Bailiffs, slop buckets, food banks and my bleeding heart: the flip side of the Royal Borough

How many Councillors accepted? We didn't.

It could hardly have felt less appropriate to contemplate going out in full evening dress for a high- falutin evening at Council Taxpayers’ expense. Councillors had been offered ‘free’ tickets worth £67.50 for an evening out at Opera Holland Park – which makes a loss of £1m a year.

My week had begun by 9.30am Monday dealing with a desperate resident who for the first time had forgotten a Council Tax payment, and was being threatened with bailiffs. A decent law-abiding person, going through upheaval at work, had for the first time ever forgotten a manual payment and spent a very wobbly weekend thinking the bailiffs would knock on the door at any moment. Of course they didn’t, it was the over-bearing Council terrorising late payers with ‘strongly worded’ warnings as they are wont to do. I was able to deal with the matter over the phone in less than five minutes, but not until the poor resident had spent two sleepless nights thinking they would be arrested or their home contents removed.

Tuesday morning brought another case so inevitable and yet so shocking that I felt resigned and disgusted simultaneously. I was told about an overcrowded family who are not eligible to be moved due to the age and gender of their children. However, one of the children is physically disabled and needs a lot of care at night; they cannot share and need their own room. One of the medical needs of this young person is that they may quickly need to go to the loo. With two women menstruating in the household (in synchrony) and one bathroom, this can cause huge problems.

Slop buckets for disabled children

Hence the slop bucket.

The disabled child, if caught short, has to do no 1s and no 2s in a bucket, which in some circles is considered a suitable punishment for crime.

'Regency' loos
for subsidised opera lovers

This, in the richest borough in Europe, where the Council can find the £1m to offer ‘free’ opera tickets for Councillors and heavily subsidised tickets for their opera-loving voters, is so utterly inhuman and callous it makes my blood boil. And before you ask, yes, the family has told the Council. The Council is ‘sympathetic’, but disabled children do not get extra housing points, which in itself is a scandal. The Council will do nothing.

Another case relates to an elderly and sick pensioner having to hand over half her weekly pension so that her daughter and children can eat. They were hungry, visibly hungry, three generations hungry in 2013 in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which is so proud of its subsidised opera and its £80m school and its huge reserves. They are now applying for food bank vouchers, but due to over-demand in the Royal Borough can only receive food three times.

Yes, in the Royal Borough, with the richest Council in Europe, the food bank is forced to ration its food.

All this is pretty ironic in the context of the amazing ‘Enough food for everyone IF’ world hunger protest in Hyde Park, just a couple of miles away. Still ‘proud to be British’ Mr Cameron?

Goya's tapestry painting, victims of war 

The final brown thread of this sad and depressing tapestry of human life relates to a post on another K&C blog, that by Auntie Dame Hornet (www.fromthehornetsnest.blogspot.com ). Woman’s Trust, a local voluntary organisation that works with women who have suffered domestic violence (https://www.facebook.com/WomansTrust  ), sent a note to the Dame inviting people to a summer party where they wished to recruit more ‘friends’ and sponsors. The resultant forum comments were an utter disgrace. I have asked and been given permission to reprint a few:

‘Now who is writing all of these boring blogs? Why are you allowing the Hornet to become a bleeding hearts club? It is NOT your audience. Please get a grip.’

‘Most dull’

‘I have no interest in beaten women and starving kids. Sorry, but each to his or her own’

‘The Dame has been drinking again and has lost her way. Next we will be hearing about nightmares and bombs in Syria. Get a grip girl. Concentrate on focus’

‘All of this domestic violence spilling over into public life is a diversion from core political issues. Another manifestation of the entitlement society.’

‘Children are taught at an early age that if they put their fingers in fire they get burnt. And guess what. They stop putting their fingers in fire! Women need to learn to stay away from abusive partners. It is their responsibility. It’s called growing up. If there is the catastrophe of children arriving in abusive relationships then this is a problem to be sorted by families. Not the state. Aunts, uncles and grandparents are the pragmatic safety net.’

Who are these people so full of bile and loathing for people without trust funds and family support? That – along with some pathetic comments about me (yawn) that I won’t honour by repeating – took up about half the forum comments.

I am born and bred in K&C, but this week I am totally ashamed to be part of it.

