Demolishing South Kilburn

South Kilburn Estate, 22-05-18

On South Kilburn Estate new concrete shells are rising from the rubble that was once Gloucester House and Durham Court. I've written before about Brent Council's 15 year estate regeneration scheme, and the implications of the changes of tenure that are at its core, but none of that captures the extraordinary visual impact made by the tearing down of people's homes, whatever the tenure. The most recent demolition phase lasted around six months. A bigger selection of images from that period is here. More words and pictures here.

South Kilburn, 22-3-18

South Kilburn Estate, 1-5-18

 

South Kilburn, 22-5-18

The London Clearances (continued)

Walterton Road, North Paddington 1975

My first useful work as a photographer came about through involvement with housing campaigners at the tail end of the slum clearance programmes of the 1960s and 70s. In London, streets of poorly maintained, privately rented Victorian terraces were being torn down and replaced by a brave new world of modern homes in publicly owned estates of concrete apartment blocks.

Forty years on, that world has turned full circle. Now it is the 'castles in the sky' that are coming down, streets are all the rage, and council housing, now renamed 'social', is struggling to survive.

Gloucester House and the rubble of Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate, 2018

Across the road from the sub-standard flat that was my home back in 1975 (toilet and cold water sink on the shared landing, no bathroom), work has begun on Phase 2b of Brent Council's 15 year South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme. Demolition of the low rise Durham Court blocks is underway, and the now deserted 18 storey Gloucester House awaits the wrecking crew.

If all goes according to plan, by 2029, when the final phase is scheduled for completion, 2400 new homes will have been built, 1200 for private sale, and 1200 let at social rent to existing secure tenants.

Partly demolished blocks, Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate

The buildings and landscaping completed so far are impressive, a big improvement on the bleak brutalist concrete they have replaced, and the scheme has attracted much praise. The council has also been lauded for its financial strategy, using income from the private sales to fund the homes let at social rents.

So what's not to like? In a convincing piece on Haringey's controversial partnership deal with Australian developer Lendlease on the Red Brick blog, Steve Hilditch argues that the most straightforward criterion for assessing the wave of regeneration deals being done by councils across the capital should be the number of social rented homes there will be at the end of the process.

“Thousands of mainly social rented homes will be knocked down and thousands of mainly private homes will be built. There will be many more homes overall, but, how will the proposed mix of market and sub-market homes tackle homelessness and the needs of people on the waiting list?  The type and tenure of new homes is as important as how many homes are built in total. Social rent remains the only truly affordable option for many people on lower incomes.”

On that measure, the figures for South Kilburn don't stack up. By 2029, 2400 new homes will have replaced 1610. Of the latter, 1420 were occupied by secure tenants and 190 by leaseholders. It's hard to know whether the prices leaseholders are getting for their compulsorily purchased homes match the prices demanded for the new (unlikely). But it is certain that 1420 secure tenants will not fit into the 1200 homes available for social rent. It is probable that enough of them will have been rehoused elsewhere to make the scheme work, but the net effect will be to reduce the number of social rent homes available across the borough, and to clear even more people on low or average incomes out of central London.

Kilburn Quarter, completed phase 2a of South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme

Brent, like many others London councils, has been forced into this trade-off between private sales and publicly owned social rentals by central government funding cuts and the long-term disempowerment of local authorities. The new estate looks like it's going to be a nice place to live, and will provide much improved homes for the tenants who are rehoused on it - albeit at higher so-called 'target' social rents.  It will also increase the number of homes available for private sale and market rental – in itself not a bad thing, as long as they're occupied once bought. It's just a pity it won't be of any help in cutting the waiting list and housing the homeless.  More pictures here. More words and pictures here and here.

More Market Failures

Nine Elms regeneration zone

 There is a striking disjunction between the desperate shortage of affordable housing in the capital, and the extraordinary panorama of cranes, pile-drivers and high-rise residential blocks in various states of construction visible from almost anywhere in the city with a view.

Even more extraordinary, at least to someone unfamiliar with London's dysfunctional property market, is the fact that many of the newly completed apartments transforming the skyline are empty, bought off-plan by overseas investors as convenient assets in which to stash their cash. But now it appears that all is not well in the luxury homes trade.

