Great news on the Architects' Journal website this morning - Tower Hamlets' councillors have voted down the application to redevelop a huge swathe of the area between Shoreditch and Spitalfields, "against the advice of their own planning officers".
OK, so the opposition to the British Land backed scheme had some high profile supporters, and the campaign was led very professionally by the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust and historian Dan Cruickshank - but even so, this is a beautiful example of how the power and greed of property developers can be successfully opposed if people are strong, well-enough organised and sufficiently stubborn.
Looking at the scheme, it seems amazing it ever got as far as this - given that Norton Folgate is officially a conservation area.
But you only have to read the account, on the Spitalfields Life site, of an earlier, 1977 attempt to flatten the area around Elder Street to see how desperate the developers are to get their hands on this area
If they really need more office space, please, let them build even taller towers in the centre of the city, an area which can not be made to look any worse with its curious assortment of "statement" skyscrapers.
Anyway, read AJ's excellent article - everything you need to know is there. And then read the story in the Hackney Citizen, celebrating the victory but ending with the dark warning that British Land "will be back". Especially as it seems they have the full support of the owners of the land, none other than the City of London Corporation itself.
Spinning happily at thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, not wanting to stop
Showing posts with label Shoreditch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shoreditch. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Property jackals murdering the gay soul of London
There's a massive crime wave hitting London, and the chances are it's happening in a street near you.
All over the city, popular, cheap, accessible centres of community are being snuffed out, suffocated by rising rents and aggressive property speculators. Each day comes news of a new outrage. Last week, for example, we heard that the The Black Cap pub in Camden High Street is to close because the owners of the property want to convert the upper floors into luxury flats.
A little later that day - in that sort of newsroom coincidence that makes you want to scream out loud, what the fuck is going on?– we heard that campaigners are now having to fight to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which would - if anyone asked you - probably be the second LGBT pub you'd name after the great centre of all things drag in Camden Town.
I have fond memories of the Black Cap, spending a few evenings there with my dear friend Phil as she make her first steps into the lesbian world. I've never been inside the RVT but always enjoyed seeing the clientele milling around outside in minimal clothing of a summer Sunday evening as I made my grim way back from Cambridge.
In case you think they're picking on gays - well, probably not, but - who knows? Madam Jo-Jos in SOho has already gone the way of all lovely, anarchic, scruffy centres of joyous everything, to be replaced by wtf hideously expensive flats, god knows.
The sort of property developer we all suspect is doing these things is certainly the type who wants to attract clients who will not be best pleased by all-night partying, loud music and noisy, boisterous clientele emerging from the premises at 4 or 5 am in full voice.
To which the only possible riposte is, if you don't like noisy parties and antisocial behaviour, don't move into any of London's party districts. Instead, just buy a flat in a docklands high-rise or go to your natural habitat, the Surrey-through-Berks-through-Bucks stockbroker belt.
Early and sustained resistance worked at the Elephant and Castle, where the Ministry of Sound managed to overturn a planning consent for luxury flats close enough for the exhausted traders living there (if anyone would have actually lived there) might be kept wake by the booming bass of the dance floor.
But elsewhere pub after club after music venue has gone dark - whether in Soho, or Brixton, or Islington, they're all falling away. New Cross and Dalston and Deptford will be next, you can be sure.
Another place fighting for its survival is the beautiful community arts centre in Shoreditch, the Rich Mix, which is apparently losing its council funding. If that happens - and there's every sign a massive campaign will fight this one to the bitter end - then it takes little imagination to work out who the land will go to.
Similar developers are even planning the destruction of the very heart of London's music business, Denmark Streeet.
If, when that happens - and heaven knows what ghastly tribute to the music industry heritage they are planning to knock up there to keep the council happy - then we'll know it really is all over, won't we?
All over the city, popular, cheap, accessible centres of community are being snuffed out, suffocated by rising rents and aggressive property speculators. Each day comes news of a new outrage. Last week, for example, we heard that the The Black Cap pub in Camden High Street is to close because the owners of the property want to convert the upper floors into luxury flats.
A little later that day - in that sort of newsroom coincidence that makes you want to scream out loud, what the fuck is going on?– we heard that campaigners are now having to fight to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which would - if anyone asked you - probably be the second LGBT pub you'd name after the great centre of all things drag in Camden Town.
I have fond memories of the Black Cap, spending a few evenings there with my dear friend Phil as she make her first steps into the lesbian world. I've never been inside the RVT but always enjoyed seeing the clientele milling around outside in minimal clothing of a summer Sunday evening as I made my grim way back from Cambridge.
In case you think they're picking on gays - well, probably not, but - who knows? Madam Jo-Jos in SOho has already gone the way of all lovely, anarchic, scruffy centres of joyous everything, to be replaced by wtf hideously expensive flats, god knows.
The sort of property developer we all suspect is doing these things is certainly the type who wants to attract clients who will not be best pleased by all-night partying, loud music and noisy, boisterous clientele emerging from the premises at 4 or 5 am in full voice.
To which the only possible riposte is, if you don't like noisy parties and antisocial behaviour, don't move into any of London's party districts. Instead, just buy a flat in a docklands high-rise or go to your natural habitat, the Surrey-through-Berks-through-Bucks stockbroker belt.
Early and sustained resistance worked at the Elephant and Castle, where the Ministry of Sound managed to overturn a planning consent for luxury flats close enough for the exhausted traders living there (if anyone would have actually lived there) might be kept wake by the booming bass of the dance floor.
