for various car repair companies and in more recent years small breweries. And in Brixton in particular a large range of low-cost shops.
The arches used to belong to the railway companies, and on privatisation passed to Network Rail. But around a dozen years ago Network Rail saw the potential of selling them off to the private sector. The arches were a relatively small earner for them, bringing in a little over £80 million a year in rents.
They offered 150 year leases to the private sector, at first without any consultation with the businesses and communities served by them, something the sale for £1.46 billion was criticised for in a 2019 report from the National Audit Office. Network Rail retained the freehold so they can continue to have access to the arches if they need. The rents for the arches were expected to increase by 54% over the next 3 or 4 years, making them too expensive for many tenants.
Also in 2019, the House of Commons public accounts committee criticised both Network Rail and the Dept of Transport for the sale which means “future tenants have fewer rights – and existing tenants no longer have an option to extend their leases.”
Committee Chair Meg Hillier is quoted in The Guardian as saying “Ultimately, government took a short-term decision to sell a profitable asset to plug a funding gap. We remain unconvinced that the sale represents the best value for the public and the public-sector finances in the long term.“
Brixton has been particularly hard hit by Network Rail’s plans to make more cash from the arches as those along Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were an important shopping area in the centre of the town – often described as the ‘heart of Brixton‘.
Network Rail ganged up with Lambeth Council to tear this heart out from the town by refurbishing thes arches which would enable them to “triple the rents, insert shiny new businesses and provide Brixton with even more over-priced bars and restaurants than the town’s citizens can shake a stick at.”
Spoken Word artist Potent Whisper – hear his #OurBrixton
The Council ignored a long campaign to keep the arches, and failed to do anything to protect the interests of the tenants or of nearby market traders who feel they will be adversely effected while the refurbishment is taking place – and with possible dangers to the general public from potentially dangerous airborne particles during the removal of asbestos.
The work was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2016, but was only started the day after this protest in February 2018. The Save Brixton Arches campaign were calling for it to be abandoned as the plans for the work fail to include proper fire safety precautions and will severely restrict access by emergency services to local businesses and the railway and station.
Protesters form a human chain in front of the arches
They also called for an investigation into local Labour MP Helen Hayes. Until shortly before she was elected in 2015 she had been a senior partner in the firm Allies & Morrison which had made the recommendation for the ‘improvement’ of the arches in 2013, though she has denied any personal involvement. A&M have been involved in many contentious ‘regeneration’ schemes with developers and councils across London which opponents describe as social cleansing.
The boards behind used to be thriving businesses – forced out
Network Rail sold its arches to ‘The Arch Company’. 50% owned by US-based private equity firm Blackstone and TT Group, one of the UK’s largest, privately owned property investment firms who since then as well as raising rents have refurbished 1,400 arches. They have also made some efforts to reduce the impacts of the rent rises and negotiated a tenant charter. Blackstone are now said to be ‘on track’ to buy out TT and take full control of the arches.
A Day Out in Deptford: On Saturday 29th September I had decided to go on the Deptford Art & Gentrification Walk, part of the Deptford X Festival, and Deptford Aint Avinnit, an art crawl organised by ART&CRITIQUE. This was the second such walk, following on from an earlier event in May 2018.
Over the afternoon we visited community spaces, galleries, studios, landmarks, waterways, green spaces and new developments on a guided walk through the street with a series of discussions on the relationship between art and gentrification and the huge changes that are currently sweeping through Deptford.
As I wrote in My London Diary in 2018, “The walk took place because of the continuing struggle with Lewisham Council over their plans to build on the 20-year old community run Old Tidemill Garden, the adjoining council flats, Reginald House, and Tidemill Primary School, which closed in 2012.”
“Local residents, including those whose homes in Reginald House are threatened with demolition have opposed the plans, and at the end of August a group of them had occupied the Old Tidemill Garden.”
The development would mean the loss of environmentally valuable green space but more importantly would be a part of the social cleansing of London which Lewisham, like other London Labour dominated councils are taking part in, demolishing council housing at social rents largely by private housing.
“The site was to be developed by Peabody with 209 housing units, 51 for sale at market prices, 41 in shared ownership schemes (which require relatively high incomes) and 109 to be let at London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London Affordable Rent, something like 65% higher than current Lewisham council rents. As well as paying much higher rents, tenants under this scheme will have for less security of tenure.“
The residents group had put forward alternative plans which suggested retaining the Tidemill Garden and council flats and building at higher density on the redundant school site to create a similar number of housing units, but the council refused to consider these and terminated the community lease on the gardens on 29th August – when residents squatted them.
