Estates under threat
February 5th, 2010
“Among
Toryboroughs across London, there seems now to be a disease spreading ever wider that the land on which council tenants live is available for development”[Tory struck out 7/11/12 owing to realisation that they’re all at it. Hello Southwark (Lab)! – Ed.]
On [Thursday] July 9th 2009 Paul Waugh of the London Evening Standard published an article on the planned demolition of all the council estates in Hammersmith and Fulham. I read this while returning home having been to a political meeting at the Methodist Hall in Westminster, and on arriving home got straight on the computer to find out more about it. I quickly discovered that there was already a blog for Queen Caroline and later on found out about the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke and Greenwich.
Later on in the year I subscribed to Roof magazine (now sadly no longer with us – April 2012) from Shelter, found myself speaking to Andy Slaughter on the telephone for 15 minutes about H&F and have subsequently continued to take a keen interest in council housing matters and the Tory intention to end it.
I have a personal interest in council housing because from 10/78 to 10/80 I lived at 93 Aragon Tower on the Pepys Estate (via the GLC hard-to-let scheme) which “was sold by Lewisham Council to Berkeley Group, in 2002 for £11.5m” (£80k per flat), to fund a leisure centre in the borough for £7 million and provide some money for regeneration of the remaining estate. This was their best block, the jewel in the crown, and they displaced 144 families to do so. To me this was the start of the rot, although there may have been other examples I simply don’t know. The estate featured in a documentary called The Tower.