Brick Lane, Brockwell Park & Lambeth Peace Month: Sunday 9th September 2007 was a slightly disappointing day for me, perhaps because I expected more and tried to do too much. I was going to London maiinly to meet a couple of friends and probably should have just done that and enjoyed some time with them – and perhaps a few beers. Even have left the cameras at home.
But the Green Fair and the Interfaith Picnic were interesting and I did manage to take a few pictures of aspects of London which now, looking back, are of more interest than I thought at the time. So here are some of the photos and what I wrote back in 2007 – and links to more pictures on My London Diary.
Brick Lane
Spitalfields.
Not a lot was happening around lunchtime in Brick Lane, so I took a few snaps and went elsewhere.
Sunday none of the three events I visited really turned out to be what I expected. I started in Brick Lane where a music festival was on offer. It didn’t really seem to have started when I was there and I couldn’t be bothered to wait.
I took a few pictures in the market which takes place every SundaySo I took the underground to Blackfriars to get a train to Herne Hill
Then I went on to the Urban Green Fair at Brockwell Park (a short journey on the train from Blackfriars [to Herne Hill station.])
I’m not sure who would want a wooden mushroom, though some you could sit on.An apple press would be useful, but this Italian one was rather larger than I needed
This was a bit more interesting but did seem to be rather too much people trying to sell things, and I had hoped for more music and performances.
I met again the great pedal-powered Rinky-Dink sound system
Imam (centre) with assistant and Toaha Qureshi from Stockwell Green Islamic Centre
I met Dave and Bob at the Green Fair, and Dave told me that there was an Interfaith Peace Picnic just about to start in Windrush Square in Brixton. So I jumped on a 37 bus for the few stops there.
All the different groups present offered generous amounts of free vegetarian food, and it pained me to have to refuse most of it. I’d not heard of the Caribbean Hindu Cultural Society before; based on Brixton Hill it is apparently the oldest Hindu group in the country.
Members of the Caribbean Hindu Society, Lambeth, address the peace picnic.
The event was organised by the South London Interfaith Group, and also present were the Archdeacon of Lambeth, the Imam and others from the Stockwell Green Islamic Centre along with some from local churches.
Representatives from various groups gave short performances of different kinds (including a powerfully sung ‘Lord’s Prayer’ by one of the more senior Hindu men) and the whole event, as intended made “a visible public statement of respect and cooperation.”
All was very worthy and worthwhile, but there was perhaps little to photograph.
Monkey Business, Wrecked Cars & Roupell: I’d thought when I wrote my previous post about 1990 that my day on April 1st 1990 had finished when my walk in Stoke Newington ended, but my contact sheets and the dates written on them tell a different story.
I’d not gone to the Poll Tax demonstration the previous day, but from Stoke Newington took the tube down to Covent Garden and walked to St Martin’s Lane and Tottenham Court Road where I photographed a few burnt out cars before going on to Waterloo East and catching a train to Lewisham to take more photographs there.
Monkey Business was a restaurant in Covent Garden which apparently came to an untimely end around 1991. In a Facebook post Sajan Narain relates: “While I was studying at Cambridge, a few of us friends went to Monkey Business, an aptly named restaurant in Covent Garden. While we were dining in the basement there, we heard loud sounds of guns being fired, and smashing of glass, like sound effects from an action movie. Waiters and staff were running around shouting.
We saw lots of huge red marks on white shirts worn by waiters. It turned out to be blood. There was a huge gang war going on above us. Many shots were fired and glass windows at the front of Monkey Business had been smashed.
Armed police, ambulances, doctors and paramedics arrived while we were there. We survived the gang war without any injuries. After that incident, Monkey Business had to be shut down, unfortunately.”
Burnt out car, St Martin’s Lane, Covent Garden, Westminster, 1990, 90-4b-21
Back in 1990 I rarely photographed demonstrations, mainly only on the large marches of organisations to which I belonged such as the Anti-Apartheid movement and CND. Although I was aware of protests against the Poll Tax – and had photographed people burning their community charge demands – I did not attend the major protest called for March 31st when around 200,000 crowded into the area around Trafalgar Square.
