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ESTHER MENELL'S BLOG

Tag: Camden Council

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

25th January 2021 /

Not long ago, in a rather heated discussion about bike lanes, a friend who I had always valued for her good sense asked me, in all seriousness, whether I preferred cars to children.

It turns out that she is a passionate advocate of a car-free city, an idea which makes no more sense to me than the idea of a forest without trees.

Perhaps the fury that the whole bike issue engenders is some kind of displacement:  what we are really furious about is the turn life has taken through no one’s fault – or everyone’s fault, if you prefer that version – and yet, even as I say this, my hackles rise as I remember that particular conversation.

I had been lamenting the disruption caused by the introduction of bike lanes on the road where, in my cycling days, I had never felt a need to be protected from the rest of the traffic, and where now confusion reigns.

Left to right: pavement, bike lane (interrupted by zebra crossing), more pavement, more zebra, mysterious section of road with bike symbol (just visible) and, not visible (because a few feet to the left of the picture), legal parking bays between the bike lane and open road!

In their enthusiasm for thwarting the driver and prioritising the cyclist, the Council has lost sight of the needs of the pedestrian, as can be seen in the now iconic snapshot of an elderly lady sitting on a bench in the middle of a bike lane as she waits for a bus.  The Council had neglected to move the bench when they moved the stop.

Bench in bike lane (without elderly occupant)

What, I asked my friend, have these measures achieved except waste public money and raise a storm in the local press?  Instead of (or as well as) cars endangering cyclists, cyclists now endanger pedestrians, and if the streets were to become children’s playgrounds, wouldn’t their games be very different from those of yesteryear . . . ?   The cheerful little girl, hiking her frock up with one hand as she dances in the street is no longer among us.  Her great-grandchildren would not be playing hopscotch.  Not long ago, at the other end of our street, a boy was deliberately run over by his mates, in a stolen car. Kitchen knives are kept out of sight in the local shops.

Today’s street toys

To think that city streets were meant as playgrounds is on a par with town-dwellers complaining about the mud in country lanes.  Cities are cities. The only reason that little girl was dancing in the street is that she lived in a slum and there was no park nearby.

Much has changed since then.  The war created a lot of open spaces, and enlightened councils have provided many more.   It does not surprise me that the blocked-to-traffic side roads are deserted.  As I go for my Covid constitutional, I have never seen any children playing in those empty streets.

The way it used to be in some of the less prosperous areas of the city

No, I don’t prefer cars to children, but I do think that cars belong on the road and children don’t.  And though I sometimes think longingly of the years spent in a remote part of North Yorkshire, where you recognised every vehicle that passed, I don’t want or expect Kentish Town to resemble it. 

Londoners using what my father used to call ‘Shanks’s pony’

Like any reasonable adult, I think city-dwellers should use public transport or their legs whenever they can but, as one gets older, one comes to realise the very real benefit of four wheels and to dread the day when one will no longer be able to manoeuvre one’s ageing body into the driving seat, putting so much that is precious for ever out of reach.

As I fill in a Camden questionnaire on ‘traffic solutions’, and wonder why on earth they need to know my ‘sexual orientation’, I am also thinking, with some satisfaction, of the day in the future when the fit young things who spearhead the powerful cycling lobby will be old themselves (if they have survived the killing fields of Chalk Farm Road*) and may come to regret what they have done.

*In its wisdom, the Council has just introduced bike lanes on this road which is being used by all the heavy traffic serving a major building development scheduled to take six years to complete.

AND WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT . . . .

28th May 2020 /

. . . . that I would back away when our next-door neighbour reaches across the fence to hand me two brick-red eggs?  It is the  Greek Orthodox Easter and Bobby has been giving us two identical brick-red eggs for almost forty years.

And what about the other day when, taking it for granted that the sound of the bell heralded yet another unattended package, I opened the door to find someone standing there, hand-outstretched.  He must have seen the alarm on my face and, stepping backwards, put down the arum lily he had been about to hand me.   I don’t know which of us was more mortified by this encounter.

It is bad enough being frightened of packages but to be frightened of kindly neighbours or of the young medics, come to collect blood for some research project – the first and last people who have crossed our threshold for almost two months – is sadder still. 

I don’t feel good either about how impatient I get on finding yet another week’s supply of free food on my doorstep.  Can we get nothing right?  The Scottish government lets those registered as high risk know they are entitled to this life-saving service, but only sends to those who request it.  Here, these precious boxes are delivered willy-nilly, and I have spent more time trying to stop them than finding ways to get them to people who need them.

Conversely, who would have thought a time would come when I would have welcomed those erstwhile doorsteppers with their trays of seemingly useless bits and pieces?  How glad I would be now of more cleaning cloths and odd containers and rubber bands.  And how glad I am, too, of the small park at the end of our road:  little more than waste-ground forty years ago, when our then neighbour Tessa Jowell, who spent her weekends in the Cotswolds, referred to it, airily, as ‘a lung for the neighbourhood’.

Tended lovingly by Camden Council, this long-neglected open space – once made brilliant use of by Ed Berman* and his merry troupe  – now finds room not only for cheerful rows of daffodils, two football pitches and a playground but also a wild-flower garden and thriving orchard, planted despite the damage done to a previous stand of young trees, and showing serene (and let us hope not misplaced) faith in the essential goodness of man.

Perhaps, after all, we are ‘under the shadow of God’s hand’: this haunting phrase used by a reckless American Evangelical who flatly refuses to limit the size of her congregation.  More haunting still (where would I be, without BBC Radio 4?) the notion, picked up from a lady astronomer, that we are all made of nuclear waste or, more poetically, if you prefer, from the residue of burnt-out stars . . . .

*Founder of Interaction, the City Farm in Kentish Town, and much else.

FOR THIS RELIEF . . .

28th December 2018 /

A few days ago, as we sat talking with friends in our front room, I thought I saw something move in the garden.  No one else seemed to have noticed. But, as the leaves which half-screen the window seemed to be on the move again, I went to the front door and opened it, just in time to see a man doing up his flies as he headed for the gate.

This shouldn’t have been the shock that it was.   Not only is someone peeing against the wall of your house small beer in the wider scheme of things, but the rampant night-time economy generated by Camden Market leaves a nightly residue of piss-stained pavements as drinkers, who have started the night’s drinking in their cars*, unload, before getting back into their cars and driving home.

And what does Camden Council do about this?   Whilst tut-tutting, and even erecting a kind of retracting pissoir in the street (which is not always recognised for what it is, and is commonly misused as a waste bin) they go on issuing alcohol licences.

The culprits in this ongoing drama are, of course, male and the dirty deed is generally done under the cover of darkness, which is why it was so surprising, as we walked down the road in broad daylight, to come across a vicious spat between an angry householder and a passer-by.

The unfortunate passer-by had stopped to readjust her jacket on a spot where there was the residue of a puddle.  Convinced the young woman was responsible for this, the old lady, beside