And I’m proud of my bleeding heart; at least I have one.

A THOUSAND ‘THANK-YOU’S: seven days in hospital

The run-down to my trip to hospital on 2 April was long, distressing and painful. On 23 November 2010, on my way to an evening meeting, I crossed a road. It was raining. As I stepped onto the kerb my foot slipped on slime, berries and leaves and kept travelling. I fell very heavily on my right side. By some miracle a cab arrived and took me to light, comfort and First Aid at the Town Hall. I was bleeding from both hands and knees and was badly shaken.

Two and a half years of frustration, pain, physio, more pain, loss of comfort, habit, sport, loss of fun-running and fitness, and more pain later, I was heading for a total hip replacement. And please don’t ask if I tried to sue the Council. Of course I tried to sue the Council. They tell me it was an accident. The road had been swept an hour before; they knew this because it was on the rota. There were no leaves, berries and slime. Silly me.

The next time someone tells you they are having major surgery now considered ‘routine’, please, please, please don’t tell them that you/your granny/half the world had the same and were climbing Mount Kilimanjaro two months later. You’re not them. I’m not them. We’re all different.

Which is why, soon after waking from a 100% successful operation by a kind and wonderful surgical team, I started to be violently sick. It didn’t stop.

There are many angles to this issue, one of which was that the hospital had no food I could eat if I wanted to. Literally. I can’t eat gluten, not sure if this is coeliac or an intolerance, it depends on my GP’s mood, but I can’t. There is no gluten-free food whatever on the menu. When I asked they gave me halal food, mushed. It was unrecognisable and could have had anything in it.

Hospital food has its detractors, always has, but I am aware that with a food budget of just £1.50/day/patient, they are stretched. Nuff said.

Anyway every possible strategy was adopted to stop my plight including shedloads of anti-emetics, but I could barely keep anything down at all, day after day after day. It was making me weak and dizzy. Kind visitors bringing in favourite biscuits were repaid with sharp words. Chocolate??? The very thought!

As the days clicked by I became torpid, could barely speak, fighting a tide of nausea day and night. I thought I was becoming delirious, lying in my own thoughts hour after hour, half the night too. I began noting how many times I and other patients said ‘thank you’ every day. Politeness is lovely, we should always be polite, but for doctors and nurses this is a job. There must be another way to show gratitude.

I remembered helping to care for my mother, through loss of sight and terminal cancer. Sometimes I’d get cross with her for thanking me over and over and over. For god’s sake, woman, you’re my mother, don’t thank me. This is how it works. Dependent baby/caring mother, outgoing child/careful mother, stroppy teen/annoyed mother, a period of relative equality that might last decades, then dependent mother/caring child.

I was glad she thanked me really; sometimes she could be quite terse.

Another train of thought related to water. The water in hospital tastes and smells dead. Did they actually wash dead people in it? Disgusting, especially when you’re feeling ill. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head.

On Monday 8 April a friend texted me the Thatcher news; I was disappointed not to be home on Twitter. I would’ve had a fine day, though I may have crossed a line or two. So here are two of my never-sent tweets:

‘I’ve been to hell and back. Luckily they wouldn’t let me in; there was a private party.’

‘Resolute, bold, authoritative, unafraid in the face of war. But enough of Kim Jong Un’.

I rallied a little and craved some simple food. A nurse found me some plain rice. It stayed down. I got home asap. So after seven days straight the details of which I will spare you from, I was still ill, very weak, but in the care of my lovely children who cooked me steamed rice, carrots and white fish; perfect. But this is just for now; we WILL return to the ‘period of relative equality’ mentioned above.

So, long may that prevail. I’m not used to being looked after.

Fighting gentrification, one cupcake at a time

Conservative Councillors are putting the finishing touches
 to their speeches

Kensington and Chelsea Council’s Budget Meeting last night (6 March) was a dreary/exciting four hour marathon. By the end of the evening the majority (TORY!) party Budget was agreed, a spending plan partially based on self-service, ignorance and complacency.

Not to say that everything in the Budget is wrong-headed; some of it is sensible and logical and necessary, partly thanks to our highly intelligent and caring senior officers – and to the odd Tory with half a heart. And there is the occasional item that has been ‘re-visioned’ -  something the Labour Group proposed in previous years, but renamed so they can claim the credit. 