The police had thought there would only be a few thousand and laughed at the protest organisers when they had suggested there could be 20,000 but it turned out much, much larger and the police were unprepared.
Heavy-handed policing, including the violent arrest of a man in a wheelchair and a charge by mounted police into the crowd in Trafalgar Square, followed by police driving riot vans into the crowd aroused huge anger from the protesters, many of whom began attacking the police with anything to hand, including scaffold poles. The police actions turned what would have been an angry but largely peaceful protest into a riot.
According to Wikipedia “Scuffles between rioters and police continued until 3 am. Rioters attacked numerous shops, most notably Stringfellow’s nightclub, and car showrooms, and Covent Garden cafés and wine bars were set ablaze, along with motor vehicles.”
A police report the following year found “no evidence that the trouble was orchestrated by left-wing anarchist groups”, though some of these definitely claimed the credit. As usual at protests, most of those responsible for attacks on police evaded arrest and those arrested were largely bystanders and many were acquitted with video evidence showing the police had “fabricated or inflated charges”.
Protests including this one against the Poll Tax led to the questioning of Margaret Thatcher’s position as Prime Minister and led to her replacement by John Major. In 1991 he announced his intention to replace the Poll Tax by a new Council Tax, still in operation.
This returned to basing tax levels on property valuations but was in many respects a much cruder and less fair system than the former rates, particularly favouring owners of large and expensive properties at the expense of those in moderate and smaller homes.
Rooftops, Waterloo, Lambeth, 1990, 90-4b-26
My day was still not finished and I was on my way to Lewisham. As I walked down to the platform at Waterloo East station I pushed my camera through the gap in one of the slightly open windows and took this picture of the rooftops of Roupell Street and its neighbours.
These densely packed late Georgian worker’s cottages were developed by metal merchant John Roupell in 1824. He had married the daughter of a wealthy City wine merchant and after she inherited a wealthy aunt’s estate in Essex bought around 7 acres here at a cost of £8,000 to develop the Roupell Park Estate, its streets named after his family.
In their early years many of these small 4-roomed houses will have housed perhaps four large families, one to a room, perhaps over 20 people. These streets are much used as settings for films and TV, and the small houses now sell for around £1.5m
Air Pollution, Lambeth Libraries & Aleppo: Saturday 30th April 2016 was a day that illustrated the diversity of protests in London. Cyclists staged a die-in outside the Dept for Transport against killer air pollution, campaigners in Lambeth demanded the council scrap plans to close ten libraries and Syrians and otheers called for an end to Russian and Syrian air strikes on Aleppo.
Stop Air Pollution Killing Cyclists
Dept of Transport
Air pollution in London is a serious problem with pollution often above legal limits, mainly because of exhaust gases and particulates from traffic on our congested streets.
Studies say that this causes the premature deaths of over 9,500 Londoners each year, as well as many more living in suffering from lung diseases, heart problems, cancers, asthma, emphysema and lung infections.
Donnachadh McCarthy of Stop Killing Cyclists
Cyclists are particularly at risk, breathing in large amounts of dirty air as they ride, though of cause the pollution affects us all. This protest was organised by ‘Stop Killing Cyclists’ who say the Tory government had stopped progress on making London’s air cleaner.
The campaigners who staged the die-in on Horseferry Road demanded fair funding for cyclists to make riding a bike in London safer with more segregated routes and safer junctions to encourage more people to ride rather than drive. As well as resulting in less traffic the exercise would also improve health.
They called for all non-zero emission private cars to be banned now from the city on days were the pollution levels were expected to be above EU safety levels, for all diesel vehicles to be banned in the city centre within 5 years – and all petrol powered vehicles within 10 years, as well as regular ‘car-free’ days in London and other major cities.
To stop the killing of children and other pedestrians they called for residential areas to become living streets Home Zones, getting rid of dangerous and polluting through routes and for a national programme of pedestrianisation of city, borough and town centres.
