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Streatham & Newham Carnivals – 2007

Streatham & Newham Carnivals: On Saturday 14 July 2007 I photographed carnivals in two areas of London, Streatham in south London and Newham in East London.

Although we had a long carnival tradition in England, and one that was much revived after the Second World War, many of those traditional carnivals had by around 2000 died out. But new carnival traditions, particularly from the Caribbean have come to take their place. Unlike the traditional events many of these received considerable funding from local authorities and organisations such as the Arts Council. While I was pleased to see this, I think we lost something by failing to support our own traditional and often rather zany activities.

The two events were rather different. This was only the second Streatham Carnival and seemed to be supported by small local groups and individuals. It was specifically a children’s parade, mainly with primary age children and their parents. The Newham event is a much larger council organised and sponsored event and includes many community organisations and schools and is in part a PR event for Newham’s Mayor.

The Streatham procession was mainly on the pavements of one of London’s busier roads, while in Newham to procession took place in a park and along less busy urban roads. The Streatham parade had a spontaneous feel while in Newham you were aware of the weeks or months of planning by the various organisations.

Here I’ll post a few pictures from each of them – with links to more pictures on My London Diary – and the short texts I wrote in 2007.

Streatham Carnival Parade

Streatham High Road

Streatham & Newham Carnivals - 2007 — *The procession walked along the pavement on both sides of the High Road.*

Saturday 14th July I photographed a small carnival procession in Streatham High Road, making its way down the pavement on the edge of the busy street, part of the Streatham Festival.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Newham Carnival

East Ham

Newham Carnival was a much larger affair, with quite a few local schools taking part along with other community groups. The carnival had a largely West Indian feel, although there were some Indian dancers. Of course those taking part reflected the multiracial nature of Newham, with over 60% of residents from ethnic groups other than White English, but I would have liked to see more diversity reflected. We even have an English Carnival tradition – and no reason why this, along with Irish and other ethnic traditions shouldn’t be more evident in events such as this

*Indian dancers were at the front of the procession*

More pictures on My London Diary.

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Focus E15 Occupy Police Station – 2016

East Ham. Sunday 10th July 2016

Housing Activists Focus E15 get their name from a hostel for young single mothers in Stratford, in the London postcode area E15. In September 2013 they were given notice of eviction from the hostel by by East Thames Housing Association after Newham Labour Council cut the funding. They were told they would have to move to private rented accommodation scattered around distant low-rent areas of the country if they wanted to be rehoused.

*Focus E15 protesters set up on Barking Rd, outside Newham Town Hall, with posters on its fence about Newham Mayor Robin Wales.*

Instead they decided to stick together and fight to remain in London where they had families, friends and support networks. Their campaign, supported by friends and family members as well as some members of the Revolutionary Communist Group, involving various direct actions including a party in the housing association offices, large marches, an occupation of Newham Council’s housing office, and of long-term empty council flats on a Stratford estate gained a great deal of local and national publicity. I was pleased to have photographed some of these events and you can find more about them on My London Dairy.

*Jasmin Stone holds up a RCG poster – ‘Newham residents suffer £50million cuts. Robin Wales gets £100,000 + £80,000 expenses’*

It was a successful campaign, but the group did not stop there, but widened into a much wider ‘Housing For All’ campaign, linking with other housing activists around the country and pushing housing for ordinary people higher up the national agenda.

*Focus E15 move towards the former police station*

They continue to fight Newham Council to meet their obligations towards local people, still in 2026 going to oppose evictions in the area, still accompanying people to support them at the housing office and still holding a weekly Saturday protest and advice stall on the pavement in the centre of Stratford on Stratford Broadway and an open meeting every Saturday afternoon in a former corner shop, Sylvia’s Corner.

*Some of the protesters had used ladders to climb onto the balconies and hang banners*

Their campaign brought them into conflict with Newham’s then Mayor, the abrasive Robin Wales, which at times became highly personal, with the mayor attacking them when they protested against him and his policies. The council’s actions against the group included the ludicrous ‘arrest’ of a table at their stall, arrests of Jasmin Stone, physical assaults and various attempts at intimidation.

The protest took place on the second day of the annual Newham Show, a PR exercise for the Mayor. For the previous two years the group had been physically prevented from handing out leaflets at the show, so in 2016 they set up a stall on the main Barking Road a short distance from the show to hand out their housing information leaflets to the crowds making their way to it.

