Projected image of Norton Folgate. Image: Spitalfields Trust
Nearly forty years after Sir John Betjemin’s campaign to protect the historic site of Norton Folgate near Spitalfields, campaigners face another battle against developers British Land.
The developers plan to demolish 75 per cent of buildings on the site, including Blossom Street’s 1886 Victorian warehouses and the former residence of playwright Christopher Marlowe.
It also plans to increase the commercial use of the site, which lies entirely within the Elder Street Conservation Area, by 65 per cent.
Tim Whittaker, an administrator for the Spitalfields Trust and a Whitechapel resident, said: “The conservation area appraisal for Elder Street is the only piece of legislation that Tower Hamlets Council have concerning the area. It is therefore of particular importance and weight and should be adhered to.
“British Land’s proposals clearly flout this in a number of ways but perhaps most importantly in their proposed wholesale redevelopment of the Blossom Street warehouses.
“The appraisal addresses this in detail, saying that any adaptation of these warehouses for reuse must be kept to an absolute minimum.
“Therefore it is important that Londoners remind Tower Hamlets Council of their own legislation and their duty to abide by it and treat conservation areas with due care.”
Tower Hamlets Council has confirmed it will accept emails and letters about the application until April, in advance of hearing British Land’s application. A council spokesperson also confirmed there was no date set for the Strategic Development Committee to hear British Land’s application.
A spokesperson for British Land told the East End Review: “The scheme preserves the 19th century townscape and refurbishes the warehouses to secure their long term future. The proposal is precisely an example of creative re-use of these unlisted buildings.”
British Land tried to develop the same patch of land last year, and added that their new 2015 scheme keeps more of the Blossom Street warehouses than the previous one did.
David Milne, the curator of Dennis Severs’ House museum on Folgate Street, said: “The plans to redevelop the site would not only be a great loss to the historic nature of these beautiful streets but would in fact remove all trace of the human character that brings people in their thousands to this vibrant and diverse community.
“We do not spend our days wandering around vast office complexes, we visit and cherish the small buildings and houses that continue to evolve as they do so wonderfully not only here within the streets of Spitalfields but all across our city.”
Multi-media artist Rob St John. Photograph: Emma Cardwell
A water fowl making its nest with rubbish, green pond weed covering a river’s surface with tyres and empty plastic bottles. To most of us, river pollution looks something like this. But for Rob St John, there many different ways of seeing – and hearing – water pollution.
The Lancastrian artist, writer and musician, was commissioned by the Love the Lea project, run by charity Thames21, to use art and science to explore and document pollution creatively in London’s second largest waterway.
Almost a year later, and Surface Tension – an album of new music and field recordings – is complete. A book of photography and writing is to accompany the music, and this month photographs from the project will be on display at Stour Space in Hackney Wick.
Ben Fenton, of Thames21, commissioned Rob St John with the hope of raising awareness of pollution in the Lea in ways that can engage new audiences.
Over the course of a few weekends last summer, St John walked most of the length of the middle and lower Lea, taking with him various bits of recording equipment.
This included special microphones in his ears that record a 360 degree stereo field. Listening back he heard swans landing, bikes going past. Then, to capture the sound of the river itself he used hydrophones, microphones that go underneath the surface of the river and pick up what’s going on down there.
“It’s a bit like fishing for sound,” St John tells me. “ Sometimes it’s absolutely nothing, sometimes it’s really cool rhythms from propellors or boats.
“One of the most unusual sounds is when you put the hydrophones into pond weed. What it’s doing is photosynthesizing so it’s giving off all these tiny air bubbles.
“When they hit hydrophones they give off this wonderful bubbly, murky crackle, almost like electronica. “Under the surface of the Lea, with its oil slicks and duck weed, a surprisingly diverse world has survived.
Surface of the River Lea. Photograph: Rob St John
“The Lea’s amazing because there are still plants and animals and fish living there against all the odds. I was fascinated by the diversity that exists below the surface levels. So surface tension became this organising idea as a project title. It’s about the tension between two different things: clean and polluted, natural and unnatural, air and water.”