“The garden was established in 1997 with the aid of Groundwork, the London Development Agency, the Foundation for Sport & Arts, Mowlem plc, Lewisham College and Lewisham Council, and much of the work on it was carried out by parents and children from Tideway Primary. It now includes 74 well-established trees and has been shown to improve air quality in the local area.”
The garden was where we had the longest discussion on the tour, but there were plenty of other places where we stopped to discuss what was happening, making it an interesting afternoon.
It was a fine day and I decided to go to Deptford a couple of hours early to take a walk around some of the parts that were not included on the tour. I’d first photographed Deptford in 1979 and took with me a copy of my book Deptford to Woolwich 1979-85.
Back in the early 1980s much of Deptford was a very different place, with industry around the Creek and Deptford Power Station. Almost all of that has now gone, replaced by tall flats including much student housing and the Laban Dance Centre. On the tour we visited some of the former industrial buildings which are now artists studios and galleries. On part of the tour I was able to show pictures of what some parts of Deptford looked like before the changes.
The many pictures on My London Diary are in three posts, links below. Deptford Walk contains pictures from my own unaccompanied walk before the art crawl. Deptford Art & Gentrification Walk has my pictures taken during the walk. A third post, Deptford Panoramas, has extreme wide-angle views taken during both walks. These have the normal aspect ration of 1.5:1, but an extreme angle of both horizontal and vertical view.
The pictures show many aspects of Deptford, still a vibrant area of London, though rapidly changing. The Tidemill Garden is now built on, Deptford Cinema closed in 2020 but has a number of ongoing projects, the High Street market was still busy last time I was there, and the Dog and Bell serves a fine pint.
Windrush & Climate – On Saturday 8th September 2018 after photographing a protest against the continuing hounding of Windrush generation migrants to the UK in Brixton I went to a Climate Change protest outside Tate Modern.
Justice for Windrush descendants – Brixton
A rally and march hosted by Movement for Justice called for the Windrush scheme to be widened to include all families and descendants of the Windrush Generation and for an end to the racist hostile environment for all immigrants.
The Windrush scandal first came to public attention in 2017 and 2018 when we heard that hundreds of migrants including those who had been urged to come and help Britain rebuild after the Second World War and who were then given the right to live and work in this country permanently where being hounded by the Home Office and some had already been deported.
Much of the information came from the work of Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman publishing the experiences of these people. The Home Office in 2012 under Theresa May had introduced a ‘Hostile Environment’ law which required people to produce at least one official document from every year they had lived in the UK to prove they had the right to stay here.
Many were of course unable to do this, and the Home Office itself had destroyed many of the official records which would have proved their case. Many were declared to be ‘undocumented migrants’ (or as the politicians and press racistly and inaccurately labelled them, ‘illegal immigrants’.
They “began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.“
The government promised to correct the matter and in May 2018 the then Home Secretary Saji Javid set up a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ under Wendy Williams. When published in 2020 it showed that the Windrush scandal was the deliberate and inevitable result of Tory government policies.
Home Secretary Priti Patel then said she accepted the reports recommendations but in 2023 Suella Braverman decided to ditch three of of them. In June 2024 the High Court ruled that her actions in abandoning the promise to establish a migrants’ commssioner and to increase the powers of the independent chief examiner of borders and immigration was unlawful.
The scandal continues, and the replacement by 2025 of physical residence permits by digital e-visas for the roughly half a million non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK seems almost certain to generate a similar scandal.
After a rally in Windrush Square which included Eulalee, a Jamaican grandmother who has been fighting for 17 years to stay in the UK with her Windrush generation husband, daughter and grandchildren as well as others affected by the scandal there was a march around the centre of Brixton, with several stops for short speeches in the more crowded parts.
Eulalee and Michael Groce on the march
Also on the march was Michael Groce, poet, community worker and Green Party candidate as councillor in Brixton, holds a poster ‘Yes, It’s Racist’. The 1985 Brixton riots began after police shot and seriously wounded his mother, putting her in hospital for a year. Later they paid her over £500,000 in damages without admitting any liability.
On the railway bridge across Brixton Road was the graffitied message ‘CLAPHAM THAT WAY YOU 2D FLAT WHITE TEPID COLONIALIST WANKER”, with Brixton gentrification now taking away much of the unique character of the area where many who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 settled after having been initially housed in a giant wartime underground shelter on Clapham Common.
After marching around the centre of Brixton spreading their message with megaphones and posters the campaigners returned for a further rally in Windrush Square.
Climate Reality, a global and diverse group of activists, community leaders, organisers, scientists, storytellers and others united to act over global warming was supported by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change, Fossil Free UK and the Green Party in one of thousands of rallies around the world demanding urgent action by government leaders to leaders commit to a fossil free world that works for all of us.