The Grade II listed former East Ham police station on the corner of High Street South, opposite Newham Town Hall had closed two years earlier and was then empty. [The Met sold it in 2018 for £3.4million.] After a few speeches and handing out leaflets for around an hour on Barking Road, the protesters picked everything up and walked the few yards to the police station where some had already used a ladder to climb onto the two balconies and hang banners.

*A protester holds a ‘Robin Wales’ selfie-stick*

The protest continued there, with more speeches. One woman on her way to the show stopped and spoke on the open mike and demonstrated how she thought people should kick Mayor Wales out of Newham – and in 2018, at least partly as a result of demonstrations like these, the Labour Party managed to do so, despite what had seemed his iron hold on the party machine.

Other housing activists came to speak and the rally continued. A police car stopped and the officers came to talk with the protesters. They claimed to be worried that the balconies could be dangerous – but they look pretty solid and sound to me and the protesters and the rally continued.

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Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction – 2014

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction: Ten years ago today, on Friday 17th January 2014 I went to Stratford to photograph and support mothers threatened with eviction from their hostel.

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction – East Thames Housing, Stratford

The eviction threat came when Newham Council withdrew funding from the Focus E15 Foyer run by East Thames Housing Association. Rather than accept the evictions and be rehoused by the council in private rented flats in far-flung areas of the UK – including Wales and Liverpool, the women in the hostel decided to join together and fight.

They fought to be rehoused near to friends, families and support including nurseries close to their local area to avoid distress and dislocation for themselves and their children – and eventually they won.

The fight by Focus E15 brought national publicity to the scandals around local authority housing, and was a inspiration to others around the country. They continue their fight with their ‘Housing For All‘ campaign and remain an active campaign against evictions in Newham, including a weekly street stall every Saturday on Stratford Broadway.

Their campaign against Newham Council and its right-wing Labour Mayor Robin Wales who seemed to regard the London borough as a personal fiefdom led to some devious and at times illegal attempts to silence them and was almost certainly a factor in fomenting the revolt by Labour Party members that eventually led to him being deposed. Though his replacement as Mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz, is perhaps only a slight improvement.

All local authorities have suffered under cuts by central government, and in particular attacks on social housing provision, begun under Thatcher and continued by all governments since. The cuts made by the Tory-led coalition following on from the financial crash of 2008 tightened the screw on them still further.

Newham under Robin Wales appears to have decided that they needed to attract a wealthier population to the area and get rid of some of their existing population and had decided in the early 2000s to sell off a well-located and popular council estate close to the centre of Stratford to whoever they could. They began the process of ‘decanting’ people from the Carpenters estate around 2004, with many properties being left empty for years despite having – together with Lambeth – the largest housing waiting lists in Greater London – around 3.5 times the average among London authorities.

One of the Focus E15 slogans was ‘Repopulate the Carpenters Estate’ and it was in part due to their actions, alongside those of other campaigners, that the estate was not sold off and demolished. The estate is now being regenerated by the council although Focus E15 find much to criticise in the council’s plans.

The Focus E15 had begun in September 2013 and the action ten years ago was one of their earliest. I met with them and supporters, including those from the Revolutionary Communist Group, on a street corner near the offices of East Thames and walked with them into the large foyer, where they posed for a photograph for one of the local newspapers.

Then some of the mothers and children moved into the show flat at the front of the offices, with others remaining on the street outside with banners and placards, handing out leaflets to people walking by and using a megaphone to explain why the mothers were protesting.

The member of East Thames staff who had been dealing with the mothers came to talk with them. He assured them that they would be allowed to remain until satisfactory accommodation had been found for them.

The mothers pointed out that East Thames had large numbers of homes available, including many on the former Olympic site in Stratford, but were told that East Thames could not allocate affordable properties directly, but had to work with Newham council.

He seemed genuinely suprised to hear from the mothers that Newham had made offers involving rehousing away from London, in Hastings, Birmingham and elsewhere, away from friends, families, colleges, nurseries and support networks, and stated that East Thames intended to see them rehoused in London.

Later the Group Chief Executive of East Thames, June Barnes arrived and talked with the mothers telling them the same. East Thames seemed clear that the real problem was with Newham Council and not with them, though the campaigners were not really convinced.

You can read a longer account of the protest and party with many more pictures on My London Diary at Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction.

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Focus E15 Occupy Police Station for Newham Show

*Jasmin Stone speaks at rally outside Newham Police station*

Focus E15 Occupy Police Station for Newham Show – Sunday 10th July 2016

*At the street stall outside Newham Town Hall*

It says something about Newham’s elected Mayor from 2012 to 2018 that the major public event in the borough was called The Mayor’s Newham Show. It should of course have been the People’s Newham Show or even just the Newham Show. But Newham was a monolithic Labour fiefdom, ruled by Sir Robin Wales, and the event, paid for by the people, was very much a PR exercise for the Mayor.

