LABOURING PETER JOHN

Regular readers of Southwark Notes will know that when we want to labour a point, we will do! In our previous post we pointed out that when Leader of The Council Peter John blames the silent poster protest at the Heygate Masterplan Planning Permission Meeting on those ‘not from The Elephant & Castle’, we wondered both how he might have known this and would it even matter if they were. We also said that pretending it was outsiders who came along to disrupt the event was ‘one of the oldest and slimiest political tricks in the book‘

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: PROBABLY MAKING IT UP

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!

HOW THE ELEPHANT WAS SOLD AT TOOLEY ST ONE TUESDAY NIGHT

We seriously haven’t recovered yet from our attendance at last night’s monster six hour pantomime playing at the Tooley St Theatre where the show was all about whether a large unaccountable development company (Lend Lease) could link up with a smaller unaccountable local council (Southwark) and do dastardly business together. The audience were played by local people who think these ugly sisters of business and wannabe politicians are about to re-stage the Kings New Clothes down at The Elephant. Any road up, here is a quick report. We will come back to the details at a later date.

• 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!

One The Elephant development: ‘Community Preview’ Thursday 10th Jan 6-8pm

One The Elephant will be a 37-storey high tower right in the heart of The Elephant and across from the Shopping Centre. It will be the little-ish sister of the Strata tower and the stalled but inevitably forthcoming 360 London tower on Newington Butts. It will contain only private homes with the currently advertised off-plan (i.e not yet built) starting price of £320,000 for a one-bed flat!  With zero affordable housing of any type, all of its 284 units will be luxury flats for the open market and some with access to a secluded garden on the roof of a 4-storey building beside the tower. We have yet to see the plans for the drawbridge, moat and boiling oil!

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!

OBJECT TO REGENERATION: Please make your objection in one second please

The excellent Elephant 35% Campaign blog puts the current situation with the regeneration in stark contrast about how has power to make decisions on local matters and who is not welcome to unless they can speak very very fast.

MASTERPLAN

The biggest planning application ever submitted to Southwark Council is due to be heard by its planning committee on Tuesday 15th January. This is the Heygate Outline Masterplan (12/AP/1092) that will see the future of the built-up environment around The Elephant change dramatically with the demolition of the Heygate and all the new unaffordable homes put on that site. Not too mention the inevitable knock-on effect of other later developers feeling that with this planning permission being granted now would be the best time to build more and more private homes in the area in any space, building or park they can get away with.

MONSTERPLAN

The Outline Masterplan application is so huge that Southwark has spent 9 months evaluating over 2o0 submitted documents. You can see how big and bonkers it is by clicking the link above or here! You can also get a measure of it from our pictured screenshots of the number of documents listed on the Southwark Planning Register under this application – and that’s just A to D!

There has also been a lot of very detailed and critical opposition to many of the intentions and desires of Lend Lease (the developer) contained within their Masterplan. There have been over 200 objections so far. It’s no joke having to wade through hundreds and hundreds of pages of sometimes dense technical and legal planning speak but over 200 people got stuck in.

Anyhow, despite appeals to common sense and using the example of the King’s Cross Masterplan where that massive plan was heard over a number of sessions, objectors have failed so far to get any reasonable amount of time to present their case. The Council is insisting that the normal THREE MINUTES will be allotted for them to hear objections and criticism.

So, if only 50 people were allowed on the night to talk about the Masterplan’s failure to maintain adequate social housing levels, or, as promised, a car free development, or it’s reduction of local green space and the felling of 100′s of trees, or the carbon neutral development that was hyped, those people would have less than 3.5 seconds each to make their case. Even if only 5 people spoke up they would still have less than 40 seconds to make their case!

