Estates being developed ..but not for old residents
THE day before Grenfell Tower caught fire, I was at a South London council estate, talking to residents.
Cressingham Gardens is a wonderful place, designed by the pioneering social architect Ted Hollamby – full of light and green space, and right on the edge of lovely Brockwell Park.
But under the smokescreen of ‘regeneration’, campaigners say the estate is being felled by Lambeth Council to make way for luxury flats. The council says the cost of renovating rather than rebuilding the estate is too high.
“It’s just too prime a site,” as one campaigner told me.
Michael O’Keefe, a retired security guard who has lived on the estate for 42 happy years, said: “They just want working class people out of here. We have a real community and they just want to demolish it.”
His wife Eileen took his hand. “We moved in here on February 14, 1976, St Valentine’s Day,” she said. “I’d gone to the flat first.
“A beautiful bouquet of flowers arrived. The note from Michael said: ‘I hope we’ll be as happy here as we’ve always been’.
“We have been so happy. It’s been the perfect place to live but now they want us to leave our friends, our community, our memories and our lives behind.”
One of Cressingham’s residents, Mark Aitken, has decorated the estate with a series of stunning giant photographs – portraits of residents that look out across the park, into the bus lanes and the petrol station.
“The exhibition isn’t allowed to be political,” he said. “But I wanted to show an estate is about the people who live in it.”
Three years ago, in July 2014, residents of the Myatts Fields North estate, in the same borough and also designed by Ted Hollamby, held a protest saying regeneration works were putting lives at risk.
Anyone following the Grenfell story may recognise the name of the construction company – Rydon, which was responsible for the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. This week, it emerged that the company had recently won a new £65million regeneration contract in Ealing.
Hours after my Cressingham visit, I stood under the blazing Grenfell Tower. It is now a shameful memorial to a housing crisis that has been smouldering for decades.
Both estates are monuments to the socially ambitious era that existed at the end of the 1960s. By the early ’80s, 42% of people lived in social housing. Now it’s 8%.
New government figures on homelessness released yesterday show that in the last year alone, 59,090 households were accepted as homeless by their local council – a rise of 17% over
By the early 1980s, 42% of people lived in social housing. Now it is 8%
the last five years. Much of that increase is due to the benefit cap which the courts tore a hole through yesterday with a landmark ruling on families with young children.
Anyone trying to understand the wider social housing crisis should watch Dispossession, a new documentary by Paul Sng and narrated by Maxine Peake.
Featuring the voices of Cressingham’s residents and others, it documents how housing policy failures began with Right To Buy – which senior Tories later admitted was designed to create more home-owning Tory voters.
The policy has left 1.4 million people on the list for a council home. Yet, an extension to Right To Buy, the new Tory Housing Bill, is about to make the effect exponentially worse – with Shelter projecting a staggering further loss of 180,000 council homes.
Last year saw a 24-year low in house building. But ‘regeneration’ is also acting as a form of social cleansing. Just look at the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle – 1,034 homes flattened, 2,704 built and only 82 social houses in the new development.
Meanwhile, last night a crucial decision was due on whether the Battersea Power Station development company will be allowed to wriggle out of building 250 of 636 affordable homes on its site.
Residents on estates like Myatts Fields North in the shiny new Oval Quarter have been locked in dispute with regeneration firms for years. “Rydon was the refurbishment contractor for 127 homes on Myatts Fields North,” Stuart Hodkinson, a housing researcher at the University of Leeds, told me.
He studied 14 of the first 50 flats refurbished as part of his research. The catalogue of failings he uncovered led to a probe by Lambeth Council. These stories are not unique to London, but it is in the capital where rocketing, unsustainable house prices have left people with little power facing down corporate greed.
The theme is the same, every time. The powerful versus the powerless. Working class people ignored, pushed aside.
Grenfell now stands as a blackened scar on the horizon. Like the Cressingham exhibition, it is a striking, visual reminder to every person who passes that an estate is first and foremost a collection of human beings.
For now, Michael O’Keefe still wakes up next to the park he loves and the memories he sees all around him. In some human currency somewhere, that’s worth millions more than a Russian oligarch’s investment flat.