They called for people to take personal actions to reduce their own contribution to climate change but more importantly to join together to press for action at local, national and international level.
In particular they called for the government to end its support for fracking and for local authorities to divest from fracking and fossil fuels.
Highbury to Stoke Newington Church Street: Continuing my walk from Sunday 1st October 1989 which had begun at Finsbury Park and continued to the Nags Head before returning to Finsbury Park. The previous post ended on Blackstock Road.
Blackstock Road continues south into Highbury as Highbury Park and I walked some way down this before turning east into Northolme Road. Highbury Park was developed in the 1870s but the houses in Northholme Road date from the 1890s. This and neighbouring roads were built on the Holm Estate and the LCC applied for permission to develop these roads in 1890.
North Holme is near Helmsley, North Riding of Yorkshire and although it has been described as a “township” is a small cluster of buildings, more a farm than even a village close to the River Dove. “The Revd Joseph Parker, DD (1830-1902) … lived in 1866 at a house in Highbury Park he called ‘North Holme‘. The sites of Northolme Road, Sotheby Road and Ardilaun Road were on part of the grounds of his house.” He was the “Minister of the City Temple, 1869-1901, author, preacher and twice Chairman of the Congregational Union“.
This house is at the eastern end of Northolme Road, where it meets Kelross Road and is a detached villa rather larger than the terraces along long the rest of the road.
Clissold Park, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10b-35
From here Kelross passage leads to Highbury New Park, a street with villas built from around 1850. But I pressed on across it into Collins Road, making my way towards Clissold Park and Stoke Newington Church St.
Clissold House was built as Paradise House for Quaker City merchant Jonathan Hoare, a noted philanthropist and anti-slavery campaigner and brother of banker Samuel Hoare Jr. The water here was a stretch of the New River which brought clean drinking water from Hertfordshire to London, but I think at some point the river here was culverted, although the bridge taking Stoke Newington Church St across it remained until the 1930s.
The park was first created as grounds for this GradeII listed house. Hoare got into financial difficulties and lost the house and grounds, which passed through several owners before being owned by Augustus Clissold. When he died in 1882 the estate was bought by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners who intended to make money from developing it as housing, but the Metropolitan Board of Works were persuaded in 1887 to buy it to be a public park.
By 1989 the house and park were in a poor condition and Clissold House was put on English Heritages ‘at risk’ register in 1991. Since then both park and house have been restored with the aid of lottery money.
Park Crescent, Spensley Walk, Stoke Newington Church St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10b-23
Grade II listed Park Crescent at 207-223 Stoke Newington Church Street was built in 1855, but by the 1980s was in a very dilapidated state and became home to around 90 squatters alongside only a handful of legal tenants. The houses were then owned by Hackey council who planned to sell them to housing associations.
Park Crescent, Spensley Walk, Stoke Newington Church St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10b-11
Three motorbikes parked outside one of the houses of Park Crescent. You can clearly see the poor state of the buildings which need Acrow props to support the porches, with the steps at right being roped off to block access to the unsafe building.
Park Crescent now looks very neat and tidy compared to this.
The building at 185 Stoke Newington Church St had been sold when I made this picture in October 1989, but The Modern Man, a hairdressers, was still alive in another shop on the street, shown in my next picture.
This row of buildings with ground-floor shops is still there and like the rest of the area has become rather better kept and is now that epitome of gentrification, an estate agents which has also expanded into 187.
Perhaps surprisingly the 5 Star Cleaners at 189 is still a dry cleaners, though under a different name.
The Modern Man, Stoke Newington Church St, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1989 89-10c-52
I found The Modern Man still in business at 121 Stoke Newington Church St at the corner with Marton Road. It didn’t survive the gentrification of the area and the shop has passed through several hands as ‘frere jacques’, ‘search and rescue, ‘Ooh Lou Lou Cakery’ and ‘The Caffeine Fix’.
I don’t know how long Tanya’s Cafe-Diner Take away lasted but around 2009 it became Lydia Cafe Restaurant and retained the name Lydia until recently becoming ‘The Tiffin Tin.’.
My walk was almost at an end, but I’ll share are few more pictures in a later post.
Fighting Brixton Gentrification – On Saturday 25th April 2015 the local community in Brixton held a day of activities to reclaim its social & cultural diversity, threatened by increasing rents and property development that are forcing out local businesses and residents.