They also wanted councils to be allowed to limit the number of private hire vehicles and to promote the serious use of pedicabs – currently only fleecing tourists in the city. The protest came in the run up to local elections, including for the Mayor of London, and the candidates were asked to respond to these demands. Only the Green Party candidate Sian Berry (who took part in the protest) really responded positively.
Upper Norwood Library on the Croydon/Lambeth border and jointly funded by the two boroughs was being handed over to the Upper Norwood Library Trust to run as a community hub. Pressure from protesters has led to the council agreeing to one member of staff for a transitional period, but the library then had five professional staff.
Protesters from the Syria Solidarity Campaign came to protest after bombing raid on the Al-Qudus hospital in Aleppo the previous Wednesday night had killed tens of civilians including children and three doctors.
The hospital had a policy of only treating civilians and among those killed were the last paediatrician and the last dentist in Aleppo. The air raid also targeted the building used by civil defence volunteers.
Across the street from the private road housing the Russian Embassy they called for an end to Russian and Syrian air strikes, for an end to the Assad regime and for Putin to get Russian forces out of Syria.
Central Hill & Vigil Against Terror: On Thursday 23 March 2017 tenants and supporters from the Central Hill estate in Crystal Palace came to a Lambeth Council Cabinet Meeting to protest against the proposed demolition of their estate. Later I went to Trafalgar Square to a vigil following the terrorist attack in Westminster the previous day.
Stop Central Hill Estate Demolition
South Lambeth
Jane Nicholl holds a mask of Lambeth Council Leader Liz Peck calling her SCUM
Central Hill is one of the finest council estates in London with around 450 homes built in 1966-74 on a hillside with views of London. I’ve photographed it on several occasions including in 2016, and was astounded when I heard of Lambeth’s plan to demolish it.
This is an estate that should certainly have been listed for its architectural merit but was refused I think on political grounds – as was Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar. Although in need of some refurbishment it is basically a a good condition and would last for many more years.
The council say that by demolishing the estate and working with a private developer they can put around twice as many homes on the site, though most of these would be for sale or market price rents rather than social housing.
Central Hill residents gather outside the community centre where the council are meeting
A report by Architects for Social Housing, Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration, includes not only their “designs for the estate’s refurbishment and increase in housing capacity by up to 50 per cent without the demolition of a single existing home, but also our account of why and how these proposals were rejected by Lambeth council, which – despite being opposed by 77 per cent of the residents – in March 2017 announced its intention to demolish Central Hill estate.”
The residents had brought with them to present to the council the survey of 322 households which showed 79% of all residents were against demolition and favoured a programme of refurbishment. The survey completely contradicted the council’s assertions.
Sid shows off his T-shirt with an amended Lambeth Council mission statement: ‘We demolish beautiful council estates to make way for ugly homes for the rich – Lambeth’
I left before the meeting, but was told the councillors refused to listen to the arguments put forward by the residents and approved the decision for demolition without any real consideration. Residents and activists say the council seems to have no interest in providing housing for its current residents but is simply hoping to share in the profits of private development – and the financial opportunities this will provide for some councillors and officers.
The Revolutionary Communist Group pose with their ‘Housing is A Right’ banner outside
Protests continued and the Central Hill estate is still there eight years later, although some facilities have closed. On Lambeth Council’s web site it states “We are undergoing the Options Appraisal process for your estate from July 2024. The process is now estimated to complete in late 2026.”
After the speeches people lit candles in the square
Thousands of Londoners including many Muslims had come to the vigil called by London Mayor Sadiq Khan to show their respect for those killed and injured in the terror attack the previous day.
Six people including the attacker died, and at least 50 people were injured when a terrorist drove a car into pedestrians on the pavement along the south side of Westminster Bridge and Bridge Street before crashing into the fence around the Houses of Parliament and jumping out to fatally stab a police officer before being himself shot and killed.
There were speeches by police, the Home Secretary and the Mayor and then a minutes silence. Three large candles on the steps were lit and people in the crowd also lit candles, bringing them to place with others as dusk fell.
