Support the Union St local traders who have been stiffed by Network Rail after years of building up their small businesses!

Such businesses are the heart of any area not too mention the jobs they provide. That’s got to be better than more offices!

Save Union St website here! Petition here! News report here!

The new shipping containers are arriving on the site of the old Shell Garage in front of Heygate Estate in readyness for the opening of artistic and creative ‘vibrant retail outlets and workshops‘. Seems like the first part of the plan is to recreate in model form Swanbourne House behind! Bloody creatives!
The first cut is the deepest. Mature Plane Tree in St Mary Newington Open Space destroyed for the new One The Elephant development behind.

Was like this!

Once again we Southwark Notes folks invite any and all who wish to accompany us on a slow walk around the sites of regeneration and gentrification in The Elephant and Castle. We will be walking and talking about all your favourites: One The Elephant, 360 London site, Strata Tower, top of Walworth Rd, Heygate Estate, Tribeca Sq and beyond to the planned and already under construction site in Newington Causeway.

Although we always start the walk and the talk, the best bits of the event is always when those who have come begin to take over the chatting, sharing of anecdotes and chipping in all the differing senses of both frustration and sometimes anger over what is going on in The Elephant and it’s infamous regeneration. Now that the Regeneration Agreement Formerly Known As Confidential is no longer a secret, this new info will enable the walk to put into perspective both reasons and motivations for the ongoing regeneration rip-off locally.

We will finish the walk at the newly occupied Self Organised London occupation of Eileen House on Newington Causeway  where we can socialise and have tea together and continue in comfort all the conversations started on the walk.

Dear Southwark Notes,
We have chanced upon an easy way to read the redacted Regeneration Agreement between Lend Lease and Southwark Council. We think it throws up all sorts of questions. Please find a press release in continuation.
Yours truly,
Concerned Southwark Residents

WE HAVE BEEN CALLING THIS A RIP-OFF FOR A LONG TIME
Of course, regular readers or other concerned residents will know that this refers to the Regeneration Agreement signed between Lend Lease and Southwark Council in July 2010 shortly after Labour took over control of the Council. Locally people campaigning on a whole range of issues that are controversial in the by-now infamous Elephant regeneration (lack of truly affordable housing, social cleansing, smaller leisure centre, removal of mature trees, lack of insight into pressure put on local services and amenities with 1000′s of new residents coming to the area, housing density, effect on local businesses and so on) have long been asking both in and out of the official Elephant Regeneration consultation programmes for access to this agreement to enable them to make up their own minds about whether the existing residents are getting a good deal or not. This request has always been refused or stalled with the be-all-and-end-all mantra ‘commercial sensitivity‘. Well, consulting people on a regeneration programme where no-one local is allowed to see the fine details is a bit of perfunctory and cynical exercise in Public Relations (as we have said many times).

Recently however as part of the Council’s Compulsory Purchase Attempt for the last remaining leaseholders on the Heygate Estate they stuck up a heavily blacked out version of the July 2010 Regeneration Agreement on the Council website: (see below!)


UPDATE: 9AM MONDAY FEBRUARY 4th 2012
Above link to blacked out Regeneration Agreement, now removed from Council website!

What follows is the rest of the email:

—
PRESS RELEASE 31.1.2013

>>>>>> Embargoed until Monday 9.00am 4th February 2013 <<<<

Badly redacted document exposes confidential figures behind Southwark’s £1.5bn secretive regeneration scheme.

Southwark Council has accidentally exposed the contents of its deal with global property giant Lend Lease for the £1.5bn regeneration of the Elephant & Castle. A redacted PDF version of its confidential regeneration agreement was uploaded to the Council’s website as part of its compulsory purchase proceedings against remaining residents on the Heygate Estate which is a key site for the regeneration scheme:

 http://www.southwark.gov.uk/download/8148/core_document_28-ra

 However the document has left it possible to copy and paste the heavily blacked-out text straight into any word processing software to reveal the entire contents. This comes as a welcome surprise for local campaigners who have been heavily critical of the lack of transparency around any real details of the Council and Lend Lease’s regeneration deal.

 The unintentional breach of the Regeneration Agreement’s strict confidentiality clauses comes after lengthy proceedings to censure an opposition councillor[1], who claimed the agreement was poor value for money after it was signed in July 2010[2]. Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, Cllr Fiona Colley response to these claims was that land value payments had been reduced in favour of a guarantee of 25% affordable housing, itself a breach of Southwark’s policy of a minimum 35% for developments in the Elephant & Castle Opportunity Area.[3] However the recently approved Heygate plans propose just 79 social rented units out of a total 2,535 new homes.