Alongside sound recordings, St John was portrayed the plight of the Lea visually by taking photographs with a pin hole camera made from a Lesney toy matchbox (the Lesney factory was on the river at Hackney Wick) and a vintage 120 film camera.
During the winter months, he then went back up to Yorkshire, taking with him bottles and bottles of Lea water, which he used to develop the film. “My girlfriend had the horror of seeing that I’d filled my studio with developing trays full of Lea water, and I had various films all soaking and degrading over different amounts of time.
“Some of them came out almost a bit out of focus and hazy, as a result of duckweed, oil or decaying leaves. Some of them had these incredible light flares and some of them just had a really light footprint of these weird microscopic bits of life.”
Scientifically, one of the most impressive methods used to create the music of Surface Tension is called sonification. St John gathered data from volunteer UCL scientists about pollutants in the river and was able to turn it into music using software.
“I fed samples in and then just let the data from each site define what that sound did. I’m really fascinated because it’s a very aesthetic and even arbitrary process what you decide to map onto what. It’s an area where there’s this real tension between science and scientific data and aesthetics and art, and that’s something I’m really interested in.”
Coming from Lancashire, it was interesting to hear St John’s perspective on the River Lea. “Maybe because it’s been so canalised it almost doesn’t feel like a river,” he says. “At least compared to when it flows round the back of Hackney Marshes where it seems to take on that lease of life again for a mile or so. That loss of wildness makes me ask if we’ve forgotten this is potentially an important biodiverse ecosystem.”
Surface Tension Until 4 May Stour Space 7 Roach Road, E3 2PA
You don’t need to be a talent scout to hear something special in the voice of Denai Moore. It’s soulful without affectation, powerful yet at times restrained … In short, this 22-year-old from Stratford has a gift. She writes her own songs too, about timeless themes – heartbreak and hard times – doing so with a rawness and emotional honesty that sets her apart. Moore has collaborated with the likes of Astronomyy and made several acclaimed EPs. This month sees the release of her debut album, Elsewhere, produced by Rodaidh McDonald.
Denai, congratulations on releasing your first album. Do you see it as a defining point in your career so far?
Totally. It feels really strange now having spent the last year living with it. I’ve seen the album grow and it’s weird that it’s out of my hands now and out in the world. I’m mostly excited because I’m super proud of it and I feel like it’s turned out just how I wanted it to be.
I’ve been watching the video for your single ‘Blame’, which is set in Iceland. The sparse beauty of the landscape there seems fitting for your music in general, don’t you think?
It’s crazy beautiful up there. We were wanting to capture an epic scene from a film, and I think the video conflicts being caught between love and lust, and the danger of putting blame on other people, or blaming yourself. The whole idea was to make it really ambiguous so people are left wondering what happens and you get a different idea each time.
The album follows I Swore, your EP from last year, which really showcases your voice and song-writing ability. Is it a good primer for the album?
I think I Swore is definitely a good introduction, sonically, for the album and that’s why it was important for me to put it out, as I felt it was showing a different direction. I got such a good reaction and so much support from it that it made me look forward to the album coming out even more.
Both the I Swore and Elsewhere were produced by Rodaidh McDonald (who’s worked with The xx and King Krule amongst many others). How important is he to your music?
I think he’s brought a lot out of me that no one else has done before. When we met he helped with ideas for songs and I felt really safe creatively with him. When we work together I feel we’re bouncing off each other. Like with the song ‘I Swore’, the demo was shorter than the version you hear now. He pushed me to make the song better and I felt like he was that extra 30 per cent that pushed my songs and everything to what it is now.
Another champion of your music is Ben Drew (Plan B), who produced your 2013 EP The Lake, as well as co-producing ‘Blame’ and ‘Feeling’ on the new album. What does he bring to your sound?