Battersea Power Station

Last month Morgan Stanley warned that prices of new, upmarket London flats could fall by as much as 20% this year, and the International Business Times reported that Chinese investors who bought apartments off-plan in the Battersea power station development are having second thoughts now the time has come to pay the balance on their relatively small up-front deposits. Those in the know are clearly expecting trouble: although pre-tax profits at the estate agent Foxtons only fell by 3% last year, investors knocked 33% of the share price. If these are the first signs of a bursting bubble, it would be good news for anyone who thinks of four walls and a roof as home, rather than an offshore shelter for their dodgy money.

More pictures here.

Construction of Alto Apartments, Wembley

The Siege of Silicon Roundabout

  Demolition site, Hoxton     

The Old Street roundabout is surrounded. The wrecking crews are converging from all directions. The traffic island whose geometry lends its name to the London home of tech start-ups, skinny jeans and wall-to-wall wall-art, is under siege. The decaying Victorian buildings which have incubated the successes and failures of the new information economy over the last few years are being torn down to make space for gleaming new steel and glass towers.

Silicon Roundabout was always a convenient, but somewhat misleading moniker. There are tech start-ups all over the city, with a significant number already housed in steel and glass at Canary Wharf – a very different social space from the coffee houses and boutiques of Hoxton and Shoreditch. Nevertheless the area does have a distinctive buzz, which it would be a shame to lose. According to one local estate agent, much of the new residential property is being bought off-plan by overseas investors looking for a safe haven for their cash, and may well remain empty once completed. And the office blocks creeping up Bishopsgate are mostly devoted to corporate finance and its besuited offshoots. Will the rather appealing well-heeled bohemian vibe survive the London property boom, or will the relentless march of investment capital clear yet another piece of the capital of lowlifes with less than six figure incomes?

 

  Demolition site, Hoxton                                        Private apartment block, City Road

Thanks to Steve Nathan for the estate agent research.  More pictures here.

Citizens, not customers

Pancras Square, 2014

Last month Camden Council took possession of a new office building containing a “state-of-the-art and sustainable” leisure centre, a relocated library, and other welcome community facilities. The council estimates its 14 floor tower, the construction of which was financed by selling off ageing and unwanted parts of its property portfolio, will save it between £2.5 million and £4.5 million a year in running costs.

5 Pancras Square sits in a corner of a major new development that has transformed the once notorious area behind King's Cross station. Ed Smith, writing in the New Statesman, described the change as one “from derelict wasteland to caffeinated utopia”. The place is buzzing with local office workers, passing travellers, and students from Central St.Martins art school in neighbouring Granary Square, built on part of the long disused goods yard. There's even a canal running through the middle to add that apparently essential waterside appeal.

I well remember the “derelict wasteland”. Twenty-five years ago I spent several weeks photographing it, and some of the people who lived and worked in it, for an exhibition. I would hesitate to now call it a “utopia”, but it is undoubtedly much improved.

Culross Buildings, 1989

So what's not to like? Not a lot. I just have a slight resentment at being regarded by my elected local authority as a 'customer' (top), rather than a 'citizen' (even if that is my status in the rest of the largely privately owned and managed development). And a nagging feeling that the rough sleepers, short-life tenants and small businesses that I photographed back then are not among those who have benefited from all this. More pictures of the 'derelict wasteland' here.  Caffeinated utopia to follow.

Young homeless man, Pancras Road, 1989

What Goes Up Might Come Down

As high-rise blocks are demolished on estates in South Kilburn and Barking (below), 2818 new homes in the skyscrapers of the former London 2012 Olympic Athletes' Village in Stratford are awaiting their first occupants (above).

The difference between those coming down and those going up is not so much architectural, as proprietorial. Private housing is replacing public: 1439 of the apartments in East Village, as it is now known, are being offering for private rent by Get Living London, a joint venture between the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and property company Delancey. The remainder are 'affordable' homes for sale, shared-ownership, or rent by Triathlon Homes, a public-private partnership.

Only time will tell whether ownership status is more important than architecture and the strength, or otherwise, of the local economy – or whether East Village is destined to become a densely packed, down-at-heel, buy-to-let opportunity earmarked for a future wrecker's ball.  More pictures here.

Slum Clearance Revisited

Earlier this month Brent Council started demolition of two 1960s tower blocks on South Kilburn Estate, part of a £66.5 million redevelopment scheme that will see them replaced by 229 low-rise apartments for sale and rent.

One of the 18 storey towers, Fielding House (above), used to fill the view from the window of a flat I once rented on the opposite side of Kilburn Park Road. Back in 1975 the towers were a recent addition to the NW6 landscape, and the Victorian terrace whose first floor I part-occupied was scheduled for compulsory purchase and demolition by the Greater London Council.