This is just plain regeneration madness! See you there: Tuesday 15th January 6pm – Council Offices at 160 Tooley Street, London SE1 2QH

WHAT REGENERATION ‘BENEFITS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE’ REALLY MEANS

The point we will labour below is that community benefits that come from agreements between developers and the Council have to make sense and be a tangible, enduring and worthwhile local resource. Siting a new playground in an estate undergoing decant is frankly nonsensical but it does kind of seem to us like just more craziness in a long and infamously crazy regeneration saga.

Cast your regeneration minds back to as far as late December 2007 when all was optimistic down at the numerous empty development sites dotted around The Elephant.  You may recall that the Oakmayne Plaza site was asking the Council for a new planning permission based on dumping the fancy hotel tower component of their mega-scheme in favour of a tower of student flats instead. Alongside this change was also the dumping of any affordable social housing from the scheme:

Not that the affordable component amounted to much any how but the 5 units pre-2007 were snipped now back to zero units. In lieu of cheaper housing for local people ironically a cash payment to the Council was promised to help along the promised Early Housing Sites for decanted Heygate tenants. So that was a lot of good as the houses simply weren’t built in time for the decant anyhow and very few people subsequently returned to the new Housing Association homes!

Anyhow we digress. To make up for the loss of the children’s playground on Elephant Rd park which was taken away one sunny weekday morning (see above) and as part of the incentive to get the Council to agree the changes, Oakmayne arranged for the new playground to be built on Heygate Estate to make up for the loss of the old one. (The whole park being robbed from local people a few years later – see here!).

Of course, plonking down a new playground there is also of dubious merit. It seemed that no questions had been asked about why a playground in Elephant Park is more accessible and useful to a wider community than one just put where any other patch of trees and grass happened to be. That the playground was not solely for the use of Heygate tenants but the wider Elephant area was fudged completely by the siting of the replacement playground. By choosing to ignore the organic fabric that the community weaves by everyday use of open spaces, parks and playgrounds and instead operating from a mentality of false ‘like for like’, it seemed more of a case of ‘well, that’ll do!’ for the  locals!

You can see the new 2007 playground here:

And you can see how great it remains in 2012 now that the estate is virtually empty and after some subcontractors had chopped it up for scrap (as witnessed by some then extant Heygate residents):

All that remains is this somewhat poignant and lonely roundabout:

Worth bearing in mind that the decant and slow boarded up and walling off of the Heygate estate has meant the loss of three local playgrounds – the one above in the middle of the estate and these two:

Playground in the estate near Balfour St now secured shut

Playground in the old Heygate site North of above Rodney Rd grilled up pre-demolition 2011. The developer got the local school kids to paint some pics to put up on the hoarding that encloses their old playground!

WHY HISTORY?!
We write up this ancient history just to make the point that as local people we not only know what is going on in our area and what amenities and resources we rely on but we also know that developers have no real knowledge or understanding of what makes up our local area and the communities that need things such as playgrounds or open spaces for football or just plain relaxing.

At Southwark Notes, like The Elephant itself, we never forget and we are happy to pull out an old document or two full of promises from the Council and different developers and say ‘Hey, wait a minute – what happened to this promise and what happened to that one?!‘. We said it before and in Southwark it’s vital that we keep on saying it – Regeneration has to be truly accountable to local people.

Promises are often made on the backs of a sense of trust and good will from local people to lose something like a playground or park and to wait for the intended redevelopment to put back what was lost. Accountability means that decisions and promises are kept to the word and not just lost along the way as the developers claw more and more profits from high density developments built on former public parks and playgrounds. It’s up to us to keep them to their word.

BLACKFRIARS RD: B.A.R.D GET BUSY!

 


Blackfriars Action for Responsible Development (BARD)
It was the ‘extraordinary arrogance‘ of Linden Homes representatives who came to the Blackfriars Rd community that was described as ‘the straw that broke the camels back‘ by a BARD member recently. Linden Homes is proposing two scheme options for the site of St George’s Mansions, the shops below and the next door pub Imbibe. Scheme One, their ‘preferred‘ option is a massive 27-ish storey tower block. Option Two, i.e the dead horse option, is a less tall tower (15 floors) with less public realm stuff (some cleaned pavements, some trees etc). The whole scheme has been wonderfully named Blackfriars Rd Central. Ho ho!