 The document reveals that having spent £44m[4] on emptying the Heygate Estate, Southwark Council is set to receive just £50m[5] in return for the 22 acre site. The agreement does give the Council a share of overage (profit left after the developer has taken a 20% priority slice), but a report from the District Valuer[6] shows a viability gap such that there is actually unlikely to be any overage.

Comparisons with other development sites at the Elephant show that the Council is receiving well below market value for its land: the neighbouring Tribeca Square 1.5 acre development site exchanged hands on the open market in 2011 for £40m. This is £10m below the council’s deal for the 22 acre Heygate site (see attached Land Registry info). The phased nature of the scheme, together with the cheap price of the land makes it more likely that the developer will engage in ‘land banking’[7] as they had previously done on the Greenwich peninsula Millennium site[8].

 Local campaigning groups have long been critical of what they see as the ‘social cleansing’ of the area and the failure of the regeneration to bring local benefits to the existing community. They say that the Council’s administration has sold the Elephant short in order to gain political advantage by honouring its manifesto pledge to deliver the regeneration after years of stalled negotiations.

[1]    http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/5869
[2]    http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4712
[3]     http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4879
[4]    Paragraphs 5.34 – 5.35: http://www.southwark.gov.uk/download/8171/proofs_of_evidence__jon_abbot__final_proof
[5]    See pages 6 & 10 of the Regeneration Agreement – (Heygate Headlease Premium £46m + Rodney Rd. Headlease Premium £4m)
[6]    See Officer Report 12/AP/1092 paragraphs 150-153: http://planningonline.southwark.gov.uk/DocsOnline/Documents/271840_1.pdf
[7]     Land banking is the practice of buying land with the intention of selling it when it becomes more profitable. Typically, land is divided into smaller plots and sold on to developers once it rises in value.
[8]     http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0708/greenwich_peninsula.aspx

There is a certain irony in the secretive agreement coming to light only because someone did some lateral thinking and cut and pasted the blacked out text into a word processing document. Seeing how the agreement’s confidentiality is referred to in the document itself -

’33.2.3 keep the Confidential Information and any copies of it secure and in such a way as to prevent unauthorised access by any third party;

33.2.5 inform the other party immediately if it becomes aware that Confidential Information has been disclosed to or come to the knowledge of an unauthorised third party’

there is the prospect of some real ticking off of the poor way in which the blacked out document was blacked out!

— A link to the un-blacked out pdf of the REGENERATION AGREEMENT JULY 2010 so you can read it properly—HERE

This is only really a side story though. More importantly, this is one document that begins to paint a clearer picture of what the regeneration deal at The Elephant really is. We would not comment on our analysis of the document and it’s financial information yet as the mind boggles when you try and read over 100 pages of legal speak so it may take us some time to fully comprehend it. Our question for now is how will both The Council and Lend Lease respond to this total muck up? And what does it mean for campaigners in the long fight so far for benefits for local people in any regeneration scheme?

With the first detailed planning application up before the Planning Committee this Tuesday 5th February seeking to build 235 mostly private or unaffordable homes on the old Heygate Site at Rodney Rd, we wonder what the Committee would make of the detailed financial agreements made in the Regeneration Agreement? Is this scheme really in the interests of Southwark residents? We hope they will be asking these questions and not sitting mutely as a few of them were on the 15th January Planning Meeting. These are representatives of local people tasked to serve those people’s interests by those people!

We immediately emailed Dill Valentine back but so far no response. We will keep you posted.

THE ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
The message from the recently Council approved Lend Lease’s Outline Masterplan for the area is that The Council are selling the Elephant area short by millions to allow a minimal amount of really affordable housing. Just to add more insanity to this and the Council’s own leak of the Agreement we would like to remind our readers of Leader of The Council’s Peter John thoughts on the Elephant regeneration plans three days before he took power in May 2010:

“”We want a deal signed and we want it signed sooner rather than later.

That is not at the expense of all the community facilities we were promised right at the outset. The heads of terms which were signed in November with Lend Lease didn’t include a leisure centre, they didn’t include a library, they didn’t include any of the community facilities we would have expected to have seen.

It was an agreement to build houses – and private houses at that. That’s simply not good enough.

If we’re going to redevelop the Elephant it has to include social housing as well as private housing, it has to include those vital community facilities and it has to have a shopping centre which people will want to go to.