But hey ho, that’s life in opposition.

Cllr Pat Mason and EDC

For new readers, I would like to reiterate some surprising facts about the ‘Royal’ Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a supposedly rich borough which has £170m in unallocated Reserves. My ward in the north of the borough, where Portobello Market stops in sight of Trellick Tower, is the joint poorest ward in London on extent measure [see p 7]. This means that every part of the ward is equally poor, around 50% of its children, which is worse than Calton in Glasgow. Other wards in North Ken also have poor estates, of say 40-45% poverty, but in Golborne it’s the most widespread.

Award-winning Morrocan Soup stall,
scrumptious food for hungry people

This is a huge surprise to many people, who might wander up Portobello Market to find the hot food stalls and restaurants and independent shops on Golborne Road. You would never guess how poor it is.

I teach a bit at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, and there’s a trick I play on the students who come on a Friday walkabout. ‘There’s an estate round here,’ I tell them, ‘that is in the poorest 5% in the entire country’. Eyes like saucers, they ask to see it, expecting gangs of hoodlums and burnt-out cars. ‘Gotcha, it’s right here,’ I tell them. They look around the wonderfully swept and pruned and cleaned-up award-winning 1970s Purcell Miller Tritton Swinbrook Estate, utterly confused.

The Council is good at sanitising poverty. It is all a façade, a Disneyfied or stage-set Kensington. Behind closed doors mothers are economising on food and heating to pay the rent, there is malnutrition, and rickets, and early death from preventable diseases. Parents sleep on the sofa while children sleep heads and tails on the floor. I’ve seen it. There is a gap of 18 years life expectancy between the south and the north of the borough [see graph]– but that’s an average of averages, it’s much greater if you take in the whole range of 98 for a British man in Hans Town, and 62 for a Moroccan man in North Ken.

But these inequalities are hidden to attract the homogeneous gentrification the Council longs for. I’ve lived here most of my life, and while Paulton’s Square where I was born among artists, bohemians and academics now houses the rich, it is the mega and mega-super rich who are in danger of destroying the borough: the plutocrats, the Far Eastern oil magnates, the ‘buy to leave’ foreign investors, some of whom, if we are to believe Simon Jenkins [click to read], are laundering dirty money.

The council does little, caught between need and greed. Look at the repugnant sale of Holland Park School’s southern playground for £110m for super-prime housing (affordable on site ‘unviable’ of course), while ploughing back £80m into arguably the most extravagant school in Europe (the relevant Cabinet Member trilled 'I spent £80m but it cost nothing'). The most expensive is not always the best; the same architects built a school in Belgium of the same size, to Passivhaus standard, for a quarter of the cost [click to read].

The Council’s complicity in overheating property prices is so blatant they don’t even bother to deny it. With £170m in Reserves they believe they are untouchable.

However Kensington and Chelsea is a borough of extremes, and inequality is growing.

Having trawled through the 2011 census figures for anything interesting, I was genuinely appalled to discover that somewhere in K&C was an estate even poorer than Swinbrook. After a hunt – hampered by disbelief – I found it. Henry Dickens Court, which I had leafleted several times during the third ‘unfortunate resignation due to child porn allegations’ by-election, is even better maintained than Swinbrook and I’m told is used by the Council to demonstrate to visiting dignitaries and national politicians how well they care for their ressies.

So here it is. Henry Dickens Court, an estate of cc500 homes, right next to the beautifully preened and bay-treed and utterly Tory Norland Conservation Area, suffers from 58% child poverty. Some 26% of its residents have no formal qualifications whatever; health is appalling; work is manual, if any [ONS stats].

To counter this the Council encourages and sponsors ‘entrepreneurialism’, and if you don’t know what that means, it’s making cupcakes and selling them on the market.

They don’t need cupcakes; they need core skills and training and well-equipped libraries and homework clubs.

Opera Holland Park
 - like it? You bought it!

So actually the Council isn’t rich at all. It is greedy but also parsimonious; simply not spending where most needed. While preaching self-reliance it chucks money at the near £1m/yr loss-making Opera Holland Park, nearly as much again for the loss-making Leighton House and Linley Samborne museum, arts strategies with accompanying lavish receptions to launch ‘cultural place-making’ and ‘creative clusters’ (which an Arts Council director friend ridicules), and last year, the completion of the frankly disgraceful expense of £23m of Council taxpayers’ money on repaving Exhibition Road. Did South Kensington need regenerating? ‘course not, but no doubt it’s whacked up property prices. The Council is playing Monopoly with people’s lives.