I’d arrived early for main ‘Reclaim Brixton’ event in Windrush Square and first made my way to Atlantic Road where long-established local businesses were being forced out from the railway arches which line one side of the road. They were under threat from Network Rail who with support from Lambeth Council were carrying out a refurbishment programme which would result in their shops being closed and the rents for the shops after being three times as high, pricing the low cost local businesses out of the area.
All the stores were closed for two hours across lunchtime in protest, and mural artists had been invited to work on their metal shutters. In 2015 I wrote: ‘On Stella’s Exclusive Hair & Beauty Salon an artist was working on a mural for the United Families and Friends campaign, celebrating Cherry Groce, Sean Rigg and Ricky Bishop, all killed by Brixton police. All the shops on both sides of the arches were closed, and most had white sheets with the name of the business and a punning message about the evictions. Some of them have traded here for many years – Denmay Fabrics since 1948, and L S Mash and Sons have been fishmongers here since 1932. Their message to Network Rail – ‘Don’t rip the soul outta my place”
Street theatre groups walked past on their way to ‘Reclaim Brixton’ some in exotic dress carrying cardboard homes and others with posters against the threat to Communities, Homes, Businesses from Lambeth Council.
I walked along to the gentrified Brixton Village, an extensive arcade between Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane, to find that police and security were keeping out protesters who, led by London Black Revs, had planned to go through the market in a peaceful march.
I found Class War at Brixton Station and walked back with them to Brixton Village, where other campaigners including some from the Ayslesbury Estate where I had photographed the previous day making their banner and other South London housing campaigners were arriving for the march.
Rather to my surprise the march when it finally started was a short and fairly direct one to Windrush Square, turning off Coldharbour Lane to enter the square via Rushcroft Road.
Close to the mansion flats which had been squatted for 32 years before residents were violently evicted in July 2013 people accompanying the long black banner of B.A.G.A.G.E (Brixton Action Group Against Gentrification and Evictions) with its message ‘Refuse to Move – Resist the Evictions – Support your Neighbours’ and others let off several red flares.
Windrush Square in front of the Tate Library and opposite Lambeth Town Hall was a few years earlier re-landscaped by Lambeth Council, who deliberately turned what had been a popular place for locals into a bleak and unwelcoming windswept area to discourage the informal gatherings that took place there.
Perhaps it was partly due to this that the event taking place there seemed to lack any real cohesion with various groups doing their own thing in different parts of the large area and largely ignoring the speeches and performances at the Unite Community stage.
After an hour or so with not very much happening, activists decided it was time for a march and took to the road blocking traffic and walked up Brixton Road.
They stopped for a while outside Brixton Underground, drumming and dancing and shouting.
Then they marched along Atlantic Road and rather to my surprise returned directly to Windrush Square along Coldharbour Lane.
Marcia Rigg, Sean Rigg’s sister, still fighting for justice for her brother’s killing by Brixton police in August 2008 and friend
I hung around for a while in Windrush Square where nothing much was still happening slowly and things seemed peaceful. I decided I had done enough for the day and left.
This was a mistake. Shortly after (probably when Class War came out of the pub) sthings kicked off and some people stormed and briefly occupied Lambeth Town Hall, a large window at Foxton’s estate agents was broken, and a few activists went into Brixton Village with banners.
Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock: Three very different protests in London on Monday 19th September 2016
Save Brixton Railway Arches
Network Rail and Lambeth Council want to evict the small local businesses from the Railway arches, some of which have been serving the community for as long as anyone can remember. The sites will be refurbished and the rents trebled, so the new Atlantic Road ‘Village’ will be home to “loads of bland, overpriced, soulless branded shops that nobody wants“. This is clearly another disturbing step in the ongoing gentrification of Brixton being pursued by Lambeth Council.
When railways where built in London in the nineteenth century much of the land they ran across was already occupied by houses, shops and other businesses. Putting the rails on top of long viaducts was a cheaper and much less disruptive way of bringing the railways into the city then putting the lines at or below ground level.
This created long runs of arches below the viaducts as well as bridges over existing roads, and these arches were soon filled largely by small local businesses for which they provided relatively low rent premises. Many of them later became garages and other businesses connected with cars, lorries and taxis, but those in the centre of Brixton where the arches had frontages on Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were occupied by a whole range of shops.
Almost all of these were small businesses serving the local community – selling food, clothing, furniture, carpets, general stores, cafes, bars. Some well-known shops had been in the same arch since the 1930s.
Network Rail wanted to evict all these tenants so the arches could be refurbished and then re-let at hugely increased rents to increase their profits by replacing valued local businesses by the kind of bland high-price chains and franchises that have blighted high streets across the country. And Lambeth Council were backing them against a strong local ‘Save Brixton Arches’ campaign.