At the moment there is no plan to deal with the shopping centre and what phase that will be within the whole regeneration structure.”

Oh Peter, what is finally in the deal you signed with Lend Lease two years ago? A reduced Leisure Centre that is only part of the deal because Lend Lease were given the sweetener of some prime SE1 land by The Tabernace to build a 40+ storey tower of luxury flats and no affordable housing (“That’s simply not good enough.“); no new library; no real ‘vital‘ community facilities to be worthy of the name; a refurbished shopping centre that seeks to include more private housing on top of it…and a total climbdown on The Council’s own policy of minimum 35% affordable housing in big new developments!

COME ON DOWN! VIEW THE FARCE!
Below we list just a few of the planning permissions bad intention for the site and why it’s a crap deal for the long-standing existing population. But here and now we want to urge anyone who cares about The Elephant to attend this charade of open, democratic and inclusive planning of our community’s future. There will be once again be a fantastic bunch of local folks doing their best to object to the development in the 3 minutes of allotted time. Last time the meeting was held in the largest room in Tooley St but this was still too small to fit all those opposed to this regeneration scheme especially once the room had been filled with council folks, Lend Lease and Soundings Consultation company. It’s up to us to make our presence known to the Planning Committee and the strength of feeling in the room. It was pointed out to us that the meeting is not a ‘public meeting‘ but a ‘meeting held in public‘ as if this wordplay can cancel out what the public might have to say on the matter!

Why local people are angry could be any of the following:
• There is a small percentage of almost affordable homes included in the new scheme. This is because the developer has cried once more that the economic crisis makes it hard to maximise such profits if they have to build a minimum of 35% affordable houses which they are required to do by Southwark’s own policies.
The issue of affordability is fudged anyhow as the new affordable homes will not be genuinely affordable to long term local residents. Only 8 units of the affordable housing shortfall will be socially rented (so a reasonable rent level). The other affordable housing provision will consist of only 18 units with rents set at 50% of a private market rent.

• Section 106 agreements, that is money a developer gives to The Council as a kind of community benefit will mainly be spent within the development site itself and not on and around nearby streets as would make sense. So really there is a real lack of public benefits if the only regeneration of the public realm is actually a part of the private development.

• The Elephant & Castle regeneration zone is supposed to be car-free (as stipulated in the Council’s own plans and policies) as the area is served by many buses, two tube lines and a train station: ‘The inclusion of these 23 non-designated bays as part of the development does not comply with policies that require developments in areas of high public transport accessibility to be car-free’. The Council is happy to ignore it’s own rules because they see the site as a ‘catalyst’ (like an accelerator?) for the wider regeneration zone. But does this ‘unfortunate’ rule breaking become the exception that proves the rule. Er..yes! Break the rules now and then it’s becomes easier for the next regeneration site. They even have the cheek to say that it’s so important to get all that affordable housing built (26 units) that relaxing the rules now is worth it. So you can blame those in need of affordable housing for all that car-parking!!

• The scheme is way to dense. 235 homes will replace 105. Half the trees on the site have already been chopped down anyhow so no need to worry about them and the bats that were roosting on site were denied by The Council to avoid a clear breach of strict bat protection laws. The Over-5′s children play area will be delivered off-site which means nowhere near the development and across many big roads wherever it maybe. The Basketball courts already on the site despite promises have been locked up for more than two years. There will only be a 25% amount of affordable retail units available. There has been no real development of the legacy of this development nor the impact of 600+ people moving into the area on the local services. Many of the homes will feature raised courtyards for the enjoyment of the homeowners. Such private and gated space is being fudged statistically with the reported amount of amenity space provided.

Phase One is a rip-off in progress as we like to say. It is The Elephant being sold under our noses. Tuesday’s Detailed Planning Application meeting is where the rip-off sell out will take place. Your free invitation to this farce has been issued by Southwark Council. Make sure you don’t miss the pantomime!