This is the key of course. K&C Council has no idea what regeneration is. Regeneration in their world is pimping unsightly areas to make poverty palatable, tidying up ‘grot spots’, planting odd corners and sticking substandard corporate art and up-lighting on flyovers; all this Disneyfication to attract developers to gentrify the poor bits. And their plan for actual people, for the poor for whom they have statutory duties? Move them to Peterborough [click to read].

This can’t last. Fortune favours the bold. The ‘Royal’ borough is blessed with old-fashioned Tories who, despite their dodgy politics, despise the blinkered and self-servative faction on the Council. It could be that they topple the current balance, or if they don’t UKIP may get a foothold. There are  nine hard-working Labour Councillors who are watching their every move. And of course our wonderful residents, loyal and supportive, waiting and working for a better chance at life.

EDC robed for a Council meeting
- not really, another scene from Opera Holland Park
of olde worlde Kensington as some would have it

At some point, the property bubble will burst and the Disneyfied version of the borough will look foolish. The ruling Tories in K&C have no Plan B for stage-set Kensington. But we do.

'Dear poor people, go away and stop depressing property prices'

zzzzzz ..... more boring generic architecture

Vultures are gathering over North Kensington. The resident status quo of long-standing bohos, locals and immigrants, BBC employees and creative types is being toppled by the closing of the Beeb, migration due to housing benefit caps, and the relentless Notting Hill-ification of the area. Estate agents are licking their chops.

After one landlord was allowed to turn a building in Kensal Town employment zone into a money-minting student hostel [link to website], just before the borough’s Core Strategy was adopted that would have prevented it, now other local landlords are trying their luck, with a tentative planning application here and there. The ‘like for like’ retail/office units at ground level to replace lost warehouse space are empty, a symbol of the utter futility of Planning regulations in certain situations.

White Knight Laundry, a family-owned business for three generations and the last vestige of what was a laundresses’ area, has just closed with the loss of 75 jobs; the new owner hopes to parachute - guess what? – yet another banal design for student flats there instead [link to story]And yet another landlord, of Garrow House, a block of studio flats, formerly used for people with visual impairment, is simply evicting the current occupants to make room for more profitable rich student accommodation. [link to website]

Planning stands by and does nothing. There is no local plan for the area and no one seems to care. And another 50 individuals or couples (and shamefully some families with children in bedsits) are put on the scrapheap, or sent to Dagenham.

And the Council is creaming in £.8m in a one-off ‘New Homes Bonus’, mainly from allowing student accommodation to be built, but will lose long-term on Council tax as students are exempt.

Around 50 of the 100 residents per month asking for housing advice have been hit by Housing Benefit cuts; many will have to move out.

Bedroom Tax will hit 854 households by an average £18 per week. Some will not be able to sustain this in the long or short term; many will have to move out.

Council rents have gone up 30% in the past five years, and are threatened to rise higher than predicted; many will have to move out.

Housing association rents could go stratospheric.

And anyone still clinging on by their finger-nails at that point will be hit by Universal Credit.

(- with thanks to the Mole)

While the Council is going through the process of challenging Census returns that state we have lost cc10,000 residents in the past ten years, the Leader has suggested spending £50m of Council taxpayers' money to buy land and build housing in Peterborough and move our ‘ambitious young people’ out there [link]. This is targetted at people on our housing waiting list, or Common Housing Register, currently around 9,000 households.

This isn't Gringott's Bank,
it's residents' money

I will give two examples of the kind of people the Peterborough Solution is alleged to be aiming to help. Both are young men, graduates, from immigrant backgrounds, married with two children, born and bred in the borough. They are polite, hard-working – and desperate.

One had returned to his mother’s overcrowded flat and was living in one bedroom with wife and two children; he returned for work. Desperate to be re-housed in or near the borough where he shared the care of his elderly mother, he was unsuccessful and made the heart-wrenching decision, for the good of his wife and children, to move to Reading. The travelling became too much, and he lost the job he was qualified for. He now hopes to get work as a cabbie.

