January Tuesday 16th 2018
SOUTHWARK COUNCIL 160 TOOLEY ST, LONDON SE1 2HZ
PROTEST FROM 4.30PM / MEETING STARTS 6PM going til late
• Object online here: Up The Elephant
• Sign petition here: Elephant Is A Castle
The demolition of The Elephant & Castle story concerns everyone in London who doesn’t want London to be crap.
Do you want the relentless weeding out of the small ways of getting by and the removal of those communal spaces and ties that make up all of our areas? In fact, is anyone actually seriously asking you what you want as your friends, your neighbours, shops, estates, open spaces disappear overnight, priced out or close down? In London right now it’s like new build flats go up as if by magic? But it’s certainly not magic.
The demolition of the Heygate Estate (1000 council homes lost) wasn’t the first in the disaster of regenerations that are being pushed onto us but it was certainly a mega-blueprint for continued social cleansing at the hands of Councils, developers, housing associations etc. And so today, there are certain frontlines of regeneration these days and these battles simply can’t be lost less we want to lose the great and messy communities that has so far made London a pretty decent place to live (despite it all!) The frontlines are places like Aylesbury Estate, Cressingham Gardens, Wards Corner, Haringey HDV. It’s crucial we win these fights and it feels like we can win them.
We call upon anyone who doesn’t want London to become ever more bland and boring to see them selves as one vital part of the struggle to say ‘No!’ to these changes, here and now. The fight against regeneration, gentrification and displacement of locals and local businesses doesn’t need to only be a local fight done only by those immediately under threat. Increasingly the successful regeneration of one area just means that any adjacent area will be next in line for social cleansing treatment. Come and support us in The Elephant as we support you in Brixton, Dalston or Tottenham or wherever. We can all be here there and everywhere offering support and solidarity whether we are affected directly or not.
PRIVATE HOMES MAXED OUT – THEY’RE HAVING A LAUGH!
A year ago when we wrote our long read ‘The Murder of The Elephant’, the plans to demolish the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre were bad. We were also cynical enough to expect them to get worse. Guess what? They did. Much worse! We won’t just repeat what we wrote back then but do read it as it sets out the whole sorry background to the current Masterplan of big time social cleansing of The Elephant. We will just update you here on the ever-shady deal between the Council and tax-avoiding offshore developers Delancey.
The number of new homes planned keeps getting higher and higher as the developer’s eyes water at the money to made at The Elephant. In 2013 the Council were refusing St Modwen’s proposed 500 homes on the Shopping Centre site as too many. Yet they are all set to now recommend Delancey’s scheme of nearly double that.
Of a planned 979 private homes, only 33 will be social rent affordable to the majority of people who live in the neighbourhood. That’s a staggering 3.3% of the total homes Delancey wants to build. Of the rest 96 flats will be ‘London Living Rent’ estimated at £250 a week for a two bedroom place). Then there is the 213 ‘Intermediate Rent’ flats for households earning between £50k to £90k. Finally the bulk of the development will be 637 Market rent flats – who knows how much these rents will be? We also have to add that all these homes are rental flats (i.e none for sale) where Delancey remains the landlord. The initial tenancy is only 3 years then you have to renew or move on. How does this add cohesion and stability to the area?
This is pure and simple Heygate Mk Two! It’s a land grab worse than the Wild West. It’s sad to think that University of The Arts London / London College of Communication‘s partnership with Delancey makes them a cynical part of this shameful social cleansing of the area they have long been part of.
The closure of homeless hostels through regeneration and the massive increase in street homeless people at Elephant is ongoing. We don’t like the term ‘housing crisis’ much as this seems to suggest that there is something wrong that the system can correct rather than the actuality that the crisis of finding some cheap and decent to live is exactly how the system maintain profits before people. 33 genuinely affordable flats out of 979. This is just taking the piss. Gotta say NO!
TRADERS CHUCKED OUT – THEY’RE HAVING A LAUGH!