I feel every time I work with him he surprises me even more. He’s so underrated as a producer. With the last song we put on the album, literally a week before I handed it in it was just this demo. We got in with Ben and he had all these ideas that really made me excited about the album again. I really value his opinion on just about anything really. Even as a mentor he’s really important.
You’ve done quite a lot of work with other artists, collaborating with the likes of SBTRKT on single ‘The Light’ and the track ‘All I Need’ by Astronomyy. How do collaborations help you creatively?
I really like working with people outside of what I do because I think it makes me a better songwriter. The song ‘All I Need’ came about the first time I sat in with Rodaidh and we started working with Astronomyy. He has a really fresh sound to him with surfy guitars and hip hop and R&B beats. I feel he’s super talented and he’s someone people should look out for.
Will you be joining him at Field Day in June then?
Yes, I’ll definitely be at Field Day. I’ve been there for the last two years and this year the line-up looks really amazing. Before then I’ll be doing a show at Electrowerkz the same week of the release, so I’m really looking forward to that – last year I spent a lot of time supporting other people, and while it’s really amazing touring with other people it’s even better seeing how their shows work and taking inspiration for your own live shows. I’m really nervous but it’s really exciting to be playing new material.
You were born in Jamaica and came to Stratford when you were 10. What was it like when you first arrived, was it hard to adjust?
I wouldn’t say it was hard to adjust really, I’d been there for holidays about three or four times previously and I had relatives there already. I think I definitely identify more now with East London than Jamaica. Of course there were a lot of cultural differences, but I didn’t really notice them as I was really young.
And growing up in Stratford were you always musical?
I guess. When I was younger my dad was working as a musician in Jamaica and America so I experienced what it was like to be in a studio. And I’ve always been around instruments at home. I suppose my musical development started when I got my first guitar when I was about 12 in Year 7. It was where a lot of my first songs came from.
And what was your first song?
It was a song called ‘Changes’ I wrote when I was 12. I’ve got a recording of it on an old laptop and hearing it now it’s so crazy how different it seems. That’s why music is really important to me. I write about what I’m currently going through, what my opinions are, and I put that out in my music. There’s a song on the new album called ‘No Light’, which is one of the oldest songs on the album, from two years ago. When I wrote it I was in a dark place and when I listen to it now it feels so different, like it’s taken on a different meaning. Even already, I look back at some of the songs on this album and get a feel of the time I wrote them in, like when I was turning 20 and and dropping out of uni and having all these new experiences for the first time. I think that’s what’s the album’s all about.
Was dropping out of university a difficult time for you? How did it come about?
To be honest it was just a bad experience anyway. I was studying songwriting and before, when I was just writing with no really kind of real method, it was just natural and I was just writing in my own time. I found that studying it, so you have to write so many songs in a week, just took the joy out of it so I had to stop. I think that’s the same for a lot of people. When you’re being told to write about four songs a week about this or that it all starts to feel tired and mechanical.
How were you discovered?
I started taking song-writing seriously when I was doing my A-levels. It was my last year but instead of focusing on my exams that were in a few months time I was more excited about the new songs I was writing and just wanted to get out there. So every week I was going to all these open mics and all these little gigs and that’s how I stumbled on the singer Clare Maguire. She saw me and asked me for my email. A couple of weeks later I was at her house making demos and we literally have the same manager now.
Listening to your first EP Saudade you can hear a lot of Bon Iver in there. Who are your big musical inspirations?
I feel like the staple ones are Bon Iver, like you said, then Lauren Hill, Feist and Kanye. These people to me are artists in the sense that they are people who are super uncompromising and write music for themselves. I think a lot of people get lost jumping on a trend and trying to create a ‘moment’. I think the main thing is to make yourself happy. That’s what I try to do every time.
What’s the next step for you and what are your ambitions?
I’m not ambitious in a traditional way. I’m not the kind of person to be like ‘I’m going to go after that Grammy’. I think in a sense what’s important for me is to keep growing as an artist and as a songwriter, get better in the studio, be more comfortable trying out different instruments, and more confident as a performer. After these first few shows hopefully I’ll do a few festivals, then hopefully write again, get into the studio and work with a few other artists. That’s the idea.