The other lives on a soon-to-be-redeveloped housing estate. From the earliest days he was told he would have the ‘opportunity’ to get into shared ownership, and he waited five long years for the scheme to emerge. He has now been told that, to be eligible for a quarter share of a one-bedroom flat (for four people) on his own estate, he would have to be earning a minimum of £45,000, as the rent and service charges more than double the cost of a mortgage. He is devastated.

Click to enlarge

So here are two hard-working and talented young families who cannot afford to continue to live near their work. How would this scheme work for them? It wouldn't, and it's not designed for them, it's designed to squeeze the poor out of the borough.

The Peterborough Solution might be worth a moment’s consideration if the Council wasn’t totally complicit in forcing property prices through the roof. Overseas money is welcomed like a long-lost friend, and what Simon Jenkins [link] in the Standard calls ‘money so infinitely dodgy that no authority dares look at it’ is shovelled into property that is still returning +13% a year, an investment far better than gold. Who needs tenants? Best to keep it empty and pristine.

This must be the most short-sighted, self-destructive and idiotic proposal I have heard, ever, from this Council, which is constantly pouring money into completely barmy ‘initiatives’. 

However, the suggestion that Peterborough might like to ‘share’ our cash-haemorrhaging Opera Holland Park has its merits. Yes, the Peterborough Solution could work for Opera Holland Park; permanently and entirely.

This is the first of two blogs on the state of our borough; the second will appear on 6 March.

HORROR AND DISHONOUR IN THE ROTTEN BOROUGH

As we approach our ‘budget-setting’ season, we look back at some of the worst excesses of frivolous spending, waste, mis-management, poor judgment and pure callousness in the recent history of RBKC.

This post can be on-going, so please send additions and corrections via Comments, and I will add if appropriate.

·         Council spent £26m on Exhibition Road paving scheme

·         Launch party for Exhibition Road said to cost £30,000 including giant elephant puppet, acrobats, Boris Johnson and other jokers

·         Olympic ‘celebration’ in Exhibition Road, two weeks in August, cost cc£1m, very poor attendance said to be of 60,000 including museum visitors, daily commuters, museum staff and students of Imperial College and the RCA; that’s equivalent to £16 spent on each visitor/passer-by

·         Failure of Chelsea Care Council sponsored business to provide care workers, losses of cc£310,000-£1m, depending who you believe

·         Solar panels imported from China installed on the Town Hall roof, cost £250,000, revenue an optimistic £35,000 - after 25 years

·         £80m spent on new Holland Park School; average cost of similar secondary school £24m

·         Council tries to tempt buyers/creation of mutual for Opera Holland Park by making temporary tent permanent; Friends of Holland Park outraged

·         After failure to sell it off, Council continues to subsidise Opera Holland Park to the tune of £1m/yr – but according to the Cabinet Member for Finance this is ‘chicken feed’

·         Meanwhile, according to the Cabinet Member for Family and Children’s Services it is a ‘tough but inevitable decision’ to save £800k/yr by privatising child day care centres

·         ’21 Projects for the 21^st Century’ become ’13 aspirations and eight no hopers for the 21^st Century’ as the following schemes flop: distributing public art around the borough (we hear there is a ‘store’ but no one wants it); Sloane Square paving scheme; purchase of Brompton Cemetery; development at Kensal Gasworks; new school for St Joseph’s; new school for Holy Trinity; £67m spent on Decent Homes (said to be half that); Golborne Road development (not a hope in hell unless they work WITH residents and traders)

·         As the Council spent £1m on a two-week Olympic ‘urban culture celebration, £750k was cut from school sports

·         Kensal Crossrail: Labour Group still waiting for Tories to agree to ‘no blank cheque’ and cost controls; whatever can be stopping them?