*A worker for street homeless in Newham speaks*

Housing action group Focus E15 were ejected from the Mayor’s Newham Show in 2014 when they approached the Mayor with protesting the borough’s housing policies – and Robin Wales was found guilty of a breach of the code of conduct by Newham Standards Committee.

The following year the council ordered private security to stop campaigners handing out leaflets at the show and members of the Focus E15 campaign were very forcibly thrown to the ground and evicted from the park in East Ham where the show is held.

*They march the few yards to the police station*

So in 2016, instead of trying to leaflet inside the Newham Show, the Focus E15 Campaign set up a stall outside Newham Town Hall on Barking Road close to the park and spoke and handed out leaflets to people walking to the show in Central Park. Their campaign began when they faced eviction from the Focus 15 hostel in central Stratford when Newham Council axed the grant and the council attempted to disperse them to private rented properties in cities including Liverpool and Manchester and to Wales.

They refused, demanding to be rehoused within reach of families, friends and facilities they were familiar with, protesting the council’s policy of social cleansing, though various marches, high profile protests and occupations of empty council properties. Their campaign, which included a weekly street stall on Stratford Broadway widened from being a personal campaign into a ‘Housing for All’ campaign against Newham and other councils who are failing in their duty to provide housing for ordinary people across London.

*A woman on her way to Newham Show says everyone should kick the Mayor*

Focus E15 continue to speak out and defend tenants from evictions and get suitable rehousing for those made homeless in Newham, while continuing to attack the council’s failure to provide adequate housing in Newham for long-term residents while hundreds of council homes have been empty for over ten years and the council encourages the building of huge areas of luxury flats for overseas investors and rich newcomers.

*‘Room for Everyone – No Room for Racism’*

Among the many empty properties in Newham was the former police station on the corner of Barking Road opposite the Town Hall on High Street South leading to Central Park. After an hour or so of campaigning from the street stall they moved the short distance to this and four people climbed onto the two balconies with banners while the others held a rally in front of the building.

Police came to look at the protest, and tried to persuade the four on the balconies to come down, telling them they were worried that these were unsafe. There was nothing to suggest there was any risk at all as the building was still in good condition despite being unused. Police who want photographers to move also always lie to us and tell us that it is for our safety – and it almost never is, and sometimes actually results us moving into greater danger.

Almost certainly the people on the balconies were safe for the next twenty years or more – or until the building was demolished, and after they told police they would come down in a short time when the rally ended, the police gave up the pretence and simply watched from the opposite side of the road.

Support for the Focus E15 protest came from the Revolutionary Communist Group, Feminist Library, Boleyn Dev 100, Tower Hamlets Renters and Newham Green Party. Among the speakers at the rally was a woman from East End Sisters Uncut who talked about their occupation of an empty property in Hackney as a community resource in protest against Hackney Council’s housing failures.

In 2015 Newham sent 244 families families out of London, claiming it had no space or money to house them here. The borough then had the largest number of empty properties of any London borough – around 1,318 with a total value of around £470 million. Although Sir Robin Wales has now been replaced as Mayor, Newham’s housing policies are still failing the people, and the police station, last in use around 8 years ago, is still empty and firmly sealed against occupation. The Focus E15 campaign continues.

More at Focus E15 Occupy Police Station.

Focus E15 Mums at City Hall 2014

Focus E15 Mums at City Hall 2014. Focus E15 mothers and children, threatened with eviction from the Mother and Baby Unit at the Focus E15 hostel in Stratford came on a decorated bus to City Hall, holding a party outside and trying to hand in a petition and card to then city Mayor Boris Johnson.

I’d met the Focus E15 Mums the previous month when they partied inside the Stratford offices of East Thames Housing Association who run the hostel, but the eviction notices had come in October 2013 because Newham Council had decided to cut the funding for the hostel.

Newham was then at the centre of a post-Olympic housing boom, with both private developers and East Thames building large blocks of flats around the area. But the great majority of these are for sale or rent at market prices, and many were being bought not to live in but by overseas investors keen to cash in on the steeply rising prices of housing in London. Even housing associations build mainly for those on good salaries who can afford shared ownership schemes, with minimal homes at council-level rents.