Few if any of the existing businesses could survive the long gap in trading for the revamping on the arches, and none would be viable at the increased rents. Many of them had decided to fight the evictions despite being threatened that if they legally challenged them they would not be offered leases after refurbishment.
On this Monday Network Rail had been intending to evict another of the traders, Budget Carpets, and people including from the local Green Party and the party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartlett, local Labour councillor Rachel Heywood and Simon Elmer from ASH had come to oppose the eviction. Rachel Heywood, a Labour councillor since 2006, was opposed to this and other policies such as library closures and council estate demolitions being pursued by the right-wing Labour cabinet and in 2018 was banned from the Labour Party for 5 years after it was announced she would stand as an independent.
The protest led to Network Rail postponing the eviction. The protesters then went into Brixton Market for a meeting where traders talked about how they have been bullied and their decision to fight the evictions.
The International Rescue Commission laid out 2,500 life jackets previously worn by adults and children refugees to cross from Turkey to Greece in Parliament Square as a reminder of the continuing deaths by drowning there.
The protest urged the UK to do more to welcome refugees to the UK and to meet the promises already made, and was criticised by a few bigots on the extreme right. Unfortunately instead the UK government has listened increasingly to the bigots and brought in even more repressive anti-migrant laws while failing to provide safe passages for migrants except for some very limited special cases.
Everyone wearing this lifejackets and those who have arrived in Europe since then in similar circumstances is now a criminal under UK law should they manage to get to this country.
At the protest I met again Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley who I had photographed earlier in Brixton. He told me his tweet about refugees and this life-jacket protest had attracted many extremely racist comments.
Later in the day I went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square where people attended a non-violent, prayerful act of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe threatened by the construction of a huge oil pipeline close to their reservation in North Dakota and the Missouri River.
A protest at the pipeline which threatens the water supply of the tribe and 8 million people who live downstream has attracted several thousands from around 120 Native American tribes and their allies around the world and 70 have been arrested at gunpoint.
Although the protest has attracted many journalists who like the protesters have been harassed by police (and some protested) there has been very little press coverage. The pipeline had already resulted in the destruction of several sacred sites.
You can read more about the pipeline on Wikipedia. Legal injunctions on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were denied. The Obama administration attempted to get some re-routing of the pipeline but one of the first things Trump did on coming to power was to approve its construction. It was completed later in 2017 and put into service. Despite various court rulings since that there had not been proper environmental reviews it remains in operation.
After taking a near-identical image of Electric Avenue to that I posted earlier I moved on to Coldharbour Lane. Rather to my surprise this row of shops is still there, close to the corner with Electric Lane on the south side of the road.
Clifton Mansions, 22 flats at 429 Coldharbour Lane were built set back from the road in 1896 to house workers at the nearby Brixton Theatre, now the Ritzy Cinema and are still reached by a archway between shops at 427 and 431.
They attracted a wide range of squatters in the 1990s, including the Pogues and Jeremy Dellar. The flats were refurbished in 2012. Flats there can now be rented for around £2,500 a month.
Matlock House looks in rather better condition now and the blocked doorway covered with fly-posting has now been restored. I think the date on the tile above that doorway is 1892. These properties were refurbished in 2015-6 after some 75 squatters living in Rushcroft Road were forcefully evicted in July 2013. You can read about the eviction and see photographs on Brixton Buzz.
Lambeth Council had owned the flats since around 1975 when they had bought them for the constuction of the Innner London Motorway Box, plans for which fortunately were abandoned, as it would have been disastrous for Brixton. Like Clifton Mansions these flats had been built to house artists and technicians from Brixton’s theatre and music halls. The council abandoned the flats and left them to rot, with squatters moving in.
One resident was able to claim “ownership in the House of Lords under the so-called ‘twelve year rule.’ Five Law Lords threw up their hands in exasperation, took a flat away from Lambeth Council and gave it to him, gratis, after more than a decade of Council mismanagement, incompetence, irresponsibility and neglect.”
The squatters formed a neighbourhood association to defend the flats against sale by the council to property developers in 2002. But slowly, despite great public support for the residents the council pressed ahead, destroying a successful community and hugely accelerating the gentrification of Brixton. Flats here are now for sale at around £750,000.
Home in 1989 by Continental Foods, this Grade II listed building at 411-417 Coldharbour Lane, was built around 1914 to the designs of of T R Somerford as one of the chain of Temperance Billiard Halls. The company targeted south London in particular because many new pubs were built here around the end of the 19th century.