Tories Out March: Around 20,000 met outside the BBC in Portland Place on Saturday 1st July 2017 to march to Parliament Square demanding an end to the Tory government under Theresa May.
Class War wrap a march steward in their banner at the start of the march
Most were supporters of the Labour Party and in particular of the then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had narrowly failed to win the recent general election, defeated not by the Tories but by sabotage within the party by the Labour right who controlled much of the party mechanism.
John McDonnell with the banner at the front of the march
The Labour right had been shocked and appalled by Corbyn’s victory in the leadership contest and had done everything they could since then to get rid of him, with orchestrated cabinet resignations and the stoking up of false antisemitism claims combined with behind the scenes actions to ensure the failure of his attempts to improve the way the party tried to deal with such allegations.
Rev Paul Nicolson from Taxpayers Against Poverty rings his bell
We had seen on television the relief felt by some of them as the results came out when after it had begun to look as if Labour had a chance of victory it became clear that the Tories would hang on to a small majority. The last thing they had wanted had been for Corbyn to have won.
Mark Serwotka of PCS and MP Diane Abbott hold the banner at the front of the march
Theresa May had scraped in but had then had to bribe the DUP, a deeply bigoted party with links to Loyalist terrorists to give her a working majority.
A Grenfell resident speaks in Parliament Square holding up some of the flammable cladding
Her austerity policies had been largely rejected by the electorate and the recent Grenfell Tower disaster had underlined the toxic effects of Tory failure and privatisation of building regulations and inspection and a total lack of concern for the lives of ordinary people.
A woman poses as Theresa May with a poster ‘We cut 10,000 fire fighter jobs because your lives are worthless’
The protesters – and much of the nation – knew that the Tories had proved themselves unfit to govern. The marchers and the people wanted a decent health service, education system, housing, jobs and better living standards for all.
East London Strippers Collective
But not all were happy with Labour policies either, although the great majority of them joined in with the sycophantic chanting in support of Corbyn. But there were significant groups who were also protesting against the housing polices being pursued by Labour-dominated local authorities, particularly in London Boroughs including Labour Southwark, Lambeth, Haringey and Newham.
Huge areas of council housing had been demolished or were under threat of demolition largely for the benefit of developers, selling off publicly owned land for the profit of the developers and disregarding the needs of the residents and of the huge numbers on council housing lists.
Class War protest the devastation of the estates where the poor live
One example was “the Heygate at Elephant & Castle, a well-designed estate deliberately run down by the council over at least a decade, but still in remarkably good condition. It cost Southwark Council over £51m to empty the estate of tenants and leaseholders, and in 2007 had valued the site at £150m, yet they sold it for a third of its market value to developers Lendlease for £50m.”
The estate had been home to over a thousand council tenants and another 189 leaseholders. Around 500 tenants were promised they would be able to return to to homes on the new estate – but there were just 82 social rented homes. The leaseholders were given compensation of around a third of the price of comparable homes in the new Elephant Park – and most had to move miles away to find property they could afford.
In 2017 Haringey was making plans to demolish around 5,000 council homes, roughly a third of its entire stock under what was known as the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) with developers Lendlease. Plans here prompted a revolt in the local area led by Labour members in the pro-Corbyn Momentum group who gained control of the council in 2018 and scrapped the HDV.
A giant-headed Theresa May outside Downing St
Among those leading protests against Labour’s Housing Policy was Class War who have been active in many of the protests over housing. I photographed them having a little fun with the march stewards, but unfortunately missed the scene at the rally in Parliament Square when Lisa Mckenzie confronted both Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the Union and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn asking them the simple question ‘When are you going to stop Labour councils socially cleansing people out of London?’.
Class War lift up their banner in front of a police officer videoing protesters
Both men ignored her, walking past without pausing to answer and “the small Class War group was surrounded by Labour Party supporters holding up placards to hide them and idiotically chanting ‘Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn! Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!’. But eight years later, now in power led by Starmer and Angela Rayner, Labour seems determined to make much the same mistakes in its housing policy.