Denai Moore plays at Electrowerkz on 9 April. Elsewhere is available from 6 April denaimoore.com
Hannah Moss in So it Goes at Iron Belly, Underbelly Edinburgh. Photograph: Richard Davenport
The journey towards Hannah Moss creating her critically-acclaimed debut theatre show started the day her dad died. For many years she was unable to verbalise or even acknowledge the grief she had suffered, aged 17, when her father passed away.
At university she had tried to write a play about the experience, but couldn’t quite find her voice. She wanted to go into the theatre professionally but wasn’t quite sure about how to approach that either.
Through her collaboration with fellow theatre maker David Ralfe and a chance encounter with a production at the Edinburgh Fringe she finally found the language to express herself.
Almost entirely without the spoken word, So It Goes tells the story of Hannah coming to terms with her father’s death. Revelling in his eccentricities and recounting fond memories, the narrative unravels through mime, movement and a mini whiteboard hanging around Hannah’s neck. “I’ve become very good at writing upside down,” she says.
The play’s title is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In the novel, death is always followed by the phrase ‘so it goes’, acknowledging it as a natural part of the cycle of life, with the same reassuring tone we might recognise in ‘c’est la vie’.
The first time Hannah spoke properly with her mother and family about her dad was after the show’s first performance. Referring to scenes in the play they found they could finally ask one another how it felt when certain moments occurred. “It was like there was this third thing to talk about,” Hannah says.
Through the prism of the play, Hannah began to communicate with her family, coming to terms with her own grief and now able to celebrate her father’s life.
Glowing reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe have prompted a national tour for So It Goes, which this month comes to Shoreditch Town Hall. It’s a tour which kicked off on Merseyside – where Hannah’s dad grew up.
Hannah has described the show as “my way of saying goodbye”, adding that: “It was fitting that Merseyside was the first show we did.”
So It Goes is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT from 8–18 April
Wendy (Nadége René) in Politrix. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
In the Big House Theatre’s latest play Politrix, the embers of the London riots are still glowing.
This punchy piece of theatre, directed by Maggie Norris, explores the widening gulf between the halls of parliament and a swathe of inner-city youth once branded a “feral underclass” by its members.
With the exception of Ben Lambert who plays Conservative politician CJ, all the cast members are part of Big House Theatre’s 12-week drama programme aimed at getting care leavers from the ages of 18-23 involved in theatre.
The plot follows a Tory MP dragging a group of six young people on a whistlestop Westminster tour. Verbatim recordings of the cast’s own trip to the House of Commons are woven into Ben Musgrave’s script, making their voices audible above the legislators that claim to speak for them.
Determined to use the occasion to her advantage, Monroe (Camilla Ferdinand) asks CJ for help in getting her brother out of prison where he was sent for being present at the scene of a gang murder – a joint enterprise conviction.
He dithers before declining. “You saw me come in here with my bag of dog-eared papers and you thought: fuck”, she accuses him scornfully.
For Monroe’s friends, the environment of pomp and privilege is oppressive, and the halls of power morph into a dystopian house of horrors.
An ashen-faced Margaret Thatcher (another turn for Lambert, now in drag) rises from the dead and attacks Leo (Shane Cameron) and Wendy (Nadège René) for being a product of the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the welfare state.
Soldiers march past and security guards perform the rituals of stop and search. Authority is everywhere they turn. Respite is found in the chapel where kindred spirits lurk, suffragettes and revolutionaries, whose tales help to soothe the young friends’ jangled nerves.
With its concrete floors and high ceiling, the all-new Hackney Showroom is an ambitious space and the acoustics are tricky to control – ironic in a play about the struggles of being heard.
But the cast rises to the challenge and it would be hard to pick out a standout performance from the wealth of fresh young talent on display. From the entertaining Fizz (Auzelina Pinto) to the angry K (Moses Gomes-Santos), each character has formidable presence.