But elsewhere pub after club after music venue has gone dark - whether in Soho, or Brixton, or Islington, they're all falling away. New Cross and Dalston and Deptford will be next, you can be sure.
Another place fighting for its survival is the beautiful community arts centre in Shoreditch, the Rich Mix, which is apparently losing its council funding. If that happens - and there's every sign a massive campaign will fight this one to the bitter end - then it takes little imagination to work out who the land will go to.
Similar developers are even planning the destruction of the very heart of London's music business, Denmark Streeet.
If, when that happens - and heaven knows what ghastly tribute to the music industry heritage they are planning to knock up there to keep the council happy - then we'll know it really is all over, won't we?
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Why won't 'pop-ups' lie down and die?
Every day, a new one, a word or phrase that has become hideous, repulsive, vomit-inducing, tedious, or just plain boring, its meaning now perverted or worn-away, thanks to its over-use or abuse for nefarious profit-hungry motives, or simply thanks to the objectionable way it is being used or abused:
Today's worn-out word or phrase that hit that spot: "pop-up"
Six or seven years ago, there was suddenly talk of pop-up shops. For example, a sale of street artists' work, including Banksies, in an empty clothes shop on Oxford Street, or someone flogging pulled-pork sandwiches to hungry clubbers in Shoreditch or hand-crafted cup-cakes somewhere in Bethnal Green. Whether or not it started in East London, this was the zone that jumped on, over-supplied and over-flogged the pop-up concept.
So we had years of pop-up art galleries, pop-up theatre or cinema, and for a while it was fun.
Then, come 2009, it became stale, at exactly the point all the advertising agencies and marketing geeks and brand-builders and media bullies realised that "pop-up" was where the money went. From being stale, pop-up quickly became rancid, it started to stink.
And now middle-aged couples in Lincolnshire are visiting pop-up coffee shops in half-empty shopping malls. BBC Radio 4 has Pop-up Ideas.
Pop-up is dead, but it will not lie down.
It keeps popping up, more and more, and is now more annoyingly popping-up than any of the ghastly Punch and Judy pop-up puppets.
Please, if you are tempted to join this battalion (or shooting gallery, or fusillade?) of popping-up people, just reconsider, or think of a new and better way to describe what you are doing.
Like, temporary, or short term. Short-let, squatted, alternative, hippie, punk, slacker, occasional, one-off, etc.
Flash-in-the-fucking-pan, perhaps.
A surprise!
A Mushroom mushroom stall - it just pops up occasionally. Shrooms all round for that.
Pop-down?
Pop-but-pop-very-softly so-as-not-to-wake-the-old-people-next-door?
Pop out to pull a nice young man with a a lovely co-star hair-do?
Pop, pops? Poppy? What, opium poppy? Is it all a drugs conspiracy?
We should be told! We must be the first to know! We will pop your bleeding weasel, mate! matey!
So - is a pop-up an expired quantity?
Yay!
Or, Nay!
Or possibly - Neigh!
Answers on a post-it. Note.
Today's worn-out word or phrase that hit that spot: "pop-up"
Six or seven years ago, there was suddenly talk of pop-up shops. For example, a sale of street artists' work, including Banksies, in an empty clothes shop on Oxford Street, or someone flogging pulled-pork sandwiches to hungry clubbers in Shoreditch or hand-crafted cup-cakes somewhere in Bethnal Green. Whether or not it started in East London, this was the zone that jumped on, over-supplied and over-flogged the pop-up concept.
So we had years of pop-up art galleries, pop-up theatre or cinema, and for a while it was fun.
Then, come 2009, it became stale, at exactly the point all the advertising agencies and marketing geeks and brand-builders and media bullies realised that "pop-up" was where the money went. From being stale, pop-up quickly became rancid, it started to stink.
And now middle-aged couples in Lincolnshire are visiting pop-up coffee shops in half-empty shopping malls. BBC Radio 4 has Pop-up Ideas.
Pop-up is dead, but it will not lie down.
It keeps popping up, more and more, and is now more annoyingly popping-up than any of the ghastly Punch and Judy pop-up puppets.
Please, if you are tempted to join this battalion (or shooting gallery, or fusillade?) of popping-up people, just reconsider, or think of a new and better way to describe what you are doing.
Like, temporary, or short term. Short-let, squatted, alternative, hippie, punk, slacker, occasional, one-off, etc.
Flash-in-the-fucking-pan, perhaps.
A surprise!
A Mushroom mushroom stall - it just pops up occasionally. Shrooms all round for that.
Pop-down?
Pop-but-pop-very-softly so-as-not-to-wake-the-old-people-next-door?
Pop out to pull a nice young man with a a lovely co-star hair-do?
Pop, pops? Poppy? What, opium poppy? Is it all a drugs conspiracy?
We should be told! We must be the first to know! We will pop your bleeding weasel, mate! matey!
So - is a pop-up an expired quantity?
Yay!
Or, Nay!
Or possibly - Neigh!
Answers on a post-it. Note.
Sunday, 21 April 2013
In orbital love
After many weeks dithering, took the new (and slightly bigger) version of the old little train from Wandsworth Road.
A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.
The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes. These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.
Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).
But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.
Seemed.
Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?
Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.
Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.
It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.
So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.
The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.
By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....
Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.
A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.
The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes. These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.
Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).
But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.
Seemed.
Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?
Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.
Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.
It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.
So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.
The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.
By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....
Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.
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