Since I made the photograph, there have been some changes with the ground floor now divided into a number of shops, including a community police station. Lambeth Council granted planning permission for it to be turned into a hotel in the 1990s, and the rest of the building around 2005 became a hostel with the name London Hotel, but has since been refurbished as flats named Billiard Lodge.
This row of shops with housing above is between Kellett Road and Saltoun Road on Atlantic Road and includes the Frontline Off Licence. The area around the north end of Railton Road which continues Atlantic Road south of here gained that name after the 1981 clashes with police which became known as the Brixton Uprising or Brixton Riots started here.
Rudra (Rudy) Narayan (1938 – 28 1998) was a barrister and civil rights activist who migrated to Britain in the 1953 from Guyana, spending seven years in the British Army before studying at Lincoln’s Inn to become a barrister.
A blue plaque now marks the building at 413 Brixton Road where he had a law practice from 1987-94. Erected by the Nubian Jak Community Trust and the Society of Black Lawyers it remembers him as ‘BARRISTER, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTION, COMMUNITY CHAMPION AND “VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS’. A heavy drinker who was thrown out of chambers for assaulting his head of chambers, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in Kings College Hospital in 1998 following a lengthy battle with alcoholism.
In 1989 Narayan who had been a Labour councillor and once been selected as Labour candidate for Birmingham Handsworth, but then deselected for allegedly anti-Semitic remarks in his books stood as a candidate in the Vauxhall by-election arguing that a largely black area should have a black MP. His campaign failed to attract much support and Labour’s Kate Hoey was elected.
The plaque is above the San Marino coffee shop on the corner with Brixton Station Road. From there I returned to the area around Ferndale Road where a further post will continue this walk.
Housing For Need Not Greed: Mostly my posts here look at old work, either from a few years ago or my work on London back in the 1980s and 90s. But I’m still goining out at taking pctures if not quite as often as I once did. So this post is about one of the two events I photographed last weekend.
Aysen Dennis – Fight4Aylesbury
Last Saturday, 8th July 2023 was National Housing Action Day, and a march from the Elephant to the Aylesbury Estate was one of 16 across the country on National Housing Day. Others were taking place in Lambeth, Islington, Kensington, Cardiff, Glasgow, Abbey Wood, Wandsworth, Harlow, Merton, Ealing, Cornwall, Folkestone, Devon, Birmingham, and Hastings.
Tanya Murat – Southwark Defend Council Housing
The Southwark protest demanded Southwark Council stop demolishing council homes and refurbish and repopulate estates to house people and end the huge carbon footprint of demolish and rebuild. They demanded housing for need not corporate greed, refurbishment not demolition, filling of empty homes and an end to the leasehold system.
Marchers at the Elephant on their way to the Aylesbury Estate
Demolition and rebuilding of housing produces huge amounts of CO2, and whenever possible should be avoided now we are aware of the real dangers of global warming. Instead existing buildings should be insulated, retrofitted and refurbished and properly maintained.
Southwark Council’s estates have for well over 20 years been deliberately run down and demonised with some being demolished and replaced. Around 1000 council homes on the Aylesbury Estate have already been demolished buy around 1,700 are still occupied but currently scheduled for demolition.
Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.
These homes were well built for the time to higher standards than their replacement and could easily and relatively cheaply be brought up to modern levels of services and insulation with at least another 50 years of life. The estate was carefully designed with open spaces, natural daylight and a range of properties, many with some private outdoor space. The planned replacements are at higher density, less spacious and unlikely to last as long – and only include a small proportion at social rents. Current tenants are more secure and the properties are far more affordable.
People on the street watch and video the march
Many of those whose homes have already been demolished here and on the neighbouring Heygate estate have been forced to move outside the area, some far from London as they can no longer afford to live here.
Bubbles and Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.
Although the developers have profited greatly from their work with Southwark Council here and in other estates, and some officers and councillors involved have personally landed well-paying corporate jobs and enjoyed lavish corporate hospitality, the schemes have largely been financial disasters for the council and council tax payers.
Fight4Aylesbury was formed in 199 as Aylesbury Tenants and Residents First, and has been fighting Southwark Council’s plans to demolish the estate since then. While these schemes – part of New Labour’s regeneration initiative – have always been destructive of local communities and disastrous for many of those whose homes have been demolished, we now see that they are also environmentally unsupportable.
You can watch a video on YouTube of Aysen Dennis, Fight4Aylesbury and Tanya Murat, Southwark Defend Council Housing talking about the protest, and FIght4Aylesbury recently released a newsletter, The Future of the Aylesbury with more details on the estate and their proposals. A few more of my pictures from the event are in the album Housing For Need Not Greed – National Action Day, London, UK and are available for editorial use on Alamy.