After the play I ask 22-year-old Kieran Roach, who gives an affecting performance as the quiet Rico, about the anger that runs throughout the piece. “It’s not anger, it’s frustration,” he gently corrects me, “frustration that we are not being listened to”.
Politrix gives a voice to those who were the collateral of the 2011 chaos. For politicians puzzling over how to build bridges with Britain’s youth it should be compulsory viewing.
Politrix is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 11 April.
Rich Mix is in danger of closing down and has launched an urgent petition for support.
The petition, which gained more than 5,000 signatures in four days, urges Tower Hamlets Council not to proceed with legal action over the repayment of £850,000, given to Rich Mix in 2002 for the refurbishment of its premises at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road.
If a court hearing, set for 20 July, finds in the council’s favour, Rich Mix could be forced to repay the money in one lump sum instead of in instalments, which according to its CEO Jane Earl has the potential to bankrupt the organisation and force it to close.
Commenters on the website change.org, which is hosting the petition, have overwhelmingly voiced their support for Rich Mix.
Londoner Michael Dollan said: “Rich Mix is a venue that encourages the appreciation and experience of a wide ranges of arts. Culture unites communities. It’s a no brainer, close it and step back in time to the days of heightened cultural division.”
Artist Amie Taylor added: “The venue has supported me massively as an artist and enabled me to earn a living when no where else would. I’m sure many artists feel the same.”
Earl hopes the petition will show Tower Hamlets Council that Rich Mix is more than a “fringe venue for minority interests”, and convince them to accept a settlement offer.
“We’d much rather that we settle the case rather than having to spend money on internal and external legal fees,” she added.
A spokesperson for Tower Hamlets Council, following an investigation by the East End Review last January into the situation, said: “The council considers that it would be inappropriate to comment on either ongoing litigation or associated settlement discussions. Irrespective of the litigation between the parties the council remains open to constructive discussions with Rich Mix over possible partnership funding.
“During these difficult times for local government funding and taking into account the council’s statutory obligations, the council must ensure that any further funding is appropriate, affordable and delivers value for the borough.”
Do you remember Ritchiemania? There was a time, nearly 20 years ago (seriously!) that the Guy Ritchie brand of cheeky Cockney crime caper successfully rejuvenated the British gangster genre and had the world spellbound – and for good reason.
Hackney’s Finest is clearly in awe of that cinematic moment. But while Lock, Stock and Snatch were a ‘Cool Britannia’ riff on Tarantino’s alternate dimension America, director Chris Bouchard’s first full length feature trades in on the infamous reputation of a real London borough, right down to a cringey namecheck in the final line. In part it’s an exaggerated reflection of writer Thorin Seex’s own observations of Hackney’s grittier side, but shot through with an endearingly silly vibe.
Things kick off promisingly enough; local smack dealer and all round reckless geezer Sirus (Nathanael Wiseman) has got himself a nice gig working in a cabbie’s office and dealing on the side (note: Hackney’s Finest gleefully treats drug abuse with all the gravity of having a Mars bar).
But things go pear-shaped when vengeful copper Priestley (played with snarling relish by Arin Alldridge) hatches a plot to stitch up our dozey hero. Holed up in a deserted warehouse in Tilbury Docks with two Welsh-Jamaican arms dealers (Enoch Frost and Marlon G. Day grappling with some truly ridiculous patois), an Afghan smackhead and his moody/deadly sister, Sirus and co. find themselves under siege from the bent feds and their private army of druggedup Russian gangsters with a fondness for European techno. Needless to say, a night of mayhem swiftly unfolds, all delivered with a knowing nod and wink.
For a low budget indie movie, Hackney’s Finest is a hell of a looker. Bouchard worked with Soho’s Framestore, the digital studio that put the fairy dust into Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar gobbling Gravity, and the results are frequently stunning. There’s a slick, crisp look to the whole affair that belies its homegrown roots, backed up by some nice moments of cinematography and punchy editing.
