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Southwark Housing, Bermondsey & Rembrandt – 2014

Southwark Housing, Bermondsey & Rembrandt: On Thursday October 16th 2014 I photographed a march from the Elephant to Southwark Council Offices over the borough’s housing scandals, took some time off in Bermondsey to take some panoramic images and then covered a protest at the National Gallery against sponsorship of art exhibitions by companies such as Shell, G4S, BP and Serco.

Compulsory Purchase Orders for Southwark Councillors

Housing campaigners from Southwark marched from the Elephant and Council to Southwark Council Offices to serve ‘People’s Compulsory Purchase Orders‘ on the homes of the Council leader and other councillors who they say have accepted gifts from developers to sell off council estates at knockdown prices.

The shameful demolition of over 1200 homes in and close to the well-designed and largely popular Heygate estate has cost the borough dearly, with the costs to the council of ‘decanting’ the residents exceeding the knock-down price it charged the developers.

Of course the estate residents suffered more, losing their homes and being forced to move further out into the suburbs. Leaseholders were only offered roughly half the true market value of property in the area.

The demolition and redevelopment has meant the loss of over a thousand social homes, and the new properties on the site had already been advertised to overseas buyers in Singapore and elsewhere as second homes, investment properties, homes for wealthy overseas students studying here, buy-to-let etc. There are just a few so-called affordable units at 80% of market rates, still well above what most Londoners can actually afford.

The protesters met at the base of the Strata Tower, an ugly development of largely luxury flats with three wind turbines built into its roof for show – unable to produce electricity as when running they produce excessive vibration in flats at the top of the building. Facing them ‘One The Elephant‘ was going up, a 44 storey block of luxury flats with no social housing, and is being sold abroad, with ‘studio flats’ starting at around £320,000 or 640,000 Singapore dollars.

Southwark campaigners were joined by members of the Focus E15 ‘Housing for All campaign’ and their first stop for a brief protest was the Elephant Park Sales Office on the Walworth Rd. They then walked through several council estates to the north of the New Kent Road which are also attractive targets for developers who can make huge profits by demolishing them and building high price flats at much higher densities.

They continued through other council estates in the area to London Bridge Station and on to the council offices in Tooley Street, where they were stopped by security from entering the Council offices. Police were called and after much argument two of the campaigners who were Southwark residents were allowed in and waited to present letters containing ‘People’s Compulsory Purchase Orders’ for their homes to council leader Peter John and two other councillors.

They asked at reception to see the councillors and were told to take a seat and wait. They waited and waited. Eventually someone from the council came to tell them that all three named councillors were unavailable but took their letters promising to hand them over personally to them.

More at CPOs for Southwark Councillors.

Bermondsey Thames Panoramas – City Hall to Angel Wharf

I had some time before my next protest and took a short walk by the River Thames,

beginning in Potters Fields where ‘One Tower Bridge’ was going up close to City Hall.

Past Tower Bridge I took a short walk on the foreshore in front of Butler’s Wharf before continuing along Shad Thames and across the footbridge over St Saviour’s Creek.

I continued along the Thames Path past the moorings, and got as far as Angel Wharf before I realised I needed to catch a bus to get me back to Trafalgar Sqaure in time for my next event.

More pictures Bermondsey Thames Panoramas

Art Not Oil Rembrandt Against Shell – National Gallery

The Art Not Oil coalition had gate-crashed the press launch of the National Gallery’s Rembrandt exhibition to give a brief performance protesting against oil sponsorship of the arts and privatisation of gallery staffing.

On the evening of 16th October they met on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields before marching the few yards to give a repeat performance outside the gallery which was then holding a gala evening for special guests and highly ranked staff.

The National Gallery was making plans to privatise up to two thirds of the gallery staff and this exhibition was being guarded by a private security firm rather than the gallery’s own staff.

Art Not Oil held banners and placards and handed out flyers agains the sponsorship by Shell stating:

"The presence of unethical sponsors like Shell and the contracting of external security firms shows the growing influence the private sector is having over our arts and culture. With its meagre contribution to the gallery, Shell is buying social legitimacy for its dodgy deeds worldwide, including:

- its failure to clean up its multiple spills in the Niger Delta
- its reckless plans to drill in the Arctic for yet more oil
- its tar sands projects in Canada that are undermining Indigenous people's rights"

They sang a number of specially written songs and performed the short playlet they had previously given inside the gallery during the press launch.