On the topic of the treatment of the numerous local traders at the Shopping Centre, there are still only poor intentions about making sure there are robust and genuine offers of relocation in the area. Delancey seeks to throw money at this problem by offering a pissy £250,000 ‘towards a relocation fund’ but it’s not clear how many of the 70 or so businesses there will get this help. It doesn’t add up to much really. They are also seeking to get out of policy compliance by offering £750,000 to relocate them into a proposed bunker-like mall in the disused garages at Perronet House or at disused railway arches in Arch St. Unsurprisingly, knowing their businesses and their customers very well, none of the traders think these are great ideas. Out of sight, out of mind no doubt! The Council has no idea how stressful and precarious any small business relocation is. They have been listening sort of to traders for years but listening and acting on what they hear isn’t their strong point. The traders are part of the essential fabric of The Elephant. Relocation plans have to be realistic and well financed and part of any new development, not shoved off-site into existing Council-owned places. The first promises to traders were for new ‘affordable retail units’ in Delancey’s development on Elephant Rd? What happened to this promised 7 units? Like the planned new market for current market stalls at the Shopping Centre, they seem now to have disappeared from the plans.
ECONOMIC GROWTH = SOCIAL LOSSES
As we wrote last year, ‘the Shopping Centre is more than just a series of shops though. Any day of the week sees people meeting friends there, hanging out, chatting in the cafes, loitering, keeping warm, watching the day go by or whatever people want to do there socially within reason…The Shopping Centre is as complex as all the people’s lives are who use it: stressed, joyful, skint, getting by, on their uppers, begging, coping, living large, whatever and it’s within those complexities that lies the Elephant’s care of its community’.
So-called ‘regeneration’ based on property development might economically increase a bit of council tax into the Council coffers but socially they actually increase poverty, isolation, ill health, anxiety and so on. For the hundreds of the elderly community who visit Palace Bingo 2 or 3 times a week, how will it feel to no longer be able to do this? For those who visit the Centre to catch up with friends in Jenny’s or Sundial, get their haircut in Lucy’s or sit in Café Nova and chat, where will they go when the area is filled with a more expensive and socially bland Costa or Café Nero? None of these informal lifelines or survival networks will survive in a landscape of luxury towers with chain shops and eateries at the bottom. Regeneration is just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The Council pretends to act in our interests but are only ever about giving even more of what we’ve got away to those who already have too much. They want to permit the murdering of an amazing community so that an offshore non-taxing paying investment vehicle can make more money for those with already loads of money.
ON GROVELLING
To be honest, after years of fighting for the basic Southwark Council’s policy-compliant 35% ‘affordable’ homes in big developments, we’ve reached a point where this scheme is so blatantly about screwing over the area that we are sick of grovelling for percentage peanuts. We oppose the Elephant & Castle ‘regeneration’ because we remain impolitely bloody-minded about the area where we live. These days what even is a victory for any local community – a minimum of affordable homes, some re-jigged open space? We are not against those things, but we know the violence of regeneration casts a shadow over those crumbs from the High Table of property development.
We reiterate what we said last year, only this time this crappy regeneration plan makes us even more determined to say NO!
‘When we say that The Elephant is being murdered we refer to the area and to the killing of a long-term home-grown neighbourhood with special characteristics, peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. When we say murder though we also mean it very specifically in that regeneration in this cynical fashion that seeks to replace deep bonds of community togetherness (with all its problems too!) with an alienating and sterile landscape of chain shops and pseudo-public places will result in a few local deaths from the removal of the heart of the area and the familiarities and connections it brings. Such community networks, developed and grown over years, provide people with support from neighbours in addition to, or instead of, the help from family. These informal support networks give people a level of emotional resilience derived from the sense of safety and well-being that comes from knowing and trusting people in the immediate locality. But the Council or Delancey won’t ever be consulting us on loneliness, or stress, or depression or isolation. For them the plans are all shiny wonders of progress that we should all be in awe of. For us these plans are deadly!’
See you at The Town Hall!
TUESDAY 16th JANUARY 2018
SOUTHWARK COUNCIL H.Q
160 TOOLEY ST, LONDON SE1 2HZ
THIS WAS THE OLD LEAFLET FOR THE CANCELLED DEMO FROM LAST YEAR:
Leaflet PDF for printing and circulating about the plans and the demo here:
SHOPPING CENTRE DEMO LEAFLET DEC 18TH
Southwark Notes - whose regeneration? 