Lambeth Protests Massive Council Cuts: it was already half an hour after sunset when I joined several hundred Lambeth residents who had turned up outside Lambeth Town Hall where later that evening on Wednesday 23rd Feb 2011 councillors were set to approve drastic cuts to council services. I took a few pictures without flash but soon realised I would need to use flash for the rest of the event.
Lambeth is a large borough in south London with over 300,000 residents, roughly a third of whom were born outside the UK. It includes some wealthy areas but also had eight areas among the 10% most deprived in the country.
One of the few taken by avaialable light
Lambeth Council has been under majority Labour control since 2006 and in the 2010 elections Labour won around 70% of the council seats. One of the councillors who spoke at the protest to loud applause was Kingsley Adams, now a former Labour party councillor after being thrown out of the party for opposing the cuts and is now an Independent Labour councillor.
And after I switched to flash
The council argues that the cuts are an ideological policy forced on them by the Tory-led Coalition Government rather than a real need to make savings, but the protesters from Lambeth Save Our Services say that they are imposing them with a much greater enthusiasm and severity than is necessary. As one banner read, “Labour Cuts in Lambeth? Thatcher would be proud!”
Speakers pointed out that there were many ways that the council could have made the necessary savings without cutting services, including bringing some private services back under council control and ending the expensive use of consultants and high levels of expenses paid to councillors.
They point out that the chief executive’s salary alone at £270,000, which seems quite excessive and is one of the highest in the country is enough to keep a library running, and compared this to the Prime Minister’s salary of £142,500.
The council had large reserves some of which they suggested could be used to keep services running while the council made more sensible plans for long-term savings. The also said that large savings could be made by paying back the council’s pension deficit over a longer period.
The cuts are indeed draconian, expected to result in one quarter of the total staff – around 1000 council workers – losing their jobs. Among those to be lost completely are park rangers and school crossing patrols, many regeneration schemes and cultural events, and the noise nuisance service.
There will be massive cuts in services for children and young people, adult social care and the upkeep of estates – where rents will be raised. Discretionary travel passes for adults with mental health problems will go.
Levels of street cleaning, and the maintenance of roads, cemeteries and parks will be cut. There will be massive cuts in education, including the merging of Lambeth College with Lewisham College. Three of the borough’s four public toilets will close, and drastic cuts in libraries will probably mean at least four closing.
I left as some of those at the protest were going into the council offices to make their case, shortly before the council meeting was scheduled to start, though there were still several hundred on the pavement outside.
Later I heard that the protesters had occupied the meeting room for a couple of hours. But the council simply held the meeting in another room and approved the plans for cuts of £79 million without them being able to make their case.
Central Hill Estate: Tuesday 2nd February 2016 was a bright winter day in London and i decided to go and take a look – and of course to photograph – the Central Hill Estate on the edge of Lambeth, which I had heard and read much about as Lambeth Coucil weree planning to demolish it.
You can read an excellent account of the building of the estate by architect Kate Macintosh on the Twentieth Century Society website, which records the care taken by lead architect Rosemary Stjernstedt (1912-1998) and her team, who had previuosly been head-hunted by Lambeth’s Chief Architect and Planner Ted Hollamby.
As well as planning to make the most of the steeply descending site with its extensive views across London the plans presevered as many as possible of the existing mature trees and included a Doctor’s group practice, a youth club, an old persons’ day centre and shops, open space, play areas, community buildings and a district heating system.
The Twentieth Century Society also supported the two applications for the listing of this site, turned down in 2016 and again in 2021, although the reasons for the refusal seem increasingly spurious and I think based on political pressure rather than architectural evidence.
I wrote about it at some length after my visit in February 2016 on My London Dairy and have visited it again on several occasions since, not lease to see the exhibition of alternative plans to meet Lambeth Council’s stated objectives for the demolition and rebuildling by careful and much lower cost development on the existing estate which would retain its essential excellent design.