More at Art Not Oil Rembrandt Against Shell.

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Decent Housing & Saving the NHS – 2014

Decent Housing & Saving the NHS: Ten years ago today there were protests over two of the major issues which still face our incoming government today, but which I have no faith in them facing or improving.

Focus E15 March for Decent Housing – East Ham

The housing crisis largely stems from successive governments, largely starting with Thatcher prioritising private ownership above all other ways of providing homes for people. Thatcher gave away publicly owned social housing to tenants at knock-down prices and refused to allow councils to try to replace what had been lost.

Government housing policy since have been obsessed with the idea of the “housing ladder“; housing isn’t – or shouldn’t be – about ladders to increase personal wealth but about homes, and the ladder is very definitely that in “Pull up the ladder, Jack! We’re all right” and sod those left at the bottom below.

Private renting has also moved from being a way in which owners of properties derived and income from properties they owned, to a scheme where more and more tenants are paying high rents to buy properties for their landlords. It’s a crazy system and one which should be stopped.

We have also seen a huge growth in properties which are largely built to be bought as investments, particularly by overseas investors, often being left unoccupied for all or most of the time. Clearly this needs to be made economically nonviable, not only because of the effects it has on the shortage of homes, but also because of the way it is seriously distorting the development of our cities.

Second (and multiple) home ownership is also an increasing problem, particularly in the more desirable rural areas of the country and we need to find ways to reduce the impact of this, perhaps through taxation to provide a fund to build social housing in these areas.

But the basic solution to the country’s housing problems is simple. Build more social housing. Any government which comes in without this as the main thurst of their housing policy will fail to improve the housing crisis.

As I wrote ten years ago “We need a government – national and local – determined to act for the benefit of ordinary people, making a real attempt to build much more social housing, removing the huge subsidies currently given to private landlords through housing benefit, legislating to provide fair contracts for private tenants and give them decent security – and criminalising unfair evictions.” We haven’t got one.

You can read more about the march in East Ham organised by Focus E15 Mums to demand secure housing, free from the threats of eviction, soaring private rents, rogue landlords, letting agents illegally discriminating, insecure tenancies and unfair bedroom tax and benefit cap on My London Diary.

The march was supported by housing protest groups from Hackney, Brent and from South London and organisations including BARAC and TUSC. I was surprised to see the popular support it received on the streets with even some motorists stopping their cars to put money in the collection buckets.

More at Focus E15 March for Decent Housing.

Save our Surgeries on NHS 66th Birthday – Whitechapel

The National Health Service began on 5th July 1948 and on its 66th anniversary the Save our Surgeries campaign against health cuts in Tower Hamlets marched to Hackney in a show of opposition to health cuts, surgery closures and NHS privatisation.

The setting up of the NHS was opposed by the Conservatives and they and the doctors and dentists associations forced many compromises which led to it being a less than comprehensive health service, though still a great national achievement and one which for we are justly proud of.

Many doctors made – and some still make – large incomes from private practice and fought to keep these rather than back a universal system wholeheartedly. But in more recent years a huge private medical system has grown up alongside the NHS and more and more people are covered through work schemes providing private medical cover.

This private system has grown parasitically on the state medical system and all governments over the past thirty or more years have found ways to syphon off money to it, by allowing it to tender for various more straightforward aspects of NHS services.

Successive governments have also created huge administrative burdens on the NHS, setting up new levels of administrators which oversee and to some extent override clinical decisions. But financially the most disastrous impact on the NHS comes from the various PFI agreements, largely made under New Labour, which enabled the building of new hospitals without the costs appearing in the government’s debts, but tied the trusts running the hospitals into huge debt repayments and the kind of service contracts that make replacing a light bulb cost £1200.

General practice was set up in 1948 under doctor-owned surgeries but increasingly these are now owned by healthcare companies after New Labour in 2007 allowed larger companies to buy them up. Operose Health, part of US healthcare giant Centene Corporation in 2022 was running 70 practices and a BBC Panorama report showed they were only employing half as many doctors as average practices, while employing six times as many physician associates (who have only 2 years of medical training rather than the 10 for GPs) who were being inadequately supervised.