Calling it a flat is being kind. It wasn't self-contained, the toilet was shared with the tenant upstairs, it had no bathroom, and the only running water was a cold tap above a Butler sink on the landing. At the time such conditions were commonplace, particularly in the private rented sector, and the towers were part of a slum clearance programme designed to sweep them away and provide good quality public housing for all who needed it.

Almost forty years on, the Victorian terrace is still standing, and it is the towers that are coming down. In a complete reversal, not only is high-rise making way for low (the 229 new South Kilburn apartments will be in buildings with traditional mansion block facades and six or seven floors), but public sector housing is making way for private: 126 of them will be sold off, and only 103 will be let. 'Private good, public bad' is the mantra now.  More pictures here.

Tenant in an unfit kitchen, Kilburn Park Road, 1982

Market Failures

The Guardian's exposé of the extraordinary state of 'Billionaire's Row' – The Bishops Avenue in north London – is yet another reminder of just how dysfunctional the UK housing market has become. Mansions worth together around £350 million are lying empty (above), many decaying into serious dereliction, whilst the government's 'bedroom tax' is forcing large numbers of those at the other end of the 'property ladder' to quit the capital, often leaving behind family, friends, schools and job opportunities.

Boris Johnson's answer? To charge owners of empty properties worth over £2 million a 50% Council Tax surcharge. Or maybe 150%. The Mayor isn't very good on detail. That should really hit the owners hard. The rate for the top Council Tax band in Barnet is £2832.40, so the surcharge would be either £1416.20, or £4248.60, depending on what he means. One of the Bishops Avenue mansions, Dryades, until recently the property of the Pakistan Minister of Privatisation (clearly a post with a generous salary), was bought for £12 million in 2007 and, according to the Guardian, is currently believed to be worth £30 million. That's a profit of £18 million in seven years, or just over £2.5 million a year. A few thousand pounds of Council Tax isn't going to make much of a dent in that.

Interventions by this and previous governments aimed at addressing failures at the opposite end of the market have been no better. The other streets where boarded-up houses lie empty, and bulldozed vacant lots stand unattended, are the result of the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder programme in Oldham (below), Liverpool and several other northern cities, started by Labour and prematurely shutdown by the coalition. Both bad decisions.

The abysmal record of government interventions at both ends of the property market highlights the failure of market-based solutions to a problem that requires social and economic planning, not blind faith in the beneficence of laissez-faire profiteering. More pictures here.

Why Should There Be Losers?

Yesterday's Queen's Speech confirmed the government's intention to proceed with the High Speed 2 Euston to Birmingham rail line, despite opposition from affected residents and businesses along its route, and unanswered questions about many of the details.

The transport case, the economic benefit, the cost, the precise route, and the location of new stations are all in dispute. Only last month, the publication of revised plans for the Euston terminal did nothing to meet the objections of the local council, nor mitigate the fears of residents in the surrounding area.

HS2 Ltd, the government-owned company charged with developing the new line, scrapped a plan to demolish and rebuild Euston station, and replaced it with plans for what Sarah Hayward, Leader of Camden Council, described as “a shed being bolted on to an existing lean-to”. The new proposal significantly reduces the regeneration and development potential of the scheme. The original allowed for multi-storey blocks of offices and apartments to be built on top of the station - presumably that can't be done on a shed roof.

Hundreds of tenants living in blocks on the nearby Regent's Park Estate scheduled for demolition still have no indication as to where they might be rehoused. Many fear they will be offered alternative accommodation outside the borough, far from family, friends and workplaces.

Tenants, leaseholders and businesses in the streets immediately to the west of the station face a different threat. The roads have been 'safeguarded' – marked out as an access route within the construction zone – but the houses, shops and restaurants along them have not. Although some are no more than three or four metres from the likely construction site boundary, under current arrangements they stand to receive nothing for 10 years of disruption and blight. In rural areas outside the M25, residents within 120 metres of the new line will receive the full, unblighted market value of their property, and those within 60 metres an additional 10% bonus plus moving costs.

Why the unequal treatment? That's what the High Court wanted to know when it upheld a legal challenge to HS2's compensation consultation in March. Conspiracy theorists might point to the political colour of the wards around the station (red), and that of the rolling Home County landscapes further north (blue). The process will now have to be re-run.

Irrespective of the wisdom of the whole enterprise, the treatment of those directly affected seems grossly unfair. There will, of course, be beneficiaries – you can't spend £34 billion without somebody benefitting – but why should there be losers?

