London housing crisis – Peckham fights back

Hundreds of people marched through South London, protesting against a huge housing development which will make profits for big developers but do nothing to solve the housing crisis. Similar housing projects are springing up across London, reports Colin Wilson.

Peckham, in the south London borough of Southwark, is a multicultural area where 4 out of 10 children live in poverty and 18,000 households are on the the housing waiting list. So there’s a desperate need for secure housing at genuinely affordable rents – for Council housing. Instead, property developers Berkeley are moving in.

Berkeley has bought the local Aylesham shopping centre – they plan to knock it down and replace it with 16 towers, including 867 homes. Only 77 will be ‘affordable’ – and that’s by the government’s definition of ‘affordable’ as 80 per cent of the local market rent, which is beyond the reach of most people on low incomes.

The campaign against the development is led by SHAPE, Southwark Housing and Planning Emergency, a coalition of 14 local community groups. Siobhan McCarthy of Aylesham Community Action, a SHAPE member organisation, spoke at a hundreds-strong rally at Peckham Square on Saturday. Siobhan, who has lived in Peckham all her life, called for a real process of local consultation and for housing that ‘fits with the Peckham that already exists’. She pointed out that the planned redevelopment process will take ten years, causing chaos for local traffic. Berkeley’s planning application is on the Southwark Council website – over 2,200 people have already objected to it, and Siobhan called on more to sign up.

David Parton, Labour councillor for the area where the redevelopment is planned, also spoke against the scheme, pointing out that the towers will block light to the neighbouring council estate. He told the rally that ‘you don’t fix the housing crisis by building luxury flats’. He’s right – but Southwark’s Labour leadership, like other Labour councils across the city, seem more interested in doing deals with developers than meeting local needs.

Protesters on Saturday marched through the borough, with lively chants including ‘What do we want? Council housing!’ and ‘No housing! No peace!’ The march’s route passed the huge redevelopment site at Elephant and Castle, where council housing has been replaced by ‘affordable’ flats sold by housing associations on a ‘shared ownership’ basis. The redevelopment – also backed by Southwark Council – has seen residents having to pay as much as £469 a month in service charges.

In fact, as a story in the Observer on 1 March highlighted, the housing redevelopments spreading across London fail different parts of the working class in different ways. If you’re on low pay the so-called ‘affordable’ flats are beyond your reach. But even if you’re on good pay and can just about afford a flat, they aren’t a good deal either. University worker Marco Scalvini bought a shared-ownership flat in a Southwark development, to find his service charge rising to over £650 a month, with a further demand for £3,000 to cover a ‘shortfall’. Part of the reason the charges are so high is that they cover services provided to owners of the full-price flats, including landscaped gardens and a concierge, which shared-ownership residents don’t get to use – they enter the block through a different ‘poor door’ on the street. The block is owned by Peabody – a housing association established in the 1860s to provide homes for the ‘poor and needy’, now involved in regeneration projects across the capital.

All across London, land owners and developers are making big profits from building huge towers, most of the flats not affordable even by the government’s definition, which create incongruous ‘little Manhattans’ around tube and rail stations. In Ilford, a low-rise neighbourhood in east London, the site of a Sainsbury’s store is to be transformed into a development including seven residential towers, the highest with 36 storeys. The former site of a B&Q store in Sutton, a leafy south London commuter suburb, is to be redeveloped by, once again, Berkeley Homes. Eight towers will be built near the town’s railway station, the highest with 21 storeys.

There isn’t even any guarantee that paying huge service charges will get you a good-quality flat. Scalvini says that his place is “beautiful”. But back in Peckham on Saturday, local resident Andrea told the rally against the Aylesham redevelopment that the flats were tiny, only just complying with minimum space standards. She pointed out that some of the bedrooms you can see on the plans are so small that only a single bed will fit in them.

And then there’s fire safety, highlighted by the role of flammable cladding in the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, in which 72 people died. Fire safety has been an issue in several Berkeley developments – at the Paragon estate in Hounslow, west London, made up of towers up to 17 storeys high, over 1,000 residents were evacuated in 2020 following expert advice about fire risks. Richmond House, a Berkeley building in south west London, caught fire in 2019 – it took only 11 minutes for the fire to spread so widely that the building was damaged beyond repair, due to what the London Fire Brigade commissioner described as ‘poor standards of construction’. When the inhabitants of the 23 flats approached Berkeley for compensation, they were told ‘we are not paying anything’.

After the Second World War, when over 3 million London homes were destroyed or damaged, the city was rebuilt despite the war’s huge impact on the British economy. Council housing was built on a mass scale – and to a plan which prioritised social integration, not a separation between rich people with a concierge and workers with a poor door. If there was the political will now, we could see good quality, rented housing built across London, controlled by local communities and meeting the needs of diverse working-class populations. The Aylesham campaign is part of that struggle, and deserves everyone’s support.