Sadly though, all the polishing in the world can’t rescue what, at heart, is a paint-by-numbers gangster knockabout that starts to drag far too early. On one level, Hackney’s Finest’s cast of 2D stereotypes is something of a love letter to multicultural London, but the substituting of real characters for bombastic accents soon starts to grate. It’s all a bit Borat, without the intelligence.
Then again, there’s really no point in getting po-faced about a film like this; it knows exactly what it is, and has no delusions otherwise. Bear this in mind and there’s a fair bit of fun to be had, from the gorgeous visuals to gunfights galore and a smattering of humorous dialogue. Just don’t be expecting Lock, Stock for a new generation.
Jonathan Kemp’s second novel, Ghosting – the follow up to 2010’s much-lauded London Triptych – is a sharp and pacy read exploring grief, memory and transformation.
Grace Wellbeck is a frustrated 64-year-old still mourning the deaths of her daughter, Hannah, and her hypnotic but violent first husband, Pete. Dreading a second nervous breakdown and plodding along with Gordon – Pete’s solid but lifeless replacement – on their London houseboat, her future is mapped out and bleak, until she meets Luke.
A 20-something performance artist caught up in a complex love triangle with his two best friends, Luke is a dead ringer for Pete, so much so that Grace fears she might be “losing it again”. Having tracked this strange apparition to a boat nearby, she finds herself on the receiving end of a warm welcome and stumbles further into a world far removed from anything she’s ever known.
Her unlikely collision with a misfit art scene gives Grace a vantage from which to consider her own existence; the journey that follows is impossible to put down.
Filling in the gaps of her current ‘crisis’ with digressions into the past – revisiting his main character as she falls in love at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, grieves in a mosquito-ridden room in Malaysia and at various other key moments over the years – Kemp gradually pieces together a life that rings quietly true.
It’s a moving depiction of how we interact with our personal histories and the way we might respond to serious trauma, always treading a fine line between the real and delusional.
While Kemp’s style is generally neat and succinct, it’s not short of the odd flourish, too: “Back on the boat she sits down in front of her make-up mirror, wishing she could claw her skin off; dig deep into her flesh and excavate the young woman buried there,” he writes. “The evening gapes empty ahead of her, a nest of hours like open mouths waiting to be fed.”
His execution is, at times, stunning – particularly when painting a distinctly lucid image of a squat party in Hackney Wick.
It’s no surprise that Kerry Hudson, author of the excellent Thirst, has described the novel as “a rare combination of insight, compassion and brilliant craft”.
She and Kemp share concern for literature’s underexplored people and both display a real knack for gripping the reader by the scruff off the neck.
With characters expertly drawn and real to a tee, Ghosting is an emotional ride through the decades to a present where direction and certainty are rare. It’s tight and, in a sense, as streamlined as the longboats moored up on the banks of the city – and that’s no bad thing. It’s about one unseen woman’s struggle, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to relate to it in some way; it’s a definite success.
Ghosting is published by Myriad Editions. RRP £8.99. ISBN: 9780956251565
Put together from scraps of cassette tapes and sound collages, you’d expect Daryl Waller’s debut to be one for the avant-garde. The 37-year-old decamped from Cornwall to Hackney to put the finishing touches to The Baby Blues, and in the process the eleven tracks took on their own lives. By producing the record he confesses his sound became “more song-like” and there’s no doubt the arrangements now take centre stage.
Spoken word still intermittently features in the haunting folk cuts, carried along with Waller’s hushed vocals. Employing double tracking in places, he evokes Elliott Smith, if only he’d swapped Portland, Oregon, for a damp woodland.
Themes of forestry recall places far away from the city, coming as no surprise that the album was partly made inside a wooden hut and despite being billed as lo-fi, the crystal clear production brings moments of beauty as string parts slowly burn over picked guitar lines.