When we asked him via Twitter how he knew it was people from outside The Elephant his reply made us sense that maybe he then wondered if it had been such a good idea to hastily and publicly blame it on outsiders. So switching to the perhaps the second ‘oldest and slimiest political tricks in the book‘, the tactic of divide and rule, he replied that that was what he was told by ‘residents who were from E&C at the meeting & have been involved in consultation. Take it up with them‘. We would point out this:

1) Peter believes so much in the consultation process as the most amazing winner of hearts and minds locally but forgets that despite members of Elephant Amenity Network, Wansey St and Garland Court TRA and Heygate Leaseholders Group all being some part of the consultation, they were the ones at the meeting objecting to the Masterplan and being quizzed on those objections by councillors for nearly two hours. Elephant Amenity Network had even sent a public letter to both Soundings Consultation agency and to Sarah Gaventa as Chair of the Lend Lease-created Regeneration Forum criticising the consultation process. The letter was signed by 28 local people or those working locally. So it’s not as if those who chose to take part in the consultations wouldn’t have something to protest about nor support the protest which is what many of those there on the night did. The objections and the signs in the protest were saying the same things.

In addition when we recently published our lengthy analysis of Soundings and the consultation: Listening To No End, we had had lots of emails of support and thanks from local people who were part of the consultation and agreed with our dire judgement of it all. We suspect it would be a hard task indeed to find many people who thought that the hours and hours we all spent in consultation had actually achieved anything substantial in the Outline Masterplan. Simply put it hasn’t and that is why objections to the plan took two hours!

2) Telling us to ‘Take it up with them‘ is a classic switching of gears and maneuvering himself away from any responsibility for what he had said. Now it can be spun as a case of it was the good objectors who had been consulted who told him it was bad outsiders so it wasn’t his fault if they had been wrong! Well, the most obvious point to make again is – in a public meeting open to all, how would anyone know where everyone had come from? But this is somewhat by the by really! We were in the room and we certainly recognised quite a few of them and the local Elephant campaigns they are part of because there has been such a slow but building resentment of this regeneration scheme as more and more promises are broken that you do get to know a few people along the way!

We leave this labouring the point with an amazing email we received after the Planning Meeting and our report on it. It puts the case much more eloquently and brilliantly than we might be able to:

“Dear Southwark Notes,
I think that the objectors and protesters at the Planning Committee last Tuesday were an amazing evidence of what could only be called a process of collective self-education about planning and urban regeneration policies in the Elephant. The depth and ingenuity of the objectors’ arguments was only schematically reflected in the protestors’ references to planning regulations and policies. But it was all there because years ago many local residents embarked on a process of learning and disseminating information about the changes proposed and taking place, putting up or attending visioning events, holding regular open monthly meetings to discuss changes in the proposed plans, seeking the advice and knowledge of urban experts, writing concerned and informed letters and emails to local Councillors, to MPs, to planning experts, architects, newspapers; making and watching documentaries about the area; organising and visiting photographic exhibitions of local communities, interviewing and being interviewed…

The objections and the protesters are only a small testimony of this large, engaged and enraged community of concerned citizens and residents that know the area as the back of their hands, having spent years poring over badly written and incongruous plans and contradictory policies, and evenings and days formulating the right questions to ask at ‘consultation’ meetings and open events… this is a participatory, varied and democratic public – one that understands constrains and not only critiques but also proposes (see EAN Visioning Event repart and EAN Interim uses report), that has always tried to engage and never to simply reject urban change…

The accusation that they are not ‘local residents’ is baffling: only an act of love for the neighbourhood and the area would have made all those people remain in a stiflingly hot and stuffy room for over 6 hours listening to planning jargon, poring over 200 pages documents, attentive, furiously taking notes, knowing what was being said, why the developers’ speech was full of euphemisms and fuzzy sales pitches, because none of what they say is grounded in the reality of the area, because what they are proposing is just another anonymous and alienating cut and paste from their repertoire of ‘global solutions’”

—
Normal Southwark Notes service will now be resumed after this unnecessary hiatus concerning The Leader of The Council.

Leader of the Council, Peter John tweeted during the protest at the Planning Meeting on Tuesday  that there was an ‘Unnecessary hiatus in meeting as protesters not from E&C cause disruption – protesters entry requested by Simon Hughes!‘.

Of course three points come to our minds on this amazing piece of Twit news:

1) how could Peter John know possibly know where those people came from? Did he ask them all in person or does he have telepathic super powers? Well, he is Leader of the Council no less. So it could be true. Or…

Was he making it up?

Answers on a postcard please!

Was Peter implying that no-one locally could possibly want to have any objections that they may wish to present in a more interesting and critical manner than in the useless 5 minutes of objection time allowed?

2) Attempting to discredit the local silent protest by saying categorically that they are outsiders is one of the oldest and slimiest political tricks in the book. So well done Peter for pulling this one on Southwark residents.