Here I’ll quote a part of what I wrote then, beginning with my introduction.
“There is only one real problem with the Central Hill Estate in Upper Norwood. Which is that the estate, owned by Lambeth Council, was built in an age when architects and planners were proud to design the best they could and councils keen to house their tenants to the highest standards, but it has lasted into an age where government policy aims to get rid of all social housing and councils are out to join developers in profiting from redeveloping with lower standards and higher densities for private sale.”
“The whole is on a much more human scale than other large developments of the era, with a design that has proved successful in encouraging community. People like living on the estate and all I talked to when walking around taking pictures were very positive – except for the one council employee who came out from the upper Norwood Community Resource Centre to ask me what I was doing. “
“A survey answered by 150 residents recently found only two in favour of it being demolished. It has been a safe place to live, with below average crime levels – perhaps having the police station at its south-east corner has helped.”
“Like all social housing, the estate has suffered from neglect and poor maintenance, and the properties need refurbishment and bringing up to modern energy standards. Considering the age of the estate the cost per dwelling assessed by Lambeth Council is relatively moderate and only a fraction of that of new building.”
You can read the alternative proposals by Architects for Social Housing – Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening – prepared for the residents of Central Hill estate between May 2015 and March 2017 in response to the threat of demolition of 456 homes on the estate by Lambeth Labour Council.
In the introduction to the ASH report they write “However, there is nothing, either in current government legislation or in the housing policies of the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, that will stop councils from following the same practices Lambeth council employed to push through their plans to demolish Central Hill estate against both the wishes of residents and the demonstrable social, financial and environmental benefits of the design alternatives.” Lambeth Council refused to seriously consider their alternative suggestions.
Little has changed since then although we are now much more aware of the environmental impacts of demolition and rebuilding, and some greater lip-service was been paid the the “wishes of residents“, but the changes in planning recently announced by Labour had they been in place back in 2016 would almost certainly have meant that Central Hill would not now still be standing.
Housing and Planning Bill March: On Saturday 30th January 2016 housing activists including some local councillors and housing activist groups mainly from South London including Class War marched from the Imperial War Museum to Downing St in a protest organised by Lambeth Housing Activists against the Housing and Planning Bill.
They say the bill will have a particularly large impact in London and greatly worsen the already acute housing crisis here.
Speeches at the rally before the march in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park at the side of the Imperial War Museum by Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett and an number of housing activists including Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing were warmly applauded.
But there was one exception; when Southwark Council Cabinet Member for Housing Richard Livingstone the atmosphere changed, with boos and loud heckling from several people in the crowd including Elmer.
Simon Elmer shouts as Richard Livingstone speaks
The arguments continued in the crowd after Livingstone had left the platform with Elmer pointing out the scandal over the demolition of the Heygate Estate and now the Aylesbury estate, where thousands of council homes have been demolished and few of the promises made by Southwark Council have been kept.
Financially and morally Heygate was a scandal, with the council making derisory offers of compensation to leaseholders, far less than the value of comparable properties in the area and a huge loss of social housing, while getting rid of a huge public asset at a fraction of its true value. And since it was something the council seemed determined to repeat, and it is not surprising that feelings ran high.
Rather to the surprise of many the march set off walking in the opposite direction to its final destination of Downing Street, and it soon became clear that we were on a tour of Lambeth rather than taking a direct route.
“Class War decided to liven things up a little, first by dancing along the street singing the ‘Lambeth Walk’ and then by rushing across the pavement towards a large estate agency.
Police formed a line to stop them entering and they stood outside for some minutes with their banners – the field of crosses with the message ‘We have found new homes of for the rich’ and the Lucy Parsons banner with its quotation “We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live” before rejoining the march.”
For much of the march Lisa Mackenzie who had stood at Class War’s candidate in the 2015 General Election against Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford stood in front of the banners waving a plastic trident with a small banner ‘This Bill is the end of Council Housing’ with its second message an image of David Cameron and the alternative text ‘Bell End’. At times she donned a face mask of Smith.
