UK housing crisis

My report about the Global Climate Strike on September 20, 2019, and, particularly, the protest in London, in which I applaud the young people fighting for their future, discuss the architects who were amongst the adults joining in, and ask what benefit there is in the criticism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion by some anti-capitalists.

I look at how Peabody Sales, the private sales arm of the giant housing association Peabody, has just launched a new development, called ‘The Muse’, at Amersham Vale in New Cross, with the private firm Sherrygreen Homes and Lewisham Council, where 80% of the homes will be for private sale. With breathtaking hypocrisy, Amersham Vale was stealthily twinned by the council with the bitterly-contested Tidemill site in Deptford, where campaigners — myself included — fought a long battle to try to prevent the destruction of a vital community space and environmental asset, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, and a block of flats next door, and where, moreover, the council has been trumpeting the number of ‘affordable’ homes that will be built, without mentioning how those figures are undermined by the number of private homes at Amersham Vale.

One year since campaigners – myself included – occupied the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council and Peabody, I look at how badly the council handled the occupation and the subsequent eviction, and ask if this and other campaigns have done any lasting damage to the fundamentally disgraceful ‘regeneration’ industry.

An article in defence of social housing – and calling for a massive project of building new council homes – on the centenary of the 1919 Addington Act, introduced by the Liberal (and later Labour) politician Christopher Addison, which established the UK’s first major council-led homebuilding programme.

I’m off to WOMAD for a week. While I’m gone, please check out ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, a really rather good documentary presented by the working class Tory stand-up comedian Geoff Norcott, featuring the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign.

My report about the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Summer Uprising’ last week, and, in particular, the significance of activists’ blockade of London Concrete in east London, as part of protests against the Silvertown Tunnel. This led to immediate arrests, unlike most of the group’s more theatrical manifestations in central London, and my conclusion is that, although the most remarkable consciousness-raising and political engagement has taken place over the last nine months via XR and Greta Thunberg, much more direct action is needed against polluters; for example, against the hugely environmentally polluting housing industry.

Marking 800 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook (and later on Twitter) from my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I cycle around London’s 120 postcodes, recording the fabric of the city and its changes, and which I actually began five years earlier, in May 2012.

Here’s the 25th chronological list of all my articles, covering the six-month period from July to December 2018, when news about Guantánamo was slow, and I became involved in the political occupation of a community garden in Deptford, in south east London, to prevent its destruction as part of a housing ‘regeneration’ project.

It’s exactly two years since the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people people died because those responsible for their safety – from central government to the local council, the management company in charge of the towers, and various contractors involved in its fatal refurbishment – prioritised cost-cutting and profiteering instead. As survivors continue to call for justice, and housing reforms to protect those in social housing, I join those calls, reflecting on how, across London and the country as a whole, those in social housing continue to be treated as disposable, whether through living in towers with unsafe cladding, or living on estates that continue to be cynically demolished as part of the ‘regeneration’ industry that is actually a tool for social cleansing.

Here’s a link to, and discussion of my recent radio interview with Andy Bungay of Wandsworth’s Riverside Radio, in which we discussed Guantánamo, and the housing crisis in London, and Andy played songs by my band The Four Fathers, about Shaker Aamer and Grenfell.