·         Refusal to pay London Living Wage to workers where property is the most expensive in the country

·         Shame also to LibDems who voted with Tories against LLW

·         Announcement of Golborne as joint poorest ward in London, with 51% of children living in poverty; 28% borough-wide. Leader challenges figures saying ‘you should get out more and drive about like I do’

·         Shock and self-reflection as former Mayor resigns after sending offensive pictures of young boys on Council email

·         Horror and recrimination as second Councillor resigns for not reporting the former Mayor sending him the pictures

·         Outrage and repulsion as different Councillor is convicted of child and animal porn charges

·         Council refuses to tighten up Standards Committee after child porn case, stating ‘a light touch’ would suffice

·         Stunned silence as a former porn star was selected as candidate for Brompton ward (then hastily deselected)

·         This story makes it into Private Eye’s Rotten Borough awards

       Tory Council turns aside as North Pole pub turned into Tesco, despite huge community campaign

·         Council refuses to challenge threatened closure of Accident and Emergency units; LibDems vote with Tories

·         ‘The Sultan and Mrs Braithwaite’ story in Bloomberg News tells us the Sultan of Brunei pays just £32/month more Council Tax for his mansion in Ken Palace Gardens than Mrs B in a Council house in North Ken.

As the Prime Mincer assured us that school sports fields were not being sold off any more, the following was being planned in K&C:

·         Middle Row Primary – part of playground to be developed with private flats

·         Warwick Road Primary – v small playground, to be built next to air pollution hotspot

·         Oxford Gardens Primary – part of playground proposed to be developed with private flats

·         Holland Park School – part of playground sold to be developed with ‘super-prime’ private flats

·         Chelsea Academy – very little outside space for sports, hamster cage on roof, residents complained when students overrun Westfield Park at end of day so they are now 'escorted' out of the area by PCSOs

·         Council seeks to procure 500 homes in Manchester as Temporary Accommodation, stating there is nowhere to build social housing in the borough, while working with Westminster on ‘middle-class estates’ plan

·         Families in Temporary Accommodation have doubled to 1,600 in 2011-12, with 138 households in B&Bs including four families, and 100 in unsuitable accommodation or no accommodation at all

·         The Council makes £1m/year PROFIT from Temporary Accommodation, while pregnant women are sometimes put in B&Bs

·         Bedroom Tax to affect 854 households from April 2013; how many of these will be ‘offered’ Manchester as an affordable alternative?

·         In 2011 we were told that: no older person would be evicted due to benefit caps and cuts; no vulnerable people would be evicted due to benefit caps and cuts; and no child approaching exams would be evicted due to benefit caps and cuts. Reports suggest otherwise.

·         Council Tax Support proposals will mean that within three years the working poor will be hit by huge cuts to financial help, which could make it uneconomic to work – or may force them to move

·         The Cabinet calls this ‘a change in population’

·         What is the final deadline for the announcement of a possible Kensal Crossrail station? Outside sources are still saying it was ‘a dead duck in May 2010’; who is telling the truth?

·         Are we going to get the secondary school/plot for secondary school  negotiated at the Earl’s Court Planning meeting – or not?

·         Is air pollution really getting worse and what are we doing about it?

·         ‘Borough wide free wi-fi’ was promised and widely vaunted in the national press. Borough wide it may have been – Ken High Street and Exhibitionist Road – borough long it is not. O2 are paying us for the pleasure of advertising to visitors, but the revenue is not going into helping poorer residents get access

Responding to concerns about how Triborough arrangements could affect our services, the Cabinet Member for Family and Children’s Services states: ‘We are at the cutting edge of the future of what is happening’.

That's just what we are afraid of love!

SAVE TRELLICK TOWER - from Council games

Does the richest Council in Europe 

want historic assets to be cost neutral?

Trellick Tower with the original cornice in place, 1970s

At the foot of North Kensington’s Trellick Tower Erno Goldfinger completed his ‘cradle to grave’ Cheltenham Estate (1972) with an old people’s home. Until 2008 Edenham Residential Care Home housed 45 people, many with dementia, plus a mental health day-care centre surrounded with beautiful mature gardens. In 2006 the Council deemed it ‘not fit for purpose’. 

Despite a huge community battle to save the home the Council demolished it, leaving a gaping wound, then to add insult to injury turned it into a coach-park.

We kept track where possible of residents; many became very distressed at their forcible removal and nearly half died within a year. Two tragically ended their lives by refusing to eat, including William Rogers below.

Our horror at what had been done to older people we should honour, protect and care for, turned into a dogged insistence that whatever came next on the site would include housing for older people. Indeed, we were promised this, and a commitment was enshrined in the Council’s ‘Older Persons’ Accommodation Report’ that emerged the following year.

No doubt they hoped we had forgotten after three years. We have not.