BARD, which is made up of a number of local folks, tenants groups and amenity groups called a small community demonstration on December 2nd 2012 and about 50 people came along to chat, listen to some good words and thoughts, hear a song and share cakes and drinks. It was a great hour well spent with some rousing notions and intentions to not let developers come to any area and start dictating what goes where with no consideration for long term residents nor any sense of what the community is, does and why.

Quotes from the BARD member’s speech at the community demo:
“What we are saying in the this demonstration today is that we have had enough. That local people have had enough…the only thing that will stop them is us. There is nothing else, there is us. We are what will stop them……Local people don’t earn enough to live here anymore and what they will do is drive us all out because this land is worth billions. We either have to get together, to work hard, we have to act in solidarity with each others struggles,  not have a struggle against this and a struggle against that but a struggle to make this a community that is meaningful, that people want to live in‘.

At Southwark Notes, we have been clear for a long time now that the regeneration of The Elephant area cannot be separated out from any development of Bankside, Aylesbury Estate, Bermondsey etc. Each place has a knock on effect on the other site especially if certain areas are being earmarked out for zero social housing and maximum luxury apartments. That’s just not right.

We welcome BARD and it’s fantastic starting demo and it’s intuition that we are all one fight against crazy land speculation and overpriced developments that offers little or nothing to existing communities. At the Elephant we have a lot of experience of the regeneration agenda and its accompanying spin and hype and empty promises. We hope we can add some insights into their already insightful campaign. Best of luck to BARD.

BARD is meeting regularly:
The next meeting of BARD is on Thursday, 10 January 2013 at 7 pm at Nelson Square Gardens Community Association Hall, 60a Rowland Hill House, Union Street, SE1. (Ground Floor Rowland Hill House, next to the Lord Nelson Pub). All welcome!

You can sign the BARD Online petition here

PIE IN THE SKY vs BLUE SKIES: IT’S ALL THE SAME!
An excellent piece was subsequently posted on the In SE1 News blog which covered both the demo and reports that the Council had been having ‘secret meetings‘ with Blackfriars developers (of which there are numerous – see our handy map below) who have constituted themselves as the Blackfriars Road Landowners’ Forum. Cllr Peter John described the meetings purely as ‘blue sky thinking‘. We leave you to figure the substance of such blue sky thinking (creative ideas that are not limited by current thinking or beliefs) in regard to local people and shops.

GHETTO MENTALITIES
Developments in the Blackfriars Rd and Southwark St area have already been subject to much criticism whereby large developers are let off both the London Plan and Southwark Council policy of factoring in affordable housing to create mixed tenure schemes. Instead big developments such as NeoBankside, One Blackfriars Rd and the forthcoming Kings’ Reach tower have been able to buy their way out of this with the promise from the Council that the $$$ will be used to build affordable housing somewhere else in the borough i.e not by the Thames. Questionable is the notion that a) the riverside should be given over to the creation of a rich person’s ghetto (contrary to any notion of building mixed communities, b) that existing residents shops and services will not be able to afford any increase in rent from the upscaling of the area.

EGG & CHIPS FOR ALL!!
The Linden Homes Blackfriard Rd development has said that the working mens’ caff and the dry cleaners that it will demolish will have a place in the new development. We cynics at Southwark Notes wonder whereabouts a working men’s caff will fit into a 27 storey tower of overpriced luxurious apartments. Maybe it can occupy a place at the top in a special Egg and Chips Public Terrace!

WALWORTH: SPECULATING ON LOCAL LAND No.2

Up for grabs! The old Met Police forensics and evidence recovery labs and that on Amelia St by Walworth Rd have been magically turned into a ‘development opportunity‘. Hopefully The Tankard pub on the corner of the site will remain.

