A tale of gentrification in London:
“When I came back from holiday, there was an axe on the kitchen table and a note saying there was a mouse in the toaster - I think that’s a good description of the madness we’re in.”
For the past two years, R. has been living in a very unusual place. Situated just behind the gigantic Elephant & Castle roundabout, the Heygate estate is one of those urban forests you’d read about on the Internet but would never think of encountering in real life. Yet, a minute away from the noisy mess of Walworth road is perhaps one of the strangest places in London. Architects conceived it so the middle of the estate is completely silent and cut away from the world; fast forward thirty years, and it now looks like the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world. Once home to over 3,000 people, the Heygate has been nearly completely emptied of its residents in 2008. It is now awaiting demolition - which should be completed in 2015 - in order to make place for brand new buildings, for a brand new community.
The plans, however, are far from popular: the council’s dream regeneration has been opposed by local residents, activists, and by the very last people still living on the site.
Far from the thousands of the last decade, there are only three remaining leaseholders in the estate, and only one flat still occupied. Out of the three tenants (not counting the mouse stuck in the toaster), R. is the one I managed to talk to. For him, living on the estate is not about “everyday life”; he is an activist, and wants to stop the current plans from becoming a reality. Not that’s it’s always easy: these days, they “always have to keep [their] blinds up as […] the attention is non-stop: all sorts of people are walking around; people with cameras, journalists, students…”
After, all it hardly is surprising: on top of being an intriguing place to visit for curious Londoners, the Heygate regeneration has been surrounded by controversy since the very start, with critics becoming more and more vocal in their opposition in the past year. In October 2012, MP Simon Hughes called for all plans to be cancelled, as they were not following the council’s own guidelines on social and affordable housing. And only two months ago, a document published on Southwark council’s website by mistake showed that they had sold the site for only £55m, knowing that they have already spent £43.5m on the decanting and demolition so far, and are expected to spend at least £6.6m more before the project is completed.
It is no wonder, then, that residents of the Aylesbury estate, just down the road from the Heygate, were worried when Southwark announced plans to fully regenerate the site. Famous for being the biggest estate in Europe, with over 8,000 people in 2,700 dwellings, the Aylesbury is also mainly known as a crime hotspot, and has suffered from a terrible reputation since the 1990’s. In a way, it’s not hard to see why, when walking around the towering blocks: while there was a blatant effort to make the area seem nicer by planting the odd tree or patch of grass, the Aylesbury looks terribly bleak, and overwhelmingly…grey. The kids playgrounds are all broken, and the dimly lit corridors going from one part of the estate to another are genuinely quite chilling. The main problem is something else, though: the place feels empty. Around a third of the flats have been decanted, and a lot of windows have metal sheets covering them, or are simply left broken. The small gardens in front of each ground floor flat are left to either die or take over the walls, and it is clear that it’s not far from becoming the ghost town the Heygate has been for so long.
In a few years, though, it should have been turned into the estate Southwark have been dreaming of: the number of (newly built) houses will go from 2,700 to 4,900, with 2,288 of them social housing. The sale of the remaining flats will finance the rest of the project. But once again, this does not please everyone: current residents are afraid to see their community go for good, and do not quite understand how the population of their estate can possibly double, without it become too cramped and unpleasant to live in. Also, since nearly half the current residents have already been moved away from the estate, there is only a slight chance that the new estate will actually benefit the original community.
This remains very much in line with what R. called “a process of state-led gentrification”, in which the composition of a neighbourhood is affected by urban planning, residential shifts and others, which causes the poorer residents to leave the area, to make place for wealthier individuals. And in these cases, the councils are unashamedly leading this. But for now, let us come back to the term “gentrification”: coined in 1964 to describe Islington by Ruth Glass, it can only seem ironical that the university she studied at, University College London, would be an active agent in the forced gentrification of a certain London borough.
Jakub, a masters student at UCL, first heard of the plans in early 2012: “there were rumours of UCL expanding, and then emails from management about how UCL would contribute to the development of the Olympic site, but no details”.The real news came a few months later: Newham council had plans to regenerate the Carpenters estate, which included UCL building a new campus on the site. In fact, the project had started long before then: the decanting of the estate started in 2004, and when in 2007 it was decided that refurbishing the buildings would be too expensive, a set of more drastic changes was already on the cards. And residents are far from happy with the decisions: a protest group, Carpenters Against Regeneration Plans (CARP) was formed to try and counter the regeneration. Their criticisms are pretty straightforward: as current residents, their future and the future of their community is very uncertain, and they have absolutely no say in the process. In short: they do not want to be kept in the dark any longer. Though Robin Wales, the Newham mayor, insists that the regeneration will benefit the area, most seem to be vehemently against the project - including UCL students themselves. For Jakub, the UCL expansion will mean that “700 people - 300 families - will be removed from their homes and from the communities they’ve been in for up to 30 years. Some families still living on the estate saw it grow, and are attached to the place. All because of UCL.”
And while the official line is that residents have or are being offered alternative places to live close to the Carpenters, at least one family had to decline an offer to move to Stoke-On-Trent, in Staffordshire.
If this seems unbelievable, it sadly isn’t an isolated reality: only last month, it was announced that Brent council was considering “paying off” some families relying on housing benefits for them to leave the borough. This was encouraged by the introduction of the government’s latest changes in welfare policies, and begs the question: in ten, twenty years’ time, what will London look like? If the poor are quite literally being priced out of London, or politely forced to go somewhere else, what will the capital end up looking like?
Boroughs are being gentrified one after the other, and seemingly without any concerns for the people directly affected by it. From Southwark to Newham, councils are bulldozing through changes very few agree with, and making entire communities disappear, often forever.
Or, as Jakub put it: “what’s really disturbing is that there’s always one single answer for this: “bringing progress” is simply never questioned, or discussed; many voices are not being heard. It’s only about this wider image of shiny new buildings.”
And while shiny new buildings may appear like a attractive prospect, it would be more than time to start wondering: who exactly do we want living in them?