Beginning life with stitched-up lines from film, ‘Gene Wilder’ develops into a hypnotic waves of psychedelic vocals crashing in between poetic lines before ending with a spoken word coda set over bird song.
Waller isn’t keen on spending too long on an idea, and opener ‘Take Me Anywhere’ proves that it’s of no artistic detriment. As he exhales his vocal delivery, it’s easy to become lost in the hypnotic orchestrations that throw the poetry into the background.
At just over two minutes long, ‘Shoad’ achieves much more than its length suggests. Starting life with a cascade of finger-picked notes, the later addition of dissonant stabs of strings, evoking the sound of sawing wood, serve to reinforce the rural themes of the record.
It quickly becomes clear that The Baby Blues is the result of a collection of abstract aural sketches developed into a gorgeously fully-formed record.
High life: The Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
Last month’s announcement that the Grade II-listed Balfron Tower in Poplar will no longer contain any social housing but will instead be sold as luxury flats put an end to speculation about its future that has been going on since 2010. But questions remain about its recent past, particularly around how more than 120 family-sized East London flats have passed from the social to the private sector without anyone being evicted.
For all that it is a gigantic and imposing concrete structure, Balfron is also delicate, with spindly, human-scale walkways connecting the service tower and main building. Six flats broad and one flat thick, it is endearingly awkward-looking; broad and slim, tall and squat, rough and rectilinear all at once. All bedrooms are on the eastern face, placed for the sunrise, with balconies to the west for its setting. Designed in the brutalist mood by British-Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger in the late 60s, it is touched by many such small elements of genius. The view is of London, from the Thames Estuary to Hampstead Heath.
For the better part of five years, Poplar HARCA, the housing association which owns the block, has maintained that the people who used to live there – social tenants who were “decanted” to allow refurbishment work to be carried out – might in theory be permitted to move back in. It stated several times that they “possibly but not probably” had a “right of return”.
This “right” wasn’t about law but about money: whether Poplar HARCA could afford to have any social housing in Balfron Tower. Until recently it was still unsure. In an interview conducted in January, Paul Augarde, head of Creativity and Innovation at Poplar HARCA, insisted he still did not know whether or not the budget for the Balfron project would have space for some social tenants to move back in. “It’s never great,” he said of what was then the possible total sale. “You don’t want to sell stuff.”
Poplar HARCA has a lot going for it. It owns and manages 6,000 social rent homes in Poplar and has built over 1,000 homes (social and private) in the last 15 years. It has refurbished all its social lets. It helps jobless residents into work, supports social enterprises in the area and even employs its own small police force. It persuaded Barclays to open the first non-charging cash point in the whole of Poplar and caused a bridge to be built over the four-lane East India Dock Road to connect estates together. It is making physical improvements to the area of a different magnitude to anything the council ever did.
Which goes some way to explaining why residents of the Brownfield Estate, of which Balfron and its neighbour Carradale House are part, voted for ownership and management of their homes to be transferred to Poplar HARCA from Tower Hamlets Council in 2007. But what has happened at Balfron is very different to what they actually voted for.
View from the top of the Balfron Tower. Photograph: Joe Roberts
In 2006, residents were sent a booklet about transferring to Poplar HARCA, two pages of which were of special relevance to Balfron and Carradale. Poplar HARCA would be contractually obliged to refurbish substantially both blocks, and two options for their tenants were proposed: they could remain living in their flats while the refurbishment was carried out, or they could move, as priority tenants, into new homes Poplar HARCA would build elsewhere on the Brownfield Estate. If they took the second option, their current flat would be sold privately to help pay for the project.
Poplar HARCA anticipated around 130 tenants from across both blocks would choose to leave in this first instance. Balfron had suffered from an historic lack of maintenance and anti-social behaviour was a serious problem. Many tenants took Poplar HARCA up on its offer; but many others opted to stay.
In other words, the sale of some flats in Balfron was always on the cards, but so was the prospect of social tenants continuing to live there indefinitely. This initial proposal, on which tenants voted, made no mention of a “decant”, permanent or temporary, nor indeed of any need to leave Balfron at all.