After this first heartless act, when the Council then turned its avaricious eyes on the 100 houses and low-rise Goldfinger flats next to Trellick Tower at Edenham Way with a plan to redevelop, residents were ready. A huge campaign was launched that went worldwide and amazingly resulted in a Council commitment not to demolish. To seal this commitment the savvy residents lobbied English Heritage, and in November 2012 Edenham Way was listed Grade II.

A Vision for Edenham 2009, by Edenham Way RA 

and Novarc Studio (now LBMV Architects)

The future of the care home site is hugely problematic as there is no trust whatever between residents and the Council, or indeed between the Council and residents. In 2009 residents put forward their People’s Plan with the ‘Vision for Edenham’, working with local Councillors and Novarc Studio (now LBMV Architects). This included various facilities demanded by residents and evidenced by local need such as a health centre, the extra care housing which Council officers had promised, a public space, community rooms, history centre, and a proposed use for Trellick Tower’s half-demolished car park.

This of course was before Localism and the Council seemed horrified by the idea of planning by residents, though some of the proposals appeared in the Core Strategy.

Then earlier this year the Council finally got around to addressing a future use for the site. We are part way through a feasibility study, which has had a pathetically low response from distrustful residents who believe it will all be private housing, whatever they say or do.

The Council is playing the ‘too-early-too-late’ game. It goes like this: there are some very early proposals for which they are asking some feedback - over Christmas. But they say we mustn’t worry as it is ‘too early’ to comment in detail. Then some concrete ideas will be put forward to be consulted upon, probably over the summer holidays. By the time we have seen something tangible, it will be ‘too late’ to make any material change.

This is the ‘too-early-too-late’ game which the Council excels in.

Another game is even more dangerous to the future use of the site. There is a hidden agenda that the purpose of any development would be to support the costs of keeping the Grade II* listed Trellick Tower in good repair - breaking the ‘culture of dependency’? How much this involves has been variously reported – and often includes large sums that have been spent already – but the latest sum is ‘£13m over the next ten years’.

If this sum is accurate – it is open to challenge – this is a new move for the Council. If buildings must now be cost neutral or self-financing, we will have to review the running costs of several K&C heritage assets. Leighton House and Linley Samborne House must pay for their own upkeep, and of course Opera Holland Park must now cease its parasitic existence and pay for the repairs of its host building, the listed Holland House – which the Council was so careless with that English Heritage listed it on ‘Buildings at Risk’.

Street art. Not a crime; cool. OK?

The current study – the fourth or fifth we know of – seems to have been informed more by preconceptions than by any genuine research or understanding of the area. It is easy to misunderstand when you don’t actually care. Thus we have been informed that the area suffers terrible anti-social behaviour, and this is evidenced by the graffiti wall. In fact the wall is tolerated or even encouraged by the TMO and the Council; we treasure our local artists many of whom exhibit in the three street art galleries on Portobello Road. The Council actually commissioned some of these artists to paint a wall, and here (above) is the Council Leader up a ladder with spray can proudly pretending to paint. This was quite cool for him, frankly, and that day I shook his hand in all sincerity for the first and possibly the last time. As for crime, you can check the crime stats for yourself below, where you will see that Golborne is joint lowest for theft from motor vehicles, just three instances in 12 months. Brompton ward (Knightsbridge darlings) is highest by far for anti-social behaviour, with Golborne around half-way down the list of shame for ‘all crimes’. 

So, enough stigmatisation. Just. Don’t.

http://maps.met.police.uk/  

So what will happen now? We have one of the best architecture practices in London working with a derisory consultation input, with scant interest, no understanding and apparently no love whatever for either residents or the neighbourhood.

This cocked-up process could make or break the future of one of the most iconic buildings in London. So if you care about the future of Trellick Tower and Cheltenham Estate, please go to the Council website (link below) and comment. Or you can give me your comments here.

We only get this chance once; we have to get it right.

A Vision for Edenham (The People’s Plan: residents proposals from 2008 working with Novarc/LBMV Architects)

http://sdrv.ms/TqCYhJ

Early proposals for the Edenham Care Home site (Levitt Bernstein)

http://rbkc.gov.uk/housing/regenerationandcommunity/trellickandedenham.aspx

WILL – YOU - LISTEN?