Last Friday I went to the first day of the Fight4Aylesbury exhibition which continues until 23 April 2023. It’s an unusual exhibition and one that is worth visiting if you can get to south London before it ends,
The exibition celebrates the struggle by residents on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark to stay in their homes since the estate was first threatened in 1999 and takes over the flat of one of those still remaining, Aysen who writes:
Welcome to my home.
I am opening the doors to my flat for a collective clelbration of 20+ years of housing struggles to defend our council homes against social cleansing and gentrification. Our fight is ongoing.
Since 1999 the council has subjected us with privitisation, “re-generation” and now demolition. We, Aylesbury residents, other council tenant all over the country, and our supporters, have been resisting and are still resisting and defending our homes.
My home tells the story of this struggle.
Aysen
You are invited to Aysen’s council flat on Aylesbury Estate to celebrate 20+ years of housing struggles for housing justice and against gentrification, social cleansing and demolition of social housing. The flat has been transformed into a living exhibition with flyers, posters, video, audio and installations on housing struggles.The exhibition is in this block, Wendover
The Aylesbury estate, designed by Hans Peter “Felix” Trenton was one of the largest areas of council housing in Europe, built from 1963 to 1977 with 2,700 dwellings for around 10,000 residents in an area containing some earlier social housing a short distance south of the Elephant and Castle between East Street market and Burgess Park.
There are a number of large blocks of various heights, from 4 to 14 floors, all well designed and built to the high standards of the era, with rather larger rooms and more solid walls than current buildings. The estate also had a central boiler to supply heat more economically to the flats.
Southwark neglected the estate in the 1980s and 1990s, failing to carry out necessary maintenance and the estate and the estate environment became in poor conditions. The heating system in particular suffered. Southwark began to use this and the neighbouring Heygate Estate as ‘sink estates’, deliberately moving in families with various social problems and people with mental health issues. It was because the estate had become unpopular that Aysen, who had to leave Turkey after the 1980 coup, was able to get a flat here with her sister in 1993.
The estate came to get a reputation as “one of the most notorious estates in the United Kingdom“, reinforced by it becoming a popular area for TV crews filming “murder scenes, gun and drug storylines and gang-related crimes in soaps and gritty dramas.” In particular from 2004-15 Channel 4 used it in an “ident” for which they had added “washing lines, shopping trolley, rubbish bags and satellite dishes” to create what was described as “a desolate concrete dystopia.”
Its poor reputation led Tony Blair to hold his first speech to the press as Prime Minister in 1997 on the estate, promising that the government would care for the poorest in society. It was a promise that he and later prime ministers have spectacularly failed to keep.
Southwark Council’s response to the estate’s decay they had overseen was to try and wash their hands of it by trying to transfer it to a private housing association to be redeveloped. But a campaign by residents in 2001 led to this being soundly rejected – not surprisingly they voted against demolition, displacement, rising rents and smaller flat sizes.
Undeterred, Southwark decided to go ahead with the redevelopment themselves, producing new plans for demolition in 2005. This time they didn’t bother to ballot the residents.
Solidarity collage which includes some of my images
The plans were for a 20 year phased demolition, with rebuilding of modern blocks by a housing association. The generous public space of the estate would be reduced and the housing density almost doubled. The first phase was completed in 2013 and Phase 2 is currently underway. All four phases are due for completion around 2032, and the 12 storey Wendover block in which the exhibition is being held has already been largely emptied of residents and is expected to be demolished around the end of this year.
Residents have continued their fight to stop the redevelopment, with protests and in January 2015 housing activists and squatters occupied flats in one of the emptied blocks. Moving from block to block they were finally evicted 18 days later. The squatters occupied another building and again were evicted. Southwark spent £140,000 on a fence, completely destroyed all bathrooms, toilets, pipes and kitchens in empty properties and spent £705,000 on security guards to prevent further occupation.
Other protests took place, including one in which part of the fence was torn down, and various protests at council meetings. Aylesbury residents also joined with housing activists in Southwark and across London at various other protests. But although these brought the Aylesbury campaign and the scandals over housing to national attention, the demolition continues.
Part of the scandal has been the “well-oiled revolving door” between the council – councillors and officers – and developers. The toilet in the exhibition flat is devoted to Southwark Council, and in particular for its Leader for more than a decade Peter John, who stepped down in 2020. He described his years as a “decade of Delivery“; community; anti-gentrification collective Southwark Notes call it “a Wild West gold rush for developers.” A 2013 report showed that “20 percent of Southwark’s 63 councillors work as lobbyists” for developers in the planning industry.