How did we get from this state of affairs to last month’s announcement that the whole of Balfron, now empty of tenants, is to be sold privately?
Crash
Poplar HARCA blames two things: the 2008 financial crisis and the refusal of planning permission for a “linked” proposal for several separate developments it submitted to Tower Hamlets Council. Approval of this proposal would have given it a solid financial resource and lowered its reliance on the sale of unwanted Balfron and Carradale flats to fund the refurbishment and other projects. Forced to apply for new developments site by site, and sell homes at post-crash prices, these flats became one of its few solid sources of money.
Since these events occurred, tenants have been “decanted” and the uncertainty of their “possible but not probable” return promulgated. If – from 2008 onwards – Poplar HARCA strongly suspected it would need to sell Balfron, why didn’t it just make a clean breast of it?
Paul Augarde argues it was simply communicating the truth of the situation, which was that Poplar HARCA did not know what was going to happen. “We were very straight,” he says. “If we’d given an absolute answer” to residents’ questions on returning, he says, “it would have been no. It would have been easier to say no.”
Decant
Poplar HARCA did not attribute the need to remove tenants in 2010 to the need to sell Balfron, instead citing a report which detailed safety risks to their remaining while work was carried out. It decided on this basis to “decant” all tenants. This makes sense – quite how people could remain in flats while their bathrooms and kitchens were renovated has never entirely been made clear. But the “decant” also meant that the sale of homes would from then on always be connected to the prospect of tenants moving back in, not to their being moved out. The question of the sale of homes would be framed around a “right of return”, not a “right to stay”.
This was the manner in which the issue was presented to tenants, who were briefed by Poplar HARCA at the end of September 2010 on the need to leave their homes. The briefing could have been clearer: “Up until reading about the process of decanting I thought we were going to temporary housing and then return,” says Michael Newman, a tenant of Balfron for many years. Printed communications, however, boded ill: “The document that I looked at was on the process of decanting, and it made no statement that I could find on returning.”
The omission caused such alarm that by October it was the subject of an FAQ on a fact-sheet distributed by Poplar HARCA. “Can I move back in when the works are complete?” was “one of the questions we just don’t know the answer to yet”, the sheet stated, before raising the prospect of selling more Balfron flats than originally intended: “We have had to re-think how we pay for the works.”
In November 2010, Newman wrote an eloquent and moving letter to Andrea Baker, Director of Housing at Poplar HARCA, asking if there had been a misunderstanding: “[I] see my flat, my home, as a safe haven with memories of my brothers, and an inspirational, poetic view that has helped me through very difficult times,” he wrote. “I have lived for the past few weeks with the worry of losing my home.
“I am writing to ask you to reassure me about my home and our community.” Baker wrote back the very next day. But she was unable to offer anything further by way of reassurance than the “possibly but not probably have a right of return” formulation.
“Right of return”, not “right to stay”
From 2010, Poplar HARCA worked with residents on relocating. Building work was (and still is) yet to start. As years went by, the realistic option for waiting residents was to cease to pursue even a moral “right of return”.
“I have been treated very well by HARCA in the decant and do feel gratitude for how they supported the move,” says Michael Newman now. He has resettled in Carradale House. “I am now happy where I live. I can see my old flat from the balcony of my new one, and I am starting a new life.”
So is Balfron Tower. Now that all tenants have been re-housed, physically and psychologically, Poplar HARCA has finally applied for planning permission for the refurbishment and has formed a partnership with developer London Newcastle to sell the flats.
What comes of all this? It’s astonishing that a social landlord started with the plan of refurbishing a listed building for its social tenants and found that it was able to do so only if it sold the building into private hands – while still being contractually obliged to carry out the work. Other housing associations may well be put off by this from pursuing such ambitious projects, and it is a shame, to say the very least, that Poplar HARCA, for all its achievements, could not set them a better example.
