The demolition of Glasgow’s Red Road flats, broadcast live on TV and beamed around the world during the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, was the iconic image of the year that, fortunately, never was.
The plan to televise the demolition was scrapped after a public outcry. Were it to have gone ahead, it would have been a fitting symbol for the destruction of affordable housing in council estates which is taking place all around the country. The process is at its most extreme in London, where scores of estates are making way for new developments of largely luxury housing in newly created, privately owned parts of the city.
The Heygate Estate, which once housed 3,000 people on low incomes at Elephant & Castle, has been demolished to make way for Elephant Park, an upmarket development of 2,500 homes of which only 79 will be social housing. Billed as London’s largest park for 70 years, Elephant Park will be privately owned. It’s the same all across London, in estates from Hackney to Hendon.
At Battersea Power Station, the centrepiece of the development is a new square called Malaysia Square. This new slice of so-called “public realm”, built by Malaysian investors, will also be privately owned. Malaysia Square itself is part of Nine Elms, an enormous, 195 hectare (482 acre) swathe of privately owned high-security development, which is deemed a fitting home for the new ultra-high-security American embassy. The controversial plan to build what will be mainly luxury apartments on the site of the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office in Clerkenwell, which was bitterly opposed by local residents, is part of the same pattern.
As low-income Londoners are forced out of the capital, property as an international asset class is creating unprecedented profits for international investors. The studio flat in the Battersea Power Station development that sold for £1m last year and is expected back on the market with a price tag of £1.5m is a particularly egregious example of this process: the property will not even be built until 2018.
But while London mayor Boris Johnson lauds these luxury developments, the privatisation of large parts of the city that they represent is actually a significant policy U-turn on his part. Back in 2009, as Johnson laid out a new approach across a raft of policy areas, he published a “manifesto for public space”, called London’s Great Outdoors. In it he railed against the “corporatisation” of streets and public spaces which, he said, made Londoners feel like trespassers in their own city.
The policy paper documented “a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space”. “Where this type of ‘corporatisation’ occurs, especially in the larger commercial developments, Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city,” he wrotes. “This need not be the case,” he added, saying he wanted to see local authorities retain control of the streets and public spaces within new building projects – to “adopt” the streets. He explicitly called it an “important principle” that should be negotiated in all new developments.
At the time, this statement struck an important blow for democracy and for the right for Londoners to feel included in their city. It is difficult to know how much impact it had, but developers at the time were certainly aware they had to work within its confines. Now Johnson seems to have forgotten all about it.
Proponents of the new private estates that are mushrooming all over London point out that this is the way London’s great estates were built in the 18th century, with aristocratic landlords the billionaire investors of their day. The Earl of Bedford controlled Covent Garden, the Earl of Southampton had the Bloomsbury Estate and the Duke of Westminster ran the whole of northern Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. These old estates include some of our finest Georgian and early Victorian squares, but what we don’t see today are the private security forces that were employed by the estates to keep out those who did not belong there, and the many gates, bars and posts.
After growing public outrage, which paralleled the rise in democracy and was reflected in two parliamentary inquiries, control of the streets was passed over to local authorities. Since then, it has been common for local authorities to “adopt” the streets and public spaces of the city, as Johnson initially recommended. Whether or not they actually own them, they control and run them.
Keeping streets under democratic control, in the hands of the local authority, need not deter private sector investment. After all, that is the way cities in the UK have developed for generations. But it would send an important message about the kind of city we wish to live in. While notionally open to all, private estates, policed by private security and round-the-clock CCTV, invariably impose rules and regulations restricting access and behaviour. From cycling and skateboarding to filming, taking photographs and even eating and drinking, many activities are routinely banned. So is political protest, which is the litmus test for whether a space is truly public and democratic.
Today, even the proposed Garden Bridge across the Thames is envisaged primarily as a private tourist attraction, rather than a public space for the city. It will not be a public right of way, but a private space: closing for corporate events, banning political protest and requiring that groups of more than eight people request permission to visit.
When Johnson became mayor, he specifically set his stall against the privatisation of large parts of the city, making it clear that he wished to see a capital that was open and inclusive to all, with democratically elected local authorities in charge of streets and public places. Now this policy has gone into reverse, signalling that billionaire investors, rather than democratically elected government, are in charge of our streets. As the architecture of places inevitably reflects social and political realities, perhaps this should not come as such a surprise.
Anna Minton is the author of Ground Control and a visiting professor in architecture at the University of East London.
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