Civic pride and the Common Good
December 12th, 2010
An article in Private Eye No.1274 dated 29/10-11/11 about the possible selling off of council assets (translation – buildings paid for by rate payers over the years) to developers, has prompted consideration of the way things used to be and how life for all of us might be better if they still were.
I was recently prompted into thinking about these things by a fellow blogger who pointed me to his take on the Big Society. After reading his thoughts here:-
https://ukregeneration.org.uk/2010/11/29/the-big-society-age-%E2%80%93-now-it%E2%80%99s-official/
Another view on post war housing
December 4th, 2010
There’s always someone who sees things from a different point of view and while I may not agree with them I am prepared to take them on head to head so here’s the view from the “other side”.
newsed1
2 December 2010 6:10PM
Well, that’s what happens when the Left fiddles with everything.
As Family and Kinship in The East showed, the Left didn’t like working class housing being private and didn’t like it being handed – via the rent man – down through well-behaved working class families.
Many of the ‘slum’ clearances were nothing of the kind- ask Timothy Spall who used to live in a perfectly decent working class street in Battersea (from where I’m now writing) which was taken over by the local council and demolished never to be re-built.
Lynsey Hanley nails the Tories lies
November 30th, 2010
I thought this was a great article, and the comments that follow it. I don’t always agree with Lynsey Hanley but on this occasion she is spot on.
“That’s the paradox of conservatism: it celebrates the idea of individual freedom while making it incredibly difficult for some individuals – generally, those who lack power and money – to exercise that freedom.”
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/26/tory-paradox-free-less-choice
ArseneKnows
26 November 2010 10:34AM
The usual right wing bull from some of the usual suspects.
The 1834 Poor Law Reform Act is what they seem to be arguing for. In this act, signed nto law incidentally by Cameron’s ancestor William IV, the driving force behind the reforms was the concept of ‘less eligibility’. This basically meant that noone in receipt of relief from poverty should be as well off as even the lowest paid labourer.
Build more crap – Grant Shapps MP
November 26th, 2010
Cringleford Norwich – look at the size of the windows
As if “toy-town estates” on the edge of almost every UK town were not enough the coalition housing minister Grant Shapps wants the developers to continue in the same vein, unregulated. What else would you expect from the party that dropped the Parker Morris standards? Only Boris has housing standards at heart now and I’ll be interested to hear his London response to this latest unwanted intervention by a cabinet minister someone in charge of a portfolio not considered sufficiently important to warrant a seat in the cabinet.
In an article published in today’s online Architects’ Journal . . .
RIBA attacks government over housing standards u-turn
RIBA president Ruth Reed has voiced ‘serious concerns’ over the government’s decision to abandon the Homes and Communities Agency’s (HCA) core housing standards for all new publicly-backed homes
. . .
She added: ‘UK house builders have delivered the smallest homes in Europe, and have built homes which have been consistently judged to be of a poor quality by the Government’s own design watchdog. The Government should be putting the interests of communities first.’
Pathfinder – Owen Hatherley – Guardian
November 22nd, 2010
“Knocking stuff down does not increase supply, […] everything we knock down shrinks supply”
Prof Anne Power speaking to LB Camden
Pathfinder seems to have been in the news since the days of John Prescott and New Labour. Back in March this year, Karen Buck MP, a lady I respect, pointed out in a housing debate that. . .
. . . when the Pathfinder projects were starting they were dealing with the problem of excess supply and indeed many areas being blighted with huge numbers of homes that they could not rent or sell . . .
Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back March 4th, 2010 https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=86
I confess that I never did understand the true reason for it especially since it quickly resulted in groups of home owners banding together and taking their local council to court, and often winning, in order to avoid demolition.
At the height of the Pathfinder demolitions I can remember BBC news reports showing people saying that they were going to lose their homes with a compensation figure that would come nowhere near the cost of a new flat built to replace it.
Housing Benefit cuts – in a nutshell
November 1st, 2010
Allied against Osborne’s housing benefit cuts
Boris Johnson, Simon Hughes and Karen Buck – allies against housing benefit cuts. Photo of Hughes by Keith Edkins
The public have a way of bringing common sense and experience to complex issues and I have great faith in the ability of Joe Public to explain things in straightforward terms that anyone can understand. So it is with the housing benefit cuts and the hyperbole that has gone with it in recent days. I was out last night and happened to glance through the Independent letters page, the first of which sums up for me the whole history of the problem in a few paragraphs.
Housing benefit – the row goes on
October 31st, 2010
Sometimes a single comment shines out so clearly that it cuts through all the wordy articles that have been written on the subject since last week. This is one such, not that saying it makes the situation any better but it does make it easier to understand the implications of the ConDem policy.