Unfortunately Labour policy appears to be to increase the reliance – and transfer of funds to the private sector rather than reduce it. You can read more about their position in the 2023 Tribune article Labour’s Love Affair with Private Healthcare by Tom Blackburn, which aslo sets out clearly the financial links of Wes Streeting to private healthcare. And of course he is not the only Labour MP with a financial interest. Labour might sort out a few of the problems but the creeping privatisation seems sure to accelerate.

The protest in East London was over changes in the funding of NHS surgeries which have failed to take into account the extra needs of deprived innner-city areas and were expected to lead the closure of some surgeries as well as other NHS cuts, particularly those happening because of the huge PFI debt from the new Royal London Hospital.

There was a brief rally in Altab Ali Park before the march with speeches by local politicians and health campaigners before the crowd of several hundreds set off down the Whitechapel Road on its way to London Fields in Hackney where it was to meet up with other protesters for a larger rally. But I left the march at Whitechapel Station.

More at

Housing For Need Not Greed

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.

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.

Housing For Need Not Greed -Tanya Murat - Southwark Defend Council Housing — *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.

Housing For Need Not Greed — *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.

March With The Homeless – 2018

March With The Homeless

No More Deaths On Our Streets Saturday 3rd March 2018

A few days ago in February 2023 a report came out that the number of rough sleepers in England has increased for the first time since 2017.

The increase is blamed on the cost-of-living crisis making the various causes of homelessness worse, and the government’s ‘Ending rough sleeping for good’ strategy announced last year has so far failed to be any help.

We are still one of the richer countries in the world, and it is a disgrace that so many have no place to go. London’s Mayor is reported as calling it extremely alarming and saying “It is high time ministers got a grip on the escalating food, energy and housing crises and restored the social security safety net which helps stop people becoming trapped in a cycle of homelessness.”

The area with the largest number is of course London, and within London the boroughs of Westminster and Camden at the heart of London top the figures. As well as having the most people sleeping on the streets, these boroughs are also home to many of the wealthiest people in the country (or at least one of their homes) and of the most egregious examples of over-consumption where the wealthy swarm to spend ridiculous amounts on over-priced goods and services.

The increase has also been greatest in the capital, with the figure in Westminster, the home of our government, alone up from 187 in 2021 to 250 in 2022.

London of course has ridiculously high house prices, stoked in part by foreign investors who own properties just to profit from the increases in prices rather than actually live in them. Many too are owned by offshore trusts, still hiding the actual owners, and often empty or underused.

The problem isn’t really house prices, or a lack of homes – we have more than are needed to give everyone a decent home. But inequality, which continues to rise. And at its roots is the greed of the rich, for whom enough is never enough. And there are ten times as many empty houses as there are homeless people.

The March With The Homeless on Saturday 3rd March 2018 took place are a recent cold snap had killed a number of rough sleepers on the streets of London. As well as organisations supporting street homeless including #solidaritynotcharity, Streets Kitchen, Homeless Outreach Central, and London: March for the homeless there were also some of those homeless taking part.

I found the police reaction to this protest shocking. They came out onto the streets to try to stop it happening and to force those taking part to return to there static protest opposite Downing Street where it began.

As well as officers on foot there were also two police horses trying to control the protest, but whose riders seemed unable to control, particularly in some of the narrower streets. I often had to rush out of their way and at one point I was crushed against a wall by a clearly out of control horse, but fortunately only slightly bruised.

I think the police saw their role as protecting the property, particularly the properties of those owners who had empty properties which they feared the protesters might attempt to occupy. The intention of the march wasn’t to actually occupy properties, but to create a little minor disruption to traffic and noise that would bring attention to the problem and put pressure on the government and authorities to take some effective action. But I think there was little if any media coverage of the event.

They intended to march to a squat in Great Portland Street that had occupied empty commercial premises and was giving food and shelter to homeless people, getting them off the freezing streets. The police seemed to be trying to keep them out of the West End, where they might disturb more people. I had to leave the march when police had halted them at Piccadilly Circus, but I think eventually they did make it and the squat provided food and overnight shelter for around 30 people on the night of the march.

More on My London Diary at No More Deaths On Our Streets.