Similar estates built with the same system elsewhere have been successfully refurbished at relatively low cost to bring insulation and other aspects up to current standards. These buildings will probably last into the next century and their demolition is expensive and incredibly wasteful of both the huge amount of energy that was embedded in them and and energy require to demolish and rebuild.
There is more to the exhibition – and you can see some hints of it in the pictures. After visiting the show I walked up four floors to the top of Wendover for the view. The windows were rather dirty and most fixed shut but I did find a few places where they were open slightly to let me take photographs of the views across London.
Although the immediate cause of this protest was the eviction of sex workers from flats in Romilly Street where they were operating within our laws restricting prostitution, the evictions were not at base about the activities of the women concerned but a result of property developers seeing enormous profits to be made by emptying properties in the area and redeveloping them.
Soho is particularly at risk from hugely profitable development as hotels and luxury flats because of its reputation and unique ambiance, which has largely derived in the past from its association with such risqué activities as strip clubs and models offering personal services as well as its restaurants and shops offering foreign delicacies unknown in the UK outside its boundaries.
Of course times have changed, and much of Soho is now Chinatown, but still its old reputation and some of those old activities remain, though many are fast disappearing. And while the tourists flock in, much of what attracts them is no longer there.
Sex remains a powerful attraction, and it was noticeable that there was far more media attention to this protest than most. Most of the masked women taking part in the protest were supporters of the ‘working girls’ from groups including the organisers of the event, Women Against Rape and the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) who I knew from other protests.
The police who issued notices to the property owners alleging that the properties were brothels are widely seen as working on behalf of the prospective developers, and owners Soho Estates whose managing director came out to speak at the event also have a financial interest. They could have stood up to the police intimidation and investigated the situation so they could assure the police that the activities in the flats were within the law, but failed to do so.
A speaker from the Soho Society told the protest that the activities of the women were one of the oldest traditions of the area, and were causing no problems with their neighbours and the many other trades of the area. Previous similar evictions have attracted local petitions signed by thousands and the ECP press release stated “Many express fears that gentrification is behind attempts to close these flats and that if sex workers are forced out it will lead the way for other small and unique businesses and bars to be drowned out by major construction, chain stores and corporations.”
Gurkha Veterans Demand Justice – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
Elderly Gurkha veterans living in the UK did not benefit from earlier campaigns for fair treatment and most living here are in extreme poverty.
This was one of a number of protests every Wednesday and Thursday opposite the Houses of Parliament inviting the government to hold talks with them and if there was no progress by later in October they said they would begin a programme of nonviolent resistance (Satyagraha) with hunger strikes, beginning with a “13 days relay hunger strike in the name of the 13 Ghurka VCs which would then be followed by a fast-unto-death” if there was no progress.
I paid a short visit to the campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign who earlier in the year been holding a lunchtime protest on the pavement in Parliament Square facing the Houses of Parliament, standing out in their orange jumpsuits and black hoods on every day parliament was in session.
Shaker Aamer, a British resident still then held at Guantánamo was one of the first to be sent there after having been handed over the the US authorities for a cash reward. Although there was no evidence against him he had suffered years of torture in which the UK intelligence services had been implicated. Despite being cleared for release in 2007 and again in 2010 he was still being held, probably because his testimony when released would cause severe embarrassment to both US and UK intelligence agencies.
This protest was the start of a new series of regular weekly vigils seeking to draw attention to the failures of both President Obama and David Cameron, as well as demanding a full Parliamentary debate about Shaker’s case.
Campaigners had come to College Green, close to the Houses of Parliament to call for reform of the laws about cannabis, in particular to allow its medical use for MS sufferers. Legal medical cannabis is mainly available here to MS sufferers who can afford to pay its very high price.
Unsurprisingly it was a rather laid back protest, beginning rather late and not really getting started the whole 90 minutes I was there before giving up and going home as they were still waiting for the megaphone or PA system to arrive.
By the time I left there were quite a few people sitting around on the grass smoking. As I commented in a caption, the photographs don’t show what they were smoking, but the smell was unmistakable, and after I while I began to feel just a little unusual. Perhaps the two police officers who strolled over to take a look had no sense of smell or perhaps they simply felt that there was little point in taking any action.
Years ago I had to give lessons against drug use to 16-18 year olds as a part of a ‘personal and social education’ programme, and was aware that many of them had rather more experience in the area than me. But the materials from the Home Office that I relied on made clear that cannabis was considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Addiction to anything is a bad thing, but so too is the criminalisation that results from our current drug laws, which also fuel an illegal and highly profitable drug business. Appropriate reform, which would certainly include easier access for medicinal use, is long overdue.