31 October 2010 7:14AM
So when there is a well known shortage of social housing throughout the land they decide on a policy of pushing people out of currently available housing into areas where there is a shortage of social housing already. Thus making the problem many times worse resulting in increased financial, health and social costs whilst people are housed in temporary accomodation and bed and breakfasts which is the worse thing you can do to a family which is trying to get back on its feet again which will cause the state more in all sorts of ways.Some help this lot are neither to themselves or anyone else.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/31/london-housing-crisis-benefit-cuts
Tackle the housing crisis . . .
October 28th, 2010
. . . by building shared flats for the young
No issue illustrates our “two-nation” problem better than this one, in that so many people are on incomes that cannot possibly gain them a private home in a lifetime, even though that is the holy grail to which all are expected to aspire.
Deborah Orr in todays Guardian tackles the housing problem from a different perspective, that of the young and advocates state owned and subsidised flats.
Two-nation Labourism must bear some responsibility for the divisive climb in housing costs that has been seen in this country since the housing market picked up at the time when Labour achieved power. Unfettered encouragement of the buy-to-let market, which allowed private landlords to step into the gap left by the lack of investment in social housing, contributed greatly to a situation in which people find themselves renting accommodation that is priced beyond their slender means, even in the suburbs they are supposed to be relocating to.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/deborah-orr-build-shared-flats
One of the commentators below the article writes from France with an excellent suggestion:-
Our local town in France has a wonderful building that is specifically for young workers. I suppose we’d call it a hostel in the UK (just to make it sound worse) but they are nice individual flats complete with caretaker on bottom floor. What a great idea. If we’re asking youngsters to work where jobs are, let’s make it just a bit easier, eh?
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/deborah-orr-build-shared-flats
Fortunately this has happened in London quite by chance. As a former Merchant seaman I have some direct experience of facilities provided for seamen by charities over the decades, for those leaving and joining ships. The following were once the home ashore of those who made their working life afloat.
Beacon House 7 Dock Street, London, E1 8JN
Single persons housing.
Prince of Wales Mission – Salmon Lane
Now private housing.
Queen Victoria Seamans’ Rest – East India Dock Road
Until the mid 1990s the QVSR retained rooms for the use of seaman on leave, but had by then long been used for overspill by the local borough council of Tower Hamlets for Somalian refugees and homeless people.
Anchor House – Canning Town
Historically a hostel for seafarers visiting the ports of East London, Anchor House today is a charity based in Canning Town that provides support to over 200 homeless and workless people each year to help them move on to employment and independent living. See the film.
Flying Angel – Silvertown
This is now being redeveloped into flats while keeping the facade onto Victoria Dock Road. The plans may be downloaded from the following link Flying Angel.
Stella Maris- Tilbury docks
This former seamans’ hostel is now 40 one bedroomed flats. Alternate document link here
There were others but as I say this is not a comprehensive list. The link to the issue of hostels above is simply that some of these former seaman’s homes have become homes for single working people. Beacon House is one such and the former Flying Angel hostel at Silvertown, another.
Social Housing cuts
October 20th, 2010
Government plans to slice 60% off the affordable housebuilding budget and fill the gap by asking new social housing tenants to pay much higher rents were attacked by housing groups for hitting the “poorest hardest”.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/20/spending-review-2010-key-points#Social%20Housing
Well sadly the writing has been on the wall since 9th July 2009 when Paul Waugh, then of the Evening Standard, exposed the policies of Hammersmith and Fulham council which became the flagship Tory borough from which the present government took their ideas and are now in the process of implementing them. It is not that we should be surprised it is that I am bitterly disappointed that in view of the opposition expressed they have not stopped to reconsider.
282 Goldhawk Road update
October 18th, 2010
UPDATE: 10/3/14 Work on site at Ashchurch Villas
UPDATE: 3/12/12
The two plots 282/292 were subsequently sold to First Base who short listed four practices of which two are known to be PTEa and MAE, the project was given to PTEa after each practice gave a presentation of their intended plans.
Last year the housing association Places for People put forward a scheme at 282 Goldhawk Road designed by Peter Barber architects for housing on the site of a former old peoples home, which proved to be unpopular with local residents not only for its height and potential to overlook adjoining property but for its poor design.
I wrote two articles about the intended development, one here
https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=207
and a shorter one here
https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=286
Tonight saw the AGM of the Ashchurch Residents Association at the Sulgrave Club, more or less opposite the site in question which was notable for being attended for its duration by Nick Johnson, Head of H&F Homes in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Councillor Lucy Ivimy and more briefly by the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, Stephen Greenhalgh.