Eventually the march reached Downing Street where police tried to direct them to the opposite side of Whitehall, but the marchers walked past them and crossed back to protest outside the gates, blocking traffic on Whitehall.
Here there were several groups listening to speakers and a samba band playing. Eventually police persuaded most of them to leave the road and I left for home.
Westminster & Waterloo: I’m not sure now why I was in London on Wednesday November 1st 1989, but probably I had been to see an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery during my half-term holiday. I took a slightly longer walk than usual to get back to Waterloo from Soho through Trafalgar Square and then along to Waterloo Bridge and across it to get back to the station.
Trafalgar Square, Westminster, 1989 89-10j-65
Back in 1989 there were still people feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and I made this rather atmospheric “contro-jour” image – not my usual kind of thing – I generally try to make pictures about substance rather than effect.
Trafalgar Square, Westminster, 1989 89-10j-66
My next frame was a little more like my normal work, though still making use of the backlit water in the fountains.
Royal Society of the Arts, John Adam St, Westminster, 1989 89-10j-56
Adelphi, the district south of Strand was developed by the Adams brothers (Robert and James), and the name is the Greek for brothers. The area here had been the London palace for the Bishop of Durham which had gardens going down the the River Thames and this was demolished for the new buildings. Financially the project was a disaster and they were only saved from bankruptcy by the Adam Buildings Act 1772 which enabled a public lottery to be run to save them.
The headquarters of the Royal Society of the Arts, then the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, was built by the brothers between 1768 and 1772 and is said to be London’s first neoclassical building.
Adelphi Building, Robert St, Savoy Place, Westminster, 1989 89-10j-44
Parts of the area were demolished in the early 1930s for the building of the massive Art Deco New Adelphi Building by Collcutt & Hamp finished in 1938. A speculative office building it has since been occupied by a number of well-known companies. The Grade II listed building with sculptures by Gilbert Ledwood has been internally refurbished since I made this picture. There is a public right of way, Lower Robert Street, beneath the building.
Outpatients, Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women, Waterloo Bridge, Stamford St, Waterloo, Lambeth, 1989 89-10j-35
I took a few more pictures in the area (not online) before making my way across Waterloo Bridge and onto Waterloo Road where I photographed the decoration on the former Outpatients Department of the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women.
This had been set up in the City of London in 1816 and was at the time one of very few hospitals that would treat children, though still only as outpatients. It gained the Royal in its title in 1821 when the Duke of York became a patron and moved to this new larger site three years later in 1824. The hospital was rebuilt to designs by Charles Nicholdson in 1903-5. It became part of the NHS in 1948 and closed in 1976.
In its later years it had a notorious psychiatric ‘Ward 5’ which carried out a number of highly dangerous treatments on its patients which led to deaths and other deleterious effects. On my 1990s map it is a part of King’s College.
St John’s Waterloo, Waterloo Rd, Waterloo, Lambeth, 1989 89-10j-21
This fine building was built in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars when the population of London was expanding rapidly and the Houses of Parliament voted a sum not exceeding a million pounds for the building of new churches to serve areas with large populations “more particularly in the Metropolis and its Vicinity.”
It was one of three churches designed by Francis Octavius Bedford in this project, and they were all built in what was then becoming an unfashionable Greek Revival style, completed in 1824.
St John’s Waterloo, Waterloo Rd, Waterloo, Lambeth, 1989 89-10j-23
The church was badly damaged in the Second World War in 1940, and stood without a roof and with much of the interior destroyed for almost ten years, with services taking place in the crypt. It was restored in 1950 with its interior in a ‘Festival of Britain’ style though some original parts remain, and was rededicated as the Festival of Britain Church. It is Grade II* listed.
I went across the road to Waterloo Station in time to catch my train home.
Haringey Development & Ritzy Strike: On Saturday 23rd September 2017 hundreds marched from a rally in North London against the council’s plans to make a huge transfer of council housing to Australian multinational Lendlease, which would result in the demolition of thousands of council homes, replacing them largely by private housing. I left the march close to its end taking the tube to Brixton where strikers at the were marking a year of action with a rally.