Residents of Edenham Way next to Trellick Tower, which together form the remainder of Erno Goldfinger’s Cheltenham estate that the Council has failed to demolish, were delighted two weeks ago to discover that English Heritage had listed their properties at Grade II.

The campaign to list Edenham Way (ringed in red in axonometric below) began in 2008, when the Council – unknown to residents – had considered flattening their homes and redeveloping the site, conveniently next to the canal and beautiful community-run lateral park and wildlife garden, Meanwhile Gardens. Once the demolition plan was discovered, the highly resourceful residents found a number of ways to scupper it.  Many were original tenants who had lived there since being decanted from their neighbouring ‘slums’; some had subsequently bought their home under Right to Buy. These former ‘slum’ dwellers appreciate the quality of their homes and were not about to let the avaricious Council destroy them and the tight-knit community that houses three generations of local people, comprising innumerable nationalities working and living in harmony.

The very sad story of the Edenham Residential Care Home (hatched area below), a Goldfinger building in front of Trellick Tower, had hit residents hard. In 2006 the Council had ‘consulted’ on its future, and in a disgraceful episode that still turns my stomach, decided it was no longer fit for purpose. Residents were turned out, and whatever the Council says about how ‘sensitively’ it was done, half were dead within a year. Two stopped eating and starved to death. We know that because we went to the funerals. It was shocking, and it woke Edenham Way residents to the reality of what could happen to them.

 From an architectural point of view, the care home had formed a carefully planned balance to the massing of the two Trellick towers and the lower blocks and houses at Edenham Way. It was a foil to the striking Trellick, surrounded by lovely gardens and trees, a vital element for the elderly care home residents many of whom suffered dementia and were unable to potter freely around the neighbourhood. The buildings themselves – we were told by an architect who worked with Goldfinger – were designed as load-bearing structural shells so that internal walls could be reorganised at will to accommodate changing need. But the Council didn’t give a fig for this, their deterministic ‘consultation’ found its mark and the buildings were ground into the dirt despite our very best efforts, which included BBC News coverage with Tony Benn, myself chained to the gates, and countless heart-breaking intercessions between families and hard-faced officers.

From a social planning aspect, Cheltenham Estate was a 'cradle to grave' or Lifetime Neighbourhood; now it's a development opportunity.

By the time I caught up with  this latest episode in 2008, a group of Edenham Way residents had already started the process of listing. Within no time at all a petition against demolition had been published in Building Design magazine and had gone global. Architects, academics, students and Goldfinger aficionados around the world signed up in support of local residents, and in the face of this strength of feeling in 2010 the Council admitted defeat – for now.

Residents living in the shadow of Trellick are now facing two onslaughts – or opportunities, depending on your viewpoint. Tomorrow Monday 3 December, an exhibition of ‘three options’ for the future of the care home site will be presented to the world. Will the architects have heard what the meagre 33 residents (from 320 households) who visited the first presentation told them? And will they have listened?

The second attack on residents’ views will emerge in the next few months. We are told that the Council is to challenge English Heritage’s listing of Edenham Way. Apparently, these unique and amazing homes are ‘of no architectural significance’. Have they visited them? This could be the most philistine, despicable and petty action of a Council that among other ‘environmental crimes’ over the years was responsible for:

-      - Demolishing the old Town Hall overnight in 1982 when a listing was imminent (I remember it well; I was there at 2am with half the neighbourhood out in their dressing gowns weeping with helpless fury)

-      - Covering an internationally-recognised mural on Portobello Road by the artist Banksy with plastic cladding, and when challenged asked, ‘who’s Banksy?’ – the same year they spent £240,000 on a painting by Lord Leighton

-      - Stating that the Grade II* listed Trellick Tower was ‘a monstrosity not worth putting a lightbulb in’

Before I see the exhibition tomorrow, before I hear the grounds on which the Council wishes to challenge the Edenham Way listing, I would like to say the following:

-      Dear Council, you are not always right. Sometimes you are very wrong indeed. Listen to your residents. Sometimes, former ‘slum’ dwellers are more knowledgeable and appreciate value better than you. You are elected to serve them.

     LISTEN. UNDERSTAND. THINK A BIT. THEN ACT.

While listing can be seen as a mixed blessing, it is not a curse. Listed buildings can be a positive force and can pay for themselves. This is not a fantasy; this is a fact.