Above: Kathleen Ullah at her front door a few metres from the planned Euston construction site; below: Buckinghamshire. More pictures here.

Something is Happening Here

Anyone taking a stroll around the area to the east of London's Old Street roundabout for the first time might well start feeling like Bob Dylan's Mr Jones: you know that something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.

From high up on gable ends, right down to pavement level, sprayed onto walls, doors, shutters – flat surfaces of any kind – a painted army of the grotesque and the bizarre marches across the built environment. The buildings themselves are a contrasting mix of Victorian dereliction and the smartly modern. In between crumbling onetime industrial premises, recently converted factories and warehouses now host offices and apartments whose occupants are served by a growing number of minimalist galleries, fashionable bars, and Macbook-infested coffee shops.

The demographic is mostly young – twenty to thirtysomething – techy, tapered jeans and T shirts, some strange haircuts. The place is buzzing. Builders' cranes break up the skyline. The massive new concrete viaduct of the East London Line sweeps over road junctions and vacant lots. It doesn't feel like the recession has reached these parts, despite its proximity to Threadneedle Street.

But what's driving all this is not visible from the street. Hidden away in the new workspaces are between 300 and 600 tech 'start-ups' (estimates vary), some already pulling in big money, others hoping to justify the faith of their venture capital investors. People call this 'Silicon Roundabout'. The government prefers 'Tech City', but either way it's clearly thriving - the closest thing we've got to an economic success story.



Of course, economic crisis and government-induced austerity are not far away. Rough sleepers and rougher drinkers still hang out in the subways leading out of Old Street tube (it has free public toilets, an important facility for the homeless); at lunchtime, beggars sit on the ground by sandwich bars and cash machines. Not everyone is an IT entrepreneur: there are car washers and security guards, bar workers and shop assistants - and the occasional older resident or passer-by who may have lived there all their lives, but look about them as though they have strayed inadvertently onto another planet.

Why here? Immediately to the south, the steel and glass towers along Bishopsgate appear to be creeping relentlessly northwards; to the east, Stratford City is being sterilised in preparation for the Olympics. But for the moment rents are relatively cheap, and this, together with what Wired has described as 'a critical mass of available programming talent, and just enough outside investment', has combined to produce a place that actually makes stuff.

This is what unplanned regeneration looks like. It's not consumption-led, like Westfield's mega-mall in Stratford, or reliant on ever-inflating property prices, like the speculative scorched earth schemes favoured elsewhere in the capital (Hammersmith & Fulham's proposals for Earls Court, for instance). It's organic, a by-product of a new industrial revolution. There are still boarded-up buildings, makeshift conversions, and scrappy rubble-strewn corners, but it's a lot more interesting than the monolithic conceits of top-down re-development. And even if Mr Jones doesn't know exactly what it is, it's definitely not Desolation Row.

More photos here.

Lifestyle Tourism

The crowds that crammed into Westfield Stratford City last week appeared to confirm the owners’ press release description of the shopping complex as “a new lifestyle destination for East London”, behaving more like tourists than serious consumers. They certainly weren’t buying very much. Primark was doing a reasonable trade, but it didn’t seem like enough to pay a return on the £1.8 billion spent on construction, or keep the 10,000 new staff in secure employment.

With money scarce on the east side of town, the largest urban shopping centre in Europe is more of a hang-out than a place to spend hard-earned cash. Except the “gateway” to the London 2012 Olympic Park is private property and crawling with security guards, and after the benevolent free-for-all of the opening week, the welcome to all and sundry (including photographers) is likely to wear thin quite quickly.

As the largest regeneration project ever undertaken in the UK it raises a lot of questions. The most obvious is - what will it actually contribute to the economy? Its 250 shops are not making anything, just selling stuff that used to be sold somewhere else. The UK’s largest casino, due to open later in the year, will move money from the pockets of the punters to the pockets of the owners, creating nothing. The new jobs, however close to the minimum wage, will probably benefit those who get them, but only at the expense of those who used to do them elsewhere. And if there are any profits, they will accrue to the joint owners in Australia (Westfield), Holland (APG) and North America (the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board).

Will people buy more than they did before? I doubt it. And what will happen to the jobs and businesses in the Stratford Centre, the down-at-heel concrete mall directly opposite the new development?

Unless European economies are thrown totally off-kilter by a Greek default, Stratford City will doubtless do well when the Olympics come to town next summer. But after that? We must wait and see.

More pictures here.