Needless to say we also have to ask if there is an exclusion zone in Peter’s mind when it comes to who has a right to object and protest anything that concerns The Elephant. Not only does the regeneration of The Elephant affect local people but it also affects those in Blackfriars, Bermondsey, Walworth, Peckham. Development and planning is not separate. It is intimately connected and he knows it. By this logic we should be demanding that no-one who doesn’t live in the area should have anything to do with regenerating it. Where does Peter John live by the way?

3) He then also has the cheek to play the party politics card and blame Simon Hughes for getting them in.

In reality, Simon Hughes was about to walk through the line of security and into the meeting when the excluded crowd said something akin to ‘well, if he’s going in then so are we‘. This was enough the make Hughes stop in his tracks, probably not happy to be seen leading a rabble of local folks in, and turn to talk to those people outside, something that Peter John would never do.  This was then how Simon Hughes decided to ask that these people could come in.

To us it matters more not what Simon Hughes had in mind getting people in but more so that Peter John was obviously happy to just leave the public outside the meeting.

All Hail All Powerful, All Knowing Leader of The Council!

• 50 members of the public were excluded from a public meeting that affects their area. The Council didn’t have a room big enough at Tooley St offices to hold all those who wanted to sit through the pantomime so it kept a whole bunch of folks outside until half way thorough when enough people had left to accommodate 20 of them. The police and security kept the door between the lobby and the meeting room secure. At one point in the break, they even started off not letting anyone from the hearing going into where the excluded folks were but relented after some argument. Of course, the Council was uninterested in holding the meeting in a place that was actually big enough despite their being over 200 objections received. Of 102 possible seats, many were taken up by Lend Lease, Soundings (Consultation cronies) and council folks. A bigger room is a no brainer if you actually give a toss!

• About 30 of the excluded people decided to hold their own fantastic objectors meeting outside in the lobby to discuss why they were there and their own concerns. We thought that was a brilliant idea instead of just giving up and going home.

• This is what the meeting looked like. A bright and airless room where we sat for 6 hours listening to one hour of brilliant focused, precise and wise objections to the Council’s willful overlooking of a Masterplan that breaches it’s own policies in numerous topics – affordable housing, car parking, sustainability, health and education and over-12 play provision and so on. And then 5 hours more of silence from any Labour Councillors to actually have any single criticism of the Masterplan and sometimes good and sometimes rather tired questioning from the Lib-Dems on the Planning Committee. All the Councillors had received detailed objections from tons of people as emails and papers and these were also all in the large 197 page Planning Committee document that each of them had. Yet they were unable to really get to grips with both the nuances and precise content of those objections. At the start we were informed that the meeting was ‘not party political‘ as if having 4 Labour councillors and 3 Lib-Dems was going to make no difference at all to the final vote.

• We also heard over an hour of Lend Lease corporate waffle and nonsense. One example among the many that we are afraid to unleash to those who weren’t there: When asked whether new more chain shops might be seen as a dangerous competition to long established local traders, one Lend Lease word magician replied that he ‘didn’t like to think of it as competition but as more like opportunity‘. Of course destroying local shopping is also contrary to the new 2012 National Planning Policy Framework that seeks for council to ‘ensure the vitality of town centres‘ i.e don’t make everywhere chain retail hell.

During Lend Lease’s questioning by the Council (akin to being ‘savaged by a dead sheep‘ as the saying goes) local people held up signs in silence to highlight key objections to the Masterplan. The Chair for the night Labour Councilor Nick Dolezal, who we found rather showy and cartoonish, freaked out and threatened the protestors with removal even though when security came they were decidedly reluctant to begin grabbing anyone. (Dolezal later publicly described them as ‘our little pixies‘!). Another threat to remove everyone bar the Council, the developers and the objectors who had spoken was also aired was similarly ignored because how can you seriously bar the public from a public meeting.

(Nick Dolezal ponders his next move as more posters are hoisted in yet another part of the room)

The silent protest was only meant to highlight the farce in progress anyhow and not to prevent anyone from hearing the rest of what was said. After twenty interesting minutes of Dolezal overreaction, the posters were lowered so that the show could go on. At point, a protestor offered the boyish Leader of the Council Peter John some posters which he took and enthusiastically threw to the floor. ‘Peter, not down there! You’re supposed to hold them up!’, was the poster givers reply. Made us laugh anyhow!

There was a telling moment near the end when the procedure requires ‘one representative for any supporters who live within 100 metres of the developement site‘ to come and testify their support. No one in the room rose to take up that role!

