Discover London – before it's too late

Leadenhall Market

Some years ago, just as I was getting interested in photography, I took to going on Sunday morning photo safaris around London.

Some were to the more salubrious areas, some to where visitors mass and others still to streets and alleys that will not be likely to find themselves on the tourist trail.

Quite a few of these came as a result of an informal online photographic project: each week, the person organising it would set a place as a subject and those who wanted to participate would go, snap away and then share their efforts.

It was interesting to see how different people saw and approached the same subject, and it also provided an opportunity to discover parts of the city one might not otherwise ever come across.

I hadn’t thought about this for some time, but was reminded of it this morning by seeing #DiscoverLondon trending on Twitter.

‘Yes,’ I thought: ‘discover London before it’s too late.’

Falkirk Street, Hackney

There’s not been a time since I moved to London in 1988 that there hasn’t been construction work going on somewhere. But in recent years, in almost every direction, the skyline has become a forest of cranes as development and redevelopment have surged ahead.

Now I want to be clear that I have no aversion to modern architecture per se – I’ve enjoyed quite a few rambles with the camera amid the steel and glass, but what’s happening now is not the stuff of good or interesting new building.

Crypt window, Christ Church Spitalfields

This blog has previously touched on the boom in high-rise towers that are soaring above us. Some of them are interesting buildings. Some – and I am thinking particularly about the ‘Walkie Talkie’ – are simply hideous.

But even that is not the point. The gentrification of London – and it’s happening elsewhere too – is getting dangerously out of hand.

There’s a human cost to this: it’s a form of social ‘cleansing’ that has been discussed far and wide. The cost of housing long since became ridiculous – it’s now a question of

St George's Garden

needing to find over £400k for a home in the capital.

In September last year, it was reported that the average cost of a home in London was £515k. It’s £272k in the rest of Britain, which is hardly cheap.

Wages have not risen to the extent that most people can get a mortgage for three times their annual income that will buy them such a home. How mortgage lenders are, therefore, getting around this, I do not know, but it can hardly be sensible and sustainable.

Off Middlesex Street

There’s another aspect to the gentrification, though: it’s producing a city where character is disappearing as fast as the developers move in.

Denmark Street – our Tin Pan Alley – is earmarked for replacement with the anodyne. Norton Folgate, in the City, is under serious threat too. Soho is having its soul stripped out.

Many other areas are going the same way.

In Brixton just this last weekend, there was a demonstration against what’s happening there, with communities feeling that they’re being forced out by redevelopment and rising prices.

Change Alley

The situation is, however, complicated by

certain factors.

Broadway Market, just around the corner from me, has undergone a revolution in the last 12 years or so.

Moving into the area two decades ago, it was three quarters derelict, usually with hardly a soul around and not enough shops to buy the ingredients for a meaningful meal.

As illustrated previously, in a lengthy interview with one of the very few traders who had survived those desolate years, the growth of supermarkets had been a factor in that decay.

Pearly king at Covent Garden

A piece of local graffiti was memorable because it was accurate: “Broadway Market,” it declared: “not so much a sinking ship as a submarine.”

As the street started to revive, some locals complained. Yet apart from some dastardly dealings by local developer Roger Wratten by name rat by nature, it’s not been a case of losing much.

The street is always busy now – which also means it’s a bigger employer – is a darned sight more pleasant (even with the hipsters and more wheelie toys than Hamleys on a Saturday), and has enough of a range of independent shops that you can actually do most of your shopping there.

No, they’re not the same sort of shops, but since the majority of those who had abandoned the street for Tesco all those years ago had shown no sign of coming back, the shops are catering to a different, more middle-class market because that’s how they’ll survive as businesses.

Princelet Street

Those who complained that there shouldn’t have been any market on Saturdays, on the grounds of gentrification, never had any alternative plans to revitalise the street.

Similarly, you see something similar when dozens of people suddenly turn up to protest against a local pub shutting, having not bothered to give it any custom for years, if ever.

In other words, the issue is neither entirely straightforward nor bad per se.

But the problems don’t stop with regeneration. As has been seen across London, rising rents then further push the small independents out, to be replaced by franchises and chains.

Coronet Street

Think Leadenhall Market – a glorious building, tragically sanitised as hiked rents drove out the

likes of a fabulous fishmonger, a poulterer and a butcher.

Think Borough Market – revived to foodie heaven, but now becoming ever more a vastly over-priced stop on the tourist trail.

London is in danger of becoming simply a sort of theme park for those passing through.

So do #DiscoverLondon: look up above street level when you’re on foot: even Oxford Street is interesting when you gaze above the shop fronts. Look at the street art too – some of it can be fascinating and adds to some otherwise dour areas.

Postman's Park

Find out about some of the places where the photographs here were taken. Maybe even go and have a look at some of places they were taken in.

We have a fascinating city. So take a little time to discover beyond the bland and the corporate and the soulless.

And take any opportunity to look a little deeper, if you discover that an area is being scheduled for redevelopment.

Let’s all attempt to ensure that London – and all our cities and towns – are not rendered devoid

of any character by those who have no interest in them other than as money machines.

Look before it's all gone

And don’t forget that local businesses will only survive if we use them. Don’t go crying outside that pub or that butcher or that library when its shutters go up for the last time if you’ve never crossed the threshold in the past decade.

All photographs copyright.

• You can follow @londonerwalking, @SpitalfieldsT and @createstreets on Twitter to find out more about the city, its history, regeneration and development.

Marketing at its brightest: the towering twaddle edition

What could be loosely termed as ‘my’ day-to-day patch in London is largely defined by the bus journey that takes me between Hackney and the area around Euston and King’s Cross.

The latter has been a hive of building activity for some years now, but Haggerston is rivaling it these days, with almost frenetic redevelopment on Whiston Road, after the Kingsland Estate was finally torn down.

There is already ‘Silk House’ and ‘Velvet House’, next to another smaller block that has been thrown up on the site of just one more of the pubs that have been lost to flats in the last decade and a half.

And on the other side of the road there is going be far more of this vast development, which all goes under the banner of ‘City Mills’.

Passing, you notice site hoardings that declare, among the pictures of bright young things looking happily domestic: “Made for living”. Well, what a jolly good thing that will be, since they’re building flats for people to, err, live in.

It’s a fine example of marketing twaddle – but pales into insignificance beside what’s happening on City Road.

First, let’s start with the Canaletto London.

Yes. That’s right: the Canaletto, as in the 17th century painter of Venice.

You can call it 'Canaletto London' all you like ...

Most certainly an interesting-looking piece of architecture – and given that it appears to be taking rather longer to build than some other nearby blocks, the finished building might actually be of a high standard.

But really, just because it’s next to City Road Basin, which butts into the Regent’s Canal, doesn’t justify the suggestion of the Grand Canal.

“Extraordinary waterside apartments overlooking the City of London,” proclaims the website for this 31-story tower. Well, if you’re on one of the higher floors, obviously.

And it’s near “Tech City” too, apparently. Which is news to me.

I thought it was near Old Street roundabout.

It’s been with some relief that I have discovered that I’m not the only one who didn’t know there was anywhere in London called “Tech City”. But we’ll come back to that.

Just a few metres away, the Lexicon London is taking shape in an upwardly fashion. It’s going to have 36 floors, making it the tallest building in Islington – at least until the planned 39-storey one goes up a five-minute walk further down the road.

“It’s the place from which to write your own life story,” wibbles the website.

“The one, two and three bedroom apartments take their inspiration from the culture and landscape of Lexicon’s location.”

I’m not sure that scruffy and run-down interiors are going to sell very well. Will rooms come complete with the smell of traffic fumes too?

The Eagle – also on City Road – is going to be “Art Deco inspired” and, like the Canaletto, will include a residents’ private cinema, a pool and god alone knows what else.

The Caneletto will have a restaurant too, so you won’t even need to cook in what will be, judging by the architects’ computer-generated images, your rather bijou kitchenette.

... but being next to this ...

We may not have gated communities yet, but you won’t need that with such developments.

Not far down the road, the Link is already complete – and is really rather disappointing, given that it was apparently “designed for stylish living”. Surprisingly, it never mentioned the stunning views over the next-door carpark, which is on the site of an old workhouse.

Another block nearer Old Street roundabout that’s well on the way has diamond-shaped windows set in steel cladding – which would probably do your head in on the morning after the night before.

The gobbledegook isn’t limited to developers, though.

According to the London Evening Standard: “The eastern side of the canal basin falls into Hackney borough and has a grittier feel. This is where Jamie Oliver opened his Fifteen restaurant, giving apprenticeships to out-of-work youngsters. Shepherdess Walk is one of the best addresses, with authentic lofts available at The Factory, a decade-old development by Manhattan Loft Corporation. Urban Spaces is selling a 1,481sq ft loft for £945,000.”

Haggerston is so cheap by comparison! But Shepherdess Walk – “one of the best addresses”? Is that complete with the bits of workhouse wall still visible around the carpark? Or is it because of the cop shop?

Seriously, though – how the hell do you get a sensible mortgage for nearly a million quid?

... does not have anything to do with this ...

The old rule of thumb used to be that you didn’t go above three times your annual household income. 

So whoever buys a loft apartment like that should – to be sensible – need to be earning £315,000 a year.

And don’t forget that the average UK wage is around £26,500, according to the Office of National Statistics, while employment agency Reed suggests that the average salary of someone in “strategy and consultancy” is £56K.

In the “media, digital and creative” industries, Reed lists the average annual income as £34,553. A software developer is listed as having an average salary of £44,050.

“Tech City” is nearby, remember.

Who is buying – and going to buy – these properties at such prices and how?

Shepherdess Walk – one of "the best addresses"

Either there’s been a substantial rise in the number of people earning vast salaries or financial institutions are playing the very same games that helped to cause the financial crisis in 2008.

And it is not the former.

London is already crowded, and even the Financial Times has recently carried a piece expressing fears for the future of our green spaces amidthis development madness.

The extra infrastructure is not there – and Crossrail and yet more bleeding supermarkets do not count.

Indeed, local infrastructure is going as the developers move in. As just one small illustration, on Kingsland Road, just around the corner from the nonsense that is ‘City Mills’, a dentist’s surgery and the pub next door have both been demolished to make way for more blocks of flats.

Next to Euston, the community around Drummond Street is threatened by the high-speed rail link to Birmingham (which scheme has both pros and cons about it).

The Link: "stylish living". No. Really.

Camden Lock, with all it’s small, independent businesses, was under threat from that too, but the plans are shifting.

While further afield from ‘my’ patch, Soho is undergoing massive change as the developers waltz in and completely change it’s character with, apparently, the acquiescence of council and police, as Rupert Everett suggests in a remarkable article.

According to Everett, plans are afoot to build huge towers topped by helipads on Walkers Court – after knocking down the houses, of course. The London Evening Standard and assorted architects are merrily trilling about cleaning up one of London’s last “seedy areas”.

Oh yes, the whole city is being sanitised in a puritan’s wet dream.

One visualisation of what might happen to Walker's Court

Denmark Street – Britain’sTin Pan Alley – is also under threat.

Consolidated Developments claims that it “will bring the site next to the new Crossrail station back into use with new shops, a hotel and the regeneration of Soho’s Denmark Street.”

They seem to have conveniently forgotten that it is not currently out of use. And you can bet your bottom dollar that most of the new retail outlets will be too expensive for most small, independent businesses.

The company also says that “a new urban gallery space will celebrate these [musical] links” and “recreate a music quarter for London”.

More verbal diarrhea, intended to calm criticisms of this gutting of the area.

Over at Broadwick Street, Cowling & Wilcox, theart shop that has traded there since 1961, ceased doing soearlier this year, having been priced out by landlord Great Portland Estates, which wants to demolish existing buildings and ‘redevelop’ them.

The planned 'redevelopment' of Denmark Street

It happened in the City at Leadenhall Market – oh, they kept the market structure itself, but rising rents forced the last, real market shops out years ago.

Now, it’s yet another cathedral to the homogenised blandness of corporate franchising.

On Euston Road, right opposite the British Library, there used to be a marvelous bookshop, Unsworths, full of second-hand, remaindered and antiquarian books.

It was driven out by a similar policy of hiking rents. As was a tiny – and very convenient in that area – convenience store a few doors down in the same Clifton House office block.

It took several years after those businesses were forced out to see what we were going to get – I suspect that that means that planning permission was rejected initially by Camden Council before being overturned by Eric Pickles, secretary of state for the biscuit barrel.

Computer visualisation of Clifton House, with hotel

Now, there is a new three-storey glass box on top of an initial six-storey building – which has become a new Premier Inn, and which is near enough to the next Premier Inn on the street for Usain Bolt to make it between the two in little more than 10 seconds.

Meanwhile, back in Haggerston, the word on Broadway Market is that our own dastardly local developer, the dreaded Roger Wratten By Name and Rat by Nature, has got his wayand will be demolishing the old Market Garden pub and replacing it – and the remains of Tony Platia’s old café next door (from which he was thrown outyears ago in highly dubious circumstances) – with a new building.

His initial attempt to get planning permission for a seven-storey block on the site, with restaurant at the bottom, was rejected by the council, so it remains to be seen whether he offered Eric a custard cream and that’s what’s going ahead, or whether there have been modifications to the plans, such as it not having so many more floors than any other building on the street or whether, as plenty of local people mutter, the council is just bent.

Around the corner, theplanned block of flats that was slated to go up, with office space below – inan area where there’s already plenty of empty office space, which then getsturned into another sodding supermarket, with the change in use requiring no furtherplanning consultation – is now being built.

I remain curious as to how that happened, since the council told me that the entire process had been abandoned after extensive local objections from residents and small businesses alike.

Under-construction and planned towers on City Road

Those businesses included some that have subsequently been thrown out of their premises by this development.

Since I had written to the council on that issue at the time and asked to be informed of any council meeting where it was raised, it is interesting to note that I have never received anything about the subject.

So much for local democracy in Hackney, it seems.

I am not against development and redevelopment per se, but it must have human beings at its core – and building vastly overpriced “multi-storey rabbit hutches” as Lucian would have described them in The Liver Birds, is not the answer to our housing problems.

However, I am against simply ripping the heart out of places – not just because of the arrogant disposal of history or even the dreadful, soulless homogenising that follows, but also because of the impact on small, independent businesses and local people who cannot afford the increasingly ludicrous prices for rent or mortgages.

Boris Johnson might have pretended to combust at the mere suggestion that government changes to housing benefit would ‘cleanse’ London of its more lowly citizens, creating Paris-style Banlieue outside the city proper, but all development, the trendification and the gentrification is helping to shove up rents and mortgages, and it will have the same effect.

How will the cleaner who wipes away the wine glass marks from the tables in the Canaletto’s private cinema be able to afford to live anywhere near their place of work?

Denmark Street – still in use

The whole thing is unsustainable insanity that has nothing whatsoever to do with the majority of the city’s people.

Somebody, somewhere needs to seriously start asking why a constantly growing London population – both residential and working – goes generally unchallenged as being positive or inevitable.

Why can not more businesses, in these times of digital communications, locate outside London?

Does “Tech City” really have to be lots of companies all physically based around Old Street?

Locating elsewhere would even provide boosts to local economies outside the capital.

How many more people do we need in a city that already struggles to cope – not least in terms of transport? What will be the tipping point?

In the meantime, while the developers hold sway, it’s small comfort to highlight the towering twaddle that they spout as they try to persuade people to line their pockets.

PS: I have not edited these bits of marketing nonsense: they seem, however, to share a common link of not understanding how to use a hyphen for a compound adjective. Just as the ‘City Mills’ people don’t understand what an apostrophe is.