Newham Council Mayor Robin Wales told the mothers there were no properties available in the area at council rents. He made it clear than if you are poor, Newham doesn’t want you, and they were offered rented accommodation far outside of London, in Birmingham, Manchester, Hastings and even Wales – “expensive, sometimes poor quality, insecure one year private rents” – with the threat that anyone who turned down the offers would be regarded as having made themselves intentionally homeless and get no help from the council.

The mothers in the hostel decided to stand together and fight the council, demanding they be placed within suitable socially rented accommodation in Newham. Among other areas they point out that there is good quality council-owned housing on the Carpenters Estate, a short walk from their hostel, which Newham council have left empty, in some cases for ten years, as they try to sell off the area for development – despite having the highest waiting list for social housing in London.

As I wrote in 2014, London Mayor Boris Johnson Boris Johnson “has made it clear that he is opposed to the gentrification of London, stating: ‘The last thing we want to have in our city is a situation such as Paris where the less well-off are pushed out to the suburbs’ and promising ‘I’ll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together…’ But these turned out to be typically Johnsonian empty words and during his time as London Mayor he did nothing to help those in housing need and stop those cleared from council estates having to move miles further out.

*The card Boris Johnson wouldn’t accept*

On the day of the protest the mothers tried to deliver a card to him, but his office simply refused to take it. The assistant director of the affordable homes programme in London, Jamie Ratcliff did come down to meet them and took their petition, but had little to say to them, giving them his card and telling them to email him.

*Mothers go in to deliver the card but no-one would accept it*

More on the event on My London Diary at Focus E15 Mums at City Hall.

The Focus E15 Campaign eventually got all or most of the mothers and children rehoused locally, and they continue to compaign in Newham for Fair Housing For All, holding a street stall despite harassment from council and police every Saturday on Stratford Broadway, helping homeless families get proper treatment from the council, protesting for those in terrible conditions in temporary accomodation and stopping evictions, and taking part in protests and campaigns for social housing in London and elsewhere.

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction 2014

*Focus E15 Mothers and children party in the show flat – 17th January 2014*

Focus E15 Mothers Party Against Eviction 2014
Housing remains one of London’s larger problems, with sky-high house prices and market rents. At the start of 2022 the average flat rent in London is over £360 per week – around £19,000 per year, while the average property price according to Zoopla is £681,427.

Housing has always been a problem in London, but in the 1950s, 60s and 70s things were beginning to improve, largely due to both Labour and Conservative councils building council houses and flats. By the 1960s over 500,000 new flats were added in London and nationally around a third of UK households lived in social housing.

The government’s minimum wage for 2022 will be £9.50 per hour from April – an on that rate you would need to work for around 38 hours a week just to pay for a flat – and of course would have no chance of ever buying a flat or house. Things have got considerably worse since 2010, and in boroughs like Newham average rents now are 65% of average wages.

The building programme slowed down in the 1970s as governments made it more difficult for councils to build, but the real watershed came with Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Housing Act which gave council tenants the right to buy their properties at between 33-50% of market value – and stopped councils from using the proceeds to built more properties.

Further housing acts under Thatcher led to the transfer of much social housing to housing associations, which were allowed to access private finance while councils were very much restricted in their borrowing. Housing associations continue to build some new properties, but the numbers are small in relation to demand, and much lower than those built by councils in the 1950s-70s. Official figures for 2019 show only 37,825 new homes built for letting at below market rents while over 1.1 million households are on housing waiting lists – around 30 times as many.

So it is not surprising that councils such as Newham have a huge housing problem, and the council says it has the highest levels of overcrowded housing in the country, one of the highest proportion of people living in insecure private rented homes and in houses of multiple occupation and the largest number of homeless people – including those in temporary accommodation.

Newham was one of the first councils to get an elected Mayor in 2002, and Robin Wales held that post until 2018 when he was deselected as candidate. Many blame him for the particular failures over housing in the borough and point to properties on the Carpenters Estate in particular, some of which have been deliberately left empty for around 15 years.

The first group to organise and call out the council on their failures over housing were young single mothers who were threatened with eviction after Newham Council removed funding from East Thames Housing Association’s Focus E15 Foyer in Stratford. Newham Council had tried to get them to move well away from London, in Hastings, Birmingham and elsewhere, away from friends, families, colleges, nurseries and support networks. These offers were for private rented accommodation, with little or no security of tenure and would leave them at the mercy of often unscrupulous or uncaring landlords.