We Southwark Notes minions know nothing about this site at all. Do you know anything?

Two interesting meetings coming up and demo!

The 35% CAMPAIGN is ‘campaigning for community inclusion in the Elephant & Castle regeneration’. They are part of organising two important and interesting meetings -  A Hustings meeting for the local by-election and an Elephant regeneration objectors meeting. Put the dates in your diary or phone!

They also have a brand new newsletter to read full of why the proposed regeneration is a shedload of broken promises when it comes to the promised community benefits re: housing, sustainability, transport, trees and so on.
Here!! 35 Percent Newsletter Nov 2012

• BY-ELECTION HUSTINGS MEETING
Tuesday 27th November
“There is going to a local council by-election in East Walworth on 29th November and we need to make sure that local candidates take our concerns about the regeneration of the area seriously. The 3 candidates (Labour, Lib-Dem and Conservative) will be attending a ‘hustings’ public open meeting on Tuesday 27 Nov 7pm at Crossway Church, 100 New Kent Rd Se1. This will be your opportunity to quiz them on the major local issues including the regeneration plans. Organised by Elephant Amenity Network

Jerry Flynn, spokesman for the group said: “The hustings is a chance for local residents to challenge and question the potential local councillor on any issue. With so many issues emerging around the recently submitted regeneration plans, this is the opportunity to demand that the new councillor takes them seriously and is fully accountable.”

• SATURDAY 1 DECEMBER 2012 from 2.00 – 3.00 pm
A Peaceful Community Demonstration to raise awareness of inappropriate development in Blackfriars Road. In Helen Gladstone Gardens [corner of Blackfriars Road and Surrey Row SE1, opposite Imbibe]

In an unprecedented move, Blackfriars Action for Responsible Development [BARD] was created by several tenant and resident associations to promote alternative strategies for a development planned by Linden Homes.  The proposed site runs from a terrace at 169-173 Blackfriars Road extending back to rows of garages in Pocock Street.

Linden Homes are giving two options for the site:

• 27 storey glass building on Blackfriars Road with further buildings behind ranging from 7 to 11 storeys providing 206 apartments.  This involves the closure of Surrey Row and the appropriation of a community garden belonging to the Nelson Square estate, or
• 15 storey building on Blackfriars Road providing 123 apartments and shops at ground level

Concerned local residents say that neither of the two options are viable for the following reasons:

• Poor and unimaginative design
• Height, massing and overshadowing of surrounding housing
• Loss of heritage buildings
• Inappropriate ‘social and/or affordable’ housing for local needs
• Lack of community facilities and insensitivity to the history and social fabric of the area
• The appropriation of  Helen Gladstone Gardens, a garden funded initially by Southwark Council’s Joint Security Initiative [JSI] money and cared for by local resident volunteers supported by the Bankside Open Spaces Trust [BOST]

There will be a Petition to sign.  Refreshments will be provided.

• ELEPHANT REGENERATION PLANS – OBJECTIONS MEETING
Tuesday 11th December
‘We are also inviting local objectors to a meeting at 7pm on Tuesday 11 December, to organise proceedings for the hearing of the Lend Lease planning applications in the coming New Year. This will involve discussing how best to approach the hearing and ensure that we make best use of the time allocated for voicing our objections. More details will be posted on our website at www.35percent.org‘

THE SIEGE OF THE ELEPHANT CONVERGENCE Sat 17th November 2012

The Siege of The Elephant:
A One-day Convergence
Saturday 17th November 2012

Saturday 17th November 11am – 5pm
Pembroke House
80 Tatum Street
London SE17 1QR

——————————————————————————————

Southwark Notes Archive Group* are currently inviting folks to contribute to The Siege of the Elephant, a one-day convergence against the gentrification of Elephant and Castle (and the surrounding area). The event aims to bring together local communities, activists, campaign and amenity group members and traders, as well as academics, students, researchers and members of campaign groups involved in similar regeneration/gentrification struggles in other areas of London.