Haringey Against Council Housing Sell-Off
People had come to a rally and march against Haringey Council’s ‘Haringey Development Vehicle’, HDV, which proposed a £2 billion giveaway of council housing and assets to a private corporation run by Australian multinational Lendlease.
This would result in the speedy demolition of over 1,300 council homes on the Northumberland Park estate, followed by similar loss of social housing across the whole of the borough.
Similar ‘regeneration’ schemes in other boroughs such as Southwark, Lambeth and Barnet had resulted in the loss of truly affordable housing, with the result of social cleansing with many of the poorer residents of the redeveloped estates being forced to move out of these boroughs to areas with cheaper private housing on the outskirts of London and beyond.
London’s housing crisis has been made much worse by the activities of wealthy foreign investors buying the new properties and keeping them empty or only occasionally used as their values rise. Among the groups on the march were those such as Class War and Focus E15 who have down much to bring this to public attention.
In London it is mainly Labour Councils who are in charge and responsible for the social cleansing of the poor and the loss of social housing that is taking place on a huge scale.
Along with speakers from estates across London where similar schemes are already taking place there were those from Grenfell Tower where cost cutting and ignoring building safety and residents’ complaints by private sector companies including the TMO set up by the council created the disaster just waiting to happen.
On My London Diary I quoted part of a speech by then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn a few days later at the Labour Party conference which condemned current practice on estate ‘regeneration’ and housing of which the HDV is the prime example.
“The disdain for the powerless and the poor has made our society more brutal and less caring. Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument: the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower, a horrifying fire in which dozens perished. An entirely avoidable human disaster, one which is an indictment not just of decades of failed housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world, it is also a damning indictment of a whole outlook which values council tax refunds for the wealthy above decent provision for all and which has contempt for working class communities.”
“Indeed it has. And high in the list of that brutality is the estate regeneration programme that threatens, is currently being implemented against, or which has already privatised, demolished or socially cleansed 237 London housing estates, 195 of them in boroughs run by Labour councils, which vie with each other for the title of ‘least caring’, and among which the councils of Hackney, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Haringey could give the Conservative-run Kensington and Chelsea council a lesson in disdain, privatisation, failed housing policies and the inequality they produce. But it’s good to hear Corbyn discard the Tories’ contemptuous terminology of ‘hardworking families’ and ‘ordinary people’ and finally – if belatedly – refer to the ‘working class’.“
They go on to comment less favourably on Corbyn who they say had ignored “the estate regeneration programme that is at the heart of London’s transformation into a Dubai-on-Thames for the world’s dirty money” and so had failed to perceive that “every estate undergoing demolition and redevelopment could produce a similar testimony of inept and incompetent local authorities, bad political decisions and a failed and broken system of democratic accountability.”
The grass roots revolt against the HDV plans resulted in a political change and the scrapping of the plans. But the Labour Party has also changed radically, and those very people responsible for those ‘least caring’ local authorities in London and across the country are now in government.
A quite different vehicle was the star of the show in Brixton, where BECTU strikers at the Ritzy Cinema were celebrating a year of strike action with a rally supported by other trade unionists, including the United Voices of the World and the IWGB and other union branches.
The strikers continued to demand the London Living Wage, sick pay, maternity and paternity pay, for managers, supervisors, chefs and technical staff to be properly valued for their work, and for the four sacked union reps to be reinstated.
After speeches in English and Spanish, came the surprise. The vehicle in Brixton was the newly acquired ‘Precarious Workers Mobile’, a bright yellow Reliant Robin, equipped with a powerful amplifier and loudspeaker, and after more speeches this led the protesters in a slow march around central Brixton.
Various actions at the Ritzy had started three years before this, when workers called for a boycott of the cinema. In 2019, after an industrial tribunal had won some of their claims BECTU suspended the boycott and the Living Staff Living Wage campaign although still continuing to fight for equal pay and against other dismissals.