For once the group stood together and determined – helped by friends – to fight the council, not just for their own cases, but also for others whom Newham is failing to provide accommodation. Though they attracted national publicity and won their fight to stay in the London they continue to hold a weekly protest and advice stall in central Stratford every Saturday – I visited it again in late 2021. Their fight exposed the failures of Robin Wales and was certainly one of the factors in his losing support in the borough.

You can read more about the protes when a group of the mothers with their children went into the East Thames offices and held a party in their show flat on on My London Diary in Focus E5 Mothers Party Against Eviction. The East Thames staff who came to talk with them were generally sympathetic and attempted to reassure them but told them it was the responsibility of the council and not the housing association to rehouse them.

Housing: Focus E15 – Newham Show 2016

Housing remains a major problem, with many people and families in London still having to live in inadequate and often dangerous conditions. It isn’t that there is a shortage of homes, as many lie empty. There is a shortage, but it is of homes that people can afford to live in.

What London desperately needs is more low-cost housing. Council housing used to provide that, and by the late 1970s almost a third of UK households lived in social housing provided on a non-profit basis. Post-war building programmes, begun under Aneurin Bevan, the Labour government’s Minister for Health and Housing led to the building of estates both in major cities and the new towns that provided high quality housing at low rents, attempting to provide homes for both the working classes and a wider community.

Successive Conservative governments narrowed the scope of public housing provision towards only providing housing for those on low income, particularly those cleared from the city slums, reducing the quality of provision and also encouraging the building of more high-rise blocks, something also favoured by new construction methods of system building. Housing became a political battle of numbers, never mind the quality.

It was of course the “right to buy” brought in under Mrs Thatcher that was a real death blow for social housing. As well as losing many of their better properties, councils were prevented from investing the cash received from the sales in new housing – and the treasury took a cut too. Tenants seemed to do well out of it, getting homes at between half and two thirds of the market price, but often having bought their homes found the costs involved were more than they could afford, particularly when repairs were needed. Many of those homes were later sold and became “buy to let” houses.

Around ten years ago I passed an uncomfortable 25 minutes of a rail journey into London when a young student with a loud public-school voice explained to two friends what a splendid scheme “buy to let” was. He was already a landlord and profiting from it. You didn’t he told them actually have to have any money, as you could borrow it against the surety of your existing property – or a guarantee from Daddy – at a reasonable rate. You then bought a house and let it out, through an agency to avoid any hassle of actually dealing with tenants. Even allowing for the agent’s fees the rents you charged would give you a return on your investment roughly twice you were paying on your loan. It was money for nothing. And so it was for those who could get banks and others to lend them money, though recent changes have made it a little less profitable.

New Labour did nothing to improve the situation, and even made things worse through encouraging local councils to carry out regeneration schemes, demolishing council estates and replacing them with a large percentage of private properties, some largely unaffordable “affordable” properties and usually a token amount of actual social housing. The situation has been was still worsened since then, both by extending the right to buy to Housing Association properties and also by changes in tenure for those still in social housing. Successive governments have also driven up both house prices and rents by various policies, particularly the subsidies for landlords provided by Housing Benefit.

I’ve written before about Focus E15, a small group based in Newham whose activities have prompted some national debate. Begun to fight council moves to close their hostel for single mothers and disperse them to privately rented accommodation across the country (like Katie in ‘I, Daniel Blake who gets sent to Newcastle), having succeeded in their fight to stay in London they widened their scope to help others fight for decent housing – particularly in Newham, where the Labour council under Mayor Robin Wales was failing to deal with some of the worst housing problems in the country – while keeping large numbers of council properties empty.

Eventually Newham got rid of Robin Wales (and their campaign almost certainly helped) but the housing problems remain. A few days ago Focus E15 tweeted

A leak was spotted on day one, now four days have passed with no proper washing facilities, and third day with faecal matter leaking from toilet soaking the carpet, with a flooded unusable kitchen. The repairs team say the family should be moved out. pic.twitter.com/5jakUzJ6K6
— FocusE15 (@FocusE15) July 6, 2021

Brimstone house in Stratford is the former FocusE15 hostel, now run by Newham Council as temporary and emergency accommodation.

One of Robin Wales’ big PR operations was the annual ‘Mayor’s Newham Show’ held in Central Park. Focus E15 were stopped from handing out leaflets inside or outside the show and on 1oth July 2016 set up a stall and protest on the main road a few hundred yards away. After handing out leaflets to people walking to the show for an hour or so, they briefly occupied the balconies of the empty former Police Station opposite Newham Town Hall on the road leading to the show ground in a protest against the Mayor’s housing record and policies.