To cut a long story short, there was no surprise when the 2 Lib-Dems voted against (because it wasn’t their party in power but they would have done the same as Labour did last night if they were) and 4 Labour votes for the scheme. There was one totally pointless abstention from a most bizarre Lib-Dem councillor (who used to be a Tory councillor) from Dulwich. At telling moment came about 20 minutes before the vote when Dolezal was rushing to finish and in a moment of pushing things along, he said ‘Oh, I’m getting serious now‘ to which we would add: Well, it is probably a serious business, no? You wouldn’t think so given Dolezal’s constant gum-chewing, jokes and lack of impartiality.

To give you a clue as to how The Elephant was sold last night we will highlight the fact that when Lend Lease were questioned on whether they will receive the freehold of the Heygate Estate land, Dolezal ruled that this question had no bearing on the planning permission. It’s a bloody good question though! When you consider that the whole scheme delivers only 71 truly affordable socially rented units to replace the 1100+ council tenancies that made up Heygate and the rest of the ‘guaranteed‘ 25% of affordable homes are of such a tenure type* that they are actually extremely unaffordable for local people and also many Londoners, you might start to wonder how it is that this scheme can be granted approval. When you consider that Lend Lease reckons that the scheme is barely viable at approx 10% affordable housing but are committed to 25%,  and that no-one is allowed to actually look at the figures because they are commercially sensitive, you might wonder if a load of porkies is being told. Would they really commit to something so obviously risky? When you consider all this, the question of whether Southwark will give Lend Lease the freehold to this currently publicly-owned land is a good and pertinent one.

(* In addition to the 71 target rent places (socially-rented) there will be a further 194 ‘Affordable Rent’ places, these rents being set at a rate of 50% of the private market rental rate locally. i.e not affordable to many. And this despite Southwark’s own 2011 objections to the concept of ‘Affordable Rent’ and the 2012 London Plan’s examination criticisms).

Lend Lease的壞公司

Anyhow, we have on tape Lend Lease’s absolute commitment to seeing this project through. So of they ever wangle out of it over the next 16 years, we will find them and subject them to a merciless replaying of this promise.

Oh, by the way, we would really be fools if we actually believed their promises. Like the Council, promises are made to be broken and to be forgotten.It is a rule at these meetings that no photography or sound / video recordings must be made and so with no actual official record of last night’s proceedings being made for public scrutiny, all of Lend Lease’s promises remain words in a room in a particular moment in time. Happily, to keep an important unofficial record, there were camera’s-a-g0-go (as you can see) recording the proceedings and at least two people in the audience taped the whole thing.

There was many a moment like this: When asked about interim uses on the Heygate site before the new houses are built and whether it would get in touch with Celia from Victory Park who had initiated a tree nursery with local school children in the Heygate Rose Garden*. They said ‘Yes, they would‘. It was common for them to nod and solemnly say ‘Yes, they would‘ to remaining open to alleviating many concerns that were raised. But with no minutes or record, who is there to keep them to their easy words?

(* We can add that this lovely example of a local community-led labour of love was not so heart-warming to the Council. They have welded the gates of the Rose Garden shut so neither Celia nor the kids can now get in there)

We will say it again: Southwark has no interest in hearing objections, useful criticism or local wisdom. It has no interest in even pretending (like Lend Lease) that it’s consultation is meaningful to any planning inquiry. It is wholly unaccountable to it’s voters. It is a total joke for anyone who cares passionately ebnough to engage in local politics through this kind of framework. This way of working is flawed. It simply cannot work to the benefit of local people. We spent years in consultation with these people, taking it seriously and giving up our knowledge and passions for free but we have not seen one single thing barring a few saved trees taken seriously or put into the Masterplan. The Masterplan remains a totally blatant and greedy land grab at the expense of local people.

After attending Lend Lease’s One The Elephant luxury flats ‘community preview‘ last week and last night’s farce, we were starting to get resigned to all this, to start to think it’s all over or that there is no alternative to the private investment model of housing and regeneration. It was a tough week.

But there is another way and we need to find it. We will continue doing what we do and we invite you, as always, to join us in that work.

Here follows our shorter review of last night’s show:
PURE PARTY POLITICAL PLANNING PERMISSION PANTOMIME. PAH!

Next Tuesday 15th January 2013 will see Southwark Council’s Planning Committee gather at their Tooley St offices to rubber-stamp Lend Lease’s Masterplan for the Elephant and Castle area. They have already issued a press release about why the Masterplan needs to be approved and all the total unaccountable crud and spin that goes with it – making mixed communities, more money for affordable housing, new parks, new this and new that. There will be some kind of debate amongst the councillors on the committee and 5 minutes in total have been allotted for public objections on the biggest planning application ever received by Southwark.

