Posts Tagged ‘loss of social housing’

Cleaners, Bow Creek and Stirling Prize

Thursday, October 6th, 2022

Thursday 6th October 2016 was another of those varied days I love. I began with a lunchtime protest against victimisation and nepotism by cleaners, then went for a walk by Bow Creek before finally photographing a protest outside RIBA where the annual Stirling Prize presentation was taking place.


Cleaners demand ‘End Nepotism’ – 155 Moorgate

The Independent Workers Union CAIWU occupied the lobby of Mace’s headquarters building in Moorgate at lunchtime protesting noisily against cleaning contractor Dall Cleaning Services. I met the cleaners and supporters outside Moorgate station where they got out posters and a banner before marching quietly to pay an unannounced visit to Mace’s headquarters building where they walked into the lobby and started making a lot of noise.

They called for the reinstatement of two cleaners who they say were dismissed illegally without proper notice or other procedures being followed. They say that the cleaners have been dismissed simply to give jobs to members of the family of a Dall Cleaning Services supervisor.

After around 15 minutes a police officer arrived, but it was too noisy to hear what he was saying and the protest continued. He stood a little to the side and called for reinforcements, and as these arrived the protesters walked out to join those who had stayed outside and the protest continued on the pavement for another 20 minutes.

Police came to tell the protesters they were making a lot of noise, and were told that was the idea – they came here to do so and shame Mace and Dall Cleaning Services.

Eventually another officer who had been present at several previous CAIWU protests arrived and was told they would soon be stopping.

And after a couple more minutes, Alberto ended the protest with the usual warning “We’ll be back – and that’s a fact”.

More at Cleaners demand ‘End Nepotism’.


Limehouse, Bow Creek & Silvertown, London

I had the afternoon to fill before the next protest and it was a fine day so I decided it was time to take another trip to Bow Creek. I took the DLR from Bank to West India Dock to start my walk, and took the opportunity and a fairly clean train window to take a few pictures on my way there.

City Island is not quite an island

I walked over the Lower Lea Crossing, which provided a view of work which was now rapidly going ahead on ‘City Island’, where a loop in Bow Creek goes around what was previously the site of Pura Foods. This development had stalled with the financial crash in 2008 but was now in full swing.

From there I walked on along the elevated Silvertown Way, giving views of the surrounding area, before taking the DLR back to Canning Town, again taking advantage of a fairly clean train window on the ride.

Rather to my surprise, at Canning Town I found that the exist to the riverside walk was finally open. I think the walk here beside Bow Creek was constructed in the 1990s and I’d been waiting for around 20 years for this exit from the station to open and give access to it. I didn’t have as much time left as I would have liked but did make a few pictures.

For years there have been plans to create a walk from the path beside the Lea Navigation at Bromley-by-Bow to the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, and the section as far as Cody Dock had opened a few years earlier – with the ridiculous name of ‘The Fatwalk’. It hasn’t really got any further yet, though at least it has been renamed as the ‘Leaway’.

More pictures – both panoramic and otherwise at Limehouse, Bow Creek & Silvertown.


ASH protest Stirling Prize – RIBA, Portland Place

Many of the protesters wore masks showing RIBA President Elect Ben Derbyshire

Architects for Social Housing (ASH) led a protest outside the Stirling Prize awards ceremony pointing out that one of the short-listed projects, Trafalgar Place, was built on the demolished Heygate Estate, which was ‘stolen from the people’ with hundreds of social housing tenants and leaseholders being evicted and the site sold at one tenth of its value to the developers.

 ‘Architecture is Always Political!’, a quote from Richard Rogers

Together with other housing protesters than held their own awards ceremony on the pavement in front of the RIBA building, awarding the ‘O J Simpson Award for getting away with murder’ to drMM Architects for this project, the first phase of Lendlease’s £1.5 billion Elephant & Castle redevelopment. This will replace 1214 social housing homes with few or no affordable homes.

There were no other contestants for the Ben Derbyshire Foot In Mouth Award than RIBA President Elect Ben Derbyshire but there was a vote to select which of five of his totally ridiculous statements by him about social housing should be the winner.

Among those at the protest were residents opposing the demolition of the Aylesbury estate, close to the Heygate, where Southwark Council are also demolishing social housing properties rather than carry out relatively low cost Aylesbury estate,that was voted for by the residents and could continue the useful life of these properties for many years.

Simon Elmer of ASH holds up the award for the ‘O J Simpson Award for getting away with murder’ awarded to drMM Architects and developers Lend Lease for Trafalgar Place

Estate demolition has a huge social and environmental cost and schemes like these in the borough of Southwark result in huge losses of social housing. But they provide expensive properties often sold largely to investors who will never live in them and large profits to the developers. Councils hope to share in these profits, but on the Heygate made huge losses, though some individuals involved have gained highly lucrative jobs.

More at ASH protest Stirling Prize.


Highgate to Stoke Newington

Wednesday, September 4th, 2019

On the early May Bank Holiday – the one that should have been on May Day but isn’t – Linda and I walked another short section of the Capital Ring, from Highgate to Stoke Newington.

After a short walk along footpaths and roads, the route joins the former railway line which is now the Parkland Walk. Quite a lot of this is in a cutting, though there are some embankment sections, but except where the line has bridges over roads the view is often very limited by trees and bushes which have grown beside the former line.

A long bridge takes you across the East Coast main line and its suburban outliers and into Finsbury Park, where both cafe and toilets were very welcome.

Across the park you join the New River, supplying water to London since 1613, thanks in particular to the efforts of Sir Hugh Myddelton, though I expect he had quite a few others to dig it for him (and it wasn’t his idea in the first place.)

This goes along the edge of the Woodberry Down Estate, a large area bought by the LCC for housing in 1934, but only developed after the war as a ‘utopian estate of the future‘. Building began in 1949 and the 57 large blocks of flats were only completed in 1962. The estate included the country’s first purpose built comprehensive school and a medical estate opened by Nye Bevan, but unfortunately was allowed to deteriorate over the years, and beggining in 2009 became one of Europe’s biggest single-site estate regeneration projects.

The controversial scheme by Berkeley Homes, Notting Hill Genesis and Hackney Council will involve a loss of around a fifth of social housing in the area estimated by the council at around 320 homes and has been described as ‘state-sponsored gentrification‘ with 3 bed flats selling for around £800,000 and many being bought up as investments by foreign investors rather than used as homes.

On the opposite side of the path, across the New River are large reservoirs of open water, part now a nature reserve with public access (and another tea room with toilets) and another used for sailing and other water sports. The remarkable Scottish Baronial castle built as offices for the water board is now a climbing centre.

From there it’s a short walk to Clissold Park (another cafe and toilets – this must be the best provided section of the Capital Ring) and Stoke Newington Church Street, often described as a ‘hipster hub‘. Next to the park are the two churches of St Mary, the older locked but with an atmospheric and overgrown churchyard and the Victorian built in 1858 to the design of Sir George Gilbert Scott,  open and well worth a visit.

As a final climax we came to Abney Park Cemetery, one of London’s finest, set up in 1840 as a burial ground for non-conformists and the final resting place of around 200,000 Londoners, now a nature reserve. We looked up the train times from nearby Stoke Newington station and rather than rushing through to the station spent some time wandering around and finding a few of the better-known graves and some other interesting monuments.

In our rush from there the few hundred yards to the station I lost a little concentration and we went down to the wrong platform and caught a train going into London rather than out and had to re-plan our journey home. It turned out to be almost as fast.

More pictures from the walk at Highgate to Stoke Newington.


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