There are two ways to contribute:

1) by participating to the event itself, which will take place on  Saturday 17th November  in Walworth, South London

2) and/or by submitting material to be displayed on the day and to be added to our Gentrification Archive. Submissions to the archive will also be accepted on a rolling basis from the Siege onwards.

The Siege of the Elephant
The aim of the day is to share evidence and discuss alternatives in
relation to the gentrification of North Southwark and Elephant and
Castle. The day will be divided in two parts and each will consist of
three parallel workshops followed by plenary discussions. We ask invited
contributors like you to introduce themselves and make a 5 minute
presentation on relevant evidence, work and/or experiences, which can
then be opened up for response to those at the table.

LIKELY TIMETABLE:
• PART I (Morning) SESSIONS
How does gentrification work and what are its causes and effects in
Elephant and Castle?
The focus in these sessions will be on sharing evidence of:
1 – DISPLACEMENT: the displacement of existing communities (residential and commercial) and loss of public resources and amenities
2 – THE ROLE OF CONSULTATION: flaws with regeneration plans and the consultation processes (broken promises of re-housing, problems with top-down planning)
3 – THE SPIN OF REGENERATION: the role of PR and mass media narratives that support the Council’s and the developers own narratives around regeneration.

• PART II (Afternoon) SESSIONS
How can we resist or alter dynamics of gentrification?
Discussing and exploring knowledge and practical ways and means that propose alternatives to regeneration as gentrification and the accompanying Local Authorities / developers’ consultations:
1 – COUNTERING DISPLACEMENT: countering the displacement of existing communities and the loss of public resources (the discontents of ‘affordable’ housing)
2 – POLITICISING CONSULTATION: resistance to empty consultation and enacting forms of local decision-making
3 – PROPOSING ALTERNATIVES: countering existing narratives of ‘failure and progress’ and promoting
alternative visions

Lunch and tea will be provided, and there may well also be time for walking
around the Heygate Estate and the Better Elephant permanent exhibition.
A finalised programme will be distributed closer to the date.

Facilitation on the day
Time is precious, so we are asking people to be selective with their contributions. Each workshop will be facilitated towards keeping the debate accessible to all and to allow time for all to contribute. Those interested in presenting evidence are asked to liaise with the organizers beforehand.

Participation In The Event:
There is no formal registration process for this event. All you need to do is write to us at:
elephantnotes@yahoo.co.uk

and we will contact you to confirm your participation and what you may be able to bring to this event – evidence, materials, facilitation skills etc.

Travel costs
We are unable to cover travel costs for all participants, but if you are
interested in coming from far and wide, do get in touch and we will
strive to contribute something from our small budget.

Contributions to Southwark Notes Gentrification Archive
We also want to use the event to expand Southwark Notes Gentrification Archive. This open-access archive attempts to hold a record of anti-gentrification struggle for the past 15 years in the North Southwark area. We are archiving books, newspaper cuttings, council brochures and academic publications on the local area as well as the local and global gentrification struggles. Let us know if you can provide us with copies of relevant work or material or if you have suggestions for work we should obtain for the archive. Material can be submitted in any format. If in digital format, we will try to print a hard copy on the day.

After the event
The evidence and discussions of the day will be compiled and a concise summary will be published and distributed for free as a small Southwark Notes pamphlet as well as online, and will include a thematic bibliography of recent research and publications.

————————————————————————————————

*Southwark Notes Archive Group run this popular anti-gentrification blog Southwark Notes that offers news, analysis and little stabs at the
gentrification of the area: http://southwarknotes.wordpress.com We have also been organising regular anti-gentrification walks, printing postcards, posters, maps and comics, and keeping active on within various groups and campaigns in the ongoing struggle whilst keeping an eye on the history (the mistakes and successes) and the big picture (globalisation, financialisation and all that!). We also maintain all this stuff and news and history in an archive within 56a Infoshop, the local Walworth self-managed community space.