It’s taken a long long time to get this far. A really long time. We and countless others have been arguing against this form of regeneration of the local area for a long time too. We urge everyone who feels uncertain or pissed off about this monster rip-off to read the collective response to the Council below from the three brave local folks who will be standing up in the five minutes to give their best shot in making someone in the council see sense and vote NO to this scheme.

We also urge that anyone who feels uncertain or pissed off about this scheme, makes sure they come to Planning Meeting this Tuesday 15th January at 6pm at the Council Offices at 160 Tooley St, SE1 (London Bridge tube)

———-

Heygate Outline Masterplan application 12-AP-1092
and demolition application 12-AP-3203.

We are representatives of local groups who have objected to the above applications. We propose to speak on behalf of these groups at the planning committee meeting next Tuesday evening, 15th January 2013.

We have the following concerns and objections which cannot be fully aired in 5 minutes.  We have therefore listed them and trust that you, and  your colleagues, will help us ensure that they are fully addressed, by asking questions of us based on these points.

Needless to say, the development is not really being marketed to local people (surely one of the key features of any regeneration scheme) but is being heavily marketed to overseas investors in the Far East as were, as we have been pointing out repeatedly over the years, Strata, Tribeca Sq, Metropolis etc.

There is a ‘Community Preview‘ on Thursday 10th at 6-8pm at London College of Communication, SE1 but this is a different kettle of fish from the real deal of the first buyers launch weekend on Sat 12th and Sun 13th January at Siobhan Davies Dance Studio, St Georges Rd, SE1. (Not too late to book your sales appointment over the launch weekend. Just call 020 3667 1522).

Quite what a ‘community preview’ is you can only tell us. Isn’t it a bit like rubbing our noses in it really when from January 2013 you can also buy a one-bed flat for £421,500 or if you need an extra bedroom you will need to stump up £535,000. A three-bedroom flat at Floor 30 will cost you a cool £1,065,000. On-site resident facilities include ‘a green roof for growing produce, a communal reading garden and a play zone for the under-fives’ plus residents of One The Elephant ‘will have a wide variety of activities a stone’s throw from their front door’ such as kebabs, betting shops, Chinese, numerous pound shops and also Bright House and the kiosk that sells bongs in the Shopping Centre!

RIP-OFF NUMBER 2312452
This development has slowly become linked to the building of a replacement Elephant leisure centre. The Council argument goes like this: if we let Lend Lease demolish the old leisure centre, use the front of the building footprint for a massive profit-expanding 37 storey building of luxury flats and get them to pay for a smaller leisure centre at the back, everyone will be quids in! Of course, this is only a very new and dastardly adulteration of many of the old regeneration plans where a new leisure centre came as part of the overall package of changes and not as something we have to now swap public land and size for. It is in this slow trickle of giving in to developers that all community benefits and gains have been ripped-off from local people who were prepared to give the regeneration a go.

Having played a smokes-and-mirrors consultation game, the Council and developers offers something which doesn’t even ‘re-provide‘, in their words, let alone ‘regenerate‘ the old leisure centre: we lose the borough’s only public squash courts and it all gets smaller and tucked behind the big thing in the sky. With Lend Lease’s announcement in mid-2012 that they will invest their profit from dumping the Greenwich Peninsula scheme (something in the region of £25 million) in the Elephant, the £3.5 million they are putting into the new leisure centre is humble to say the least. To top it off, they successfully refused to build affordable housing against all recent London-wide and local Southwark plans and the inevitable high profits of the scheme using the secret and untouchable mumbo-jumbo argument –  it ain’t financially viable -  will never be known to be measured against whether regeneration is offering value for money for long term local residents.

LEND LEASE GET THE SHAKES
In one sense, the One The Elephant scheme is something of both a necessity for Lend Lease and a bone given to them by the Council as Lend Lease still have the financial jitters on the Heygate redevelopment. Although with tears in his eyes, a Lend Lease person told us last year that they aren’t making ‘so’ much money on One The Elephant. Luckily our violins were close at hand and we consoled him with a nice bit of Concerto No.5 in A, the second movement by Mozart. Or not!

It would not be a big shock if Lend Lease didn’t complete both Phase 1 (Rodney Rd) and Phase 2 (Heygate St) over the next decade. Maybe the money to be made is in One The Elephant and Phase 1 where density and height pays dividends on such a small site. Will Phase 2 ever get built or will it get dumped and flogged in a perpetual round of selling on and risky speculation? It’s not impossible that once demolished the Heygate estate area will sit empty for years and years (like Tribeca Sq) waiting out the financial crisis.

FOUR PARTS HYPE AND AN ESTATE AGENT
As a long-ish aside, we had a reputable Estate Agent write to us the other day asking if he could write something about Bankside and it’s potential for investors and home buyers on our estimable blog as they were keen to expand their web presence. We were intrigued and immediately commissioned a piece although in the end it was not suitable to publish here bizarrely enough. However an extract does give you an insight from the lowest part of the global property construction chain:

‘Bankside is a very attractive area which is exceptionally dynamic and vastly improving in developments making it one of the most up and coming areas of London….For potential buyers, this redevelopment of Bankside is quickly making it a very attractive area to invest in. Homes along this area range from between £800 and £1,300 a sq. ft. which is exceptionally good value for money for such a diverse and bustling area, with so much action on its doorstep. Away from the river there are cheaper areas notably around the Waterloo, London Bridge and Elephant and Castle area, where homes are typically around £500 and £700 sq. ft. Homes range from extravagant riverside flats, classical Victorian terraces, public housing and private developments, charitable and church housing, factory and warehouse options and live work units’.

Our presumed insight is that this formerly unloved area that nobody posh or with more money to invest for high returns would ever take a taxi too, has now fallen under the spell of those who operate with either a keen ironic sense of humour or a superb sense of optimism to write these kind of local summaries. Perusing the One The Elephant website that seeks to market the Elephant area to lots of people who have probably never been here we can find all sorts of funny things. For example, despite being firmly in the centre of The Elephant, the publicity cannot bring itself to show any real photos of the actual Elephant area and especially not the Shopping Centre. The one pic we could find was taken in La Chatica café on Elephant Rd, this being a suitably ‘exotic’ and ‘vibrant’ niche kind of place for those who want to invest. Other local attractions featured on the site under the heading ‘Elephant & Castle’ are (listed here in an ascending order of the improbability of localness) Burgess Park, Kennington Park, The South Bank, Borough Market and the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben!

By the way, it would be churlish to name the estate agent involved. We were just nonplussed and took it as a sign that the operation of hype is out of control. Who could possibly ask to increase web presence of their local business of selling overpriced housing in the area to a website that has spent over 5 years relentlessly criticising the effects on the local population of such a property business!? We did ask him where he got the web address from but he never answered this pertinent question.

Anyhow, more important than estate agents and their whims is the very real and material question of One The Elephant – now there’s a real trendsetter!

Here is a massive development that

• was inexplicably separated out from the vast Lend Lease Outline Masterplan so that it had it’s own planning application and so we are guessing would appear separate when it is intrinsically linked to the wider Lend Lease development and those within the Elephant Opportunity Area.

• had zero real consultation on the topic of whether it should be built on top of the old leisure centre in the first place as opposed to just consulting on what new leisure centre people want.

• has zero social housing in an area desperate for truly affordable housing.

• has not been subject to any detailed assessment of the impact of 450 extra people on existing services and resources in the area (health, education, etc)

• does not provide any retail opportunity for traders displaced from the Shopping Centre refurbishment

• is an architectural eyesore that sits very uncomfortably next to the Grade ll listed Metropolitan Tabernacle.

• will have 46 car parking spaces in a development that is centered right at one of the most publicly accessible transport interchanges in London (buses, tube and rail) and the regeneration zone itself was always supposed to be a car-free development zone.

• has a very stupid name!

Take that to the community preview!

POST MORTEM: Even the dead aren’t safe!
Before the ‘One the Elephant’ name was cunningly devised in some blue-sky thinking session this development was previously known as St Mary’s Residential after the churchyard on which it is partly to stand. But it’s not only the name that is lost in favour of the yuppie cachet of One The Elephant (as if), Walworth loses its dead to regeneration, since they are disinterring remains that go back to the Middle Ages. Some of the 500 skeletons dating back to medieval times unearthed beneath the site in 25 crypts will be reburied outside of the borough, some in Southwark’s functioning cemeteries. The Elephant regeneration finally spells displacement for the living and the dead. Of course the bodies that were missed in the diging will keep spinning in their grave and keeping many a private penthouse buyer nonplussed at the eerie and eldritch sound! It could be so. Woooo! Woooo!