The King's Cross land grab
WORKERS, MAY 2006 ISSUE
St Pancras International is due to open in 2007 – the London terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, incorporating the adjoining King's Cross Station. Works at King's Cross will continue until 2015. It offers the opportunity to redevelop the 67-acre site behind the station, the last large open space left for redevelopment in Central London. It is Europe's biggest construction project, and the site of an attempted land grab that will devastate local communities and tenants.
The area is characterised by high unemployment and almost Dickensian conditions of overcrowding and crime. Victorian homes, bulldozed to make way for the railway, were replaced by mean tenements, which in turn gave way to council housing, which today's Labour government is reluctant to maintain.
For the past 20 years, tenants have scrutinised plans for their estates. Rightly suspecting the greed of capitalist developers would prevail unless challenged, they asked their representatives, the King's Cross Railway Lands Group, to draw up alternative, community-friendly plans, working closely with the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London.
These plans have been largely ignored, and 23 community groups have accused the main developer, Argent St John Ltd, of breaking its promise of balanced mixed development, instead putting big business and profit before the needs of local people.
Residents said 3,000 new homes were needed. Camden Council, faced with thousands of families demanding a home, had promised 50% of the 1,946 homes eventually included in the £2 billion scheme would be "affordable" (a low proportion – but the percentage given in the Mayoral London Plan). Yet following a packed Town Hall meeting in March, Camden voted in private not to send Argent back to the drawing board, but to accept 42%.
Under Argent's plans, only 338 of the homes will be for families. The rest will be single lets for commuters coming in to work in the corporate high-rise offices which will dominate the area, shading the Regent's Canal, which the Mayor had promised to protect; 650 are described as "student units"– minuscule, presumably.
Rents are conservatively estimated at £100 a week, but the reality is that young people in Camden – as in many other inner cities – already either have to live with their parents, or be prepared to spend a whole month's wages on privately renting a one-room flat. Rents and house prices are hiked deliberately to displace working-class communities.
There is no mechanism in the plans to reduce local unemployment or significantly encourage social cohesion; 116 local small and medium-sized businesses have already lost their premises, displacing 2,000 jobs. Argent is offering just 10 affordable busi-ness units. A unique industrial and histo-rical heritage will also largely disappear.
Argent's Transport Assessment has also been denounced as inadequate. With rising numbers of workers using King's Cross on a dangerously overloaded tube system, residents want the reopening of the Piccadilly and North London Line stations. All that has been offered is a commitment "in principle" to improve bus services.
Campaigners have gained some improvements on the original offer, which was for even fewer homes. Some architectural heritage will be preserved. There will be limited sports facilities and green space, and a new primary school.
But Camden secondary schools are desperately oversubscribed, so residents are angry that their request for an extra secondary school has been rejected. They also want an Olympic-sized pool; elsewhere in the borough, swimming pools are being run down and closed.
Instead, Argent plans 120 retail outlets, rock venues, and a casino, saying that without such facilities, London would be "losing business from French, German and Japanese companies". It dismisses local people as a "minority impeding progress", threatening them with "no jobs, money, or improvements'" unless they accept the plans as part of an "international mix".
Campaigners have vowed to fight on – housing is a fundamental right. But who will listen? The council decision is said to have been swayed by pressure from four cabinet ministers, the former leader (now created a dame for implementing Blairite policies), and the current leader. Labour calls Argent's plans "the best deal in London". And they have the Mayor's 24-hour international business policy stamped all over them. Hardly surprising that the Mayor has rejected an appeal. It will now go to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and there are calls for a full public planning enquiry. Camden is considered to have lost its nerve under pressure. The argument has not yet been won, and there is time to take advantage of splits in Labour ranks prior to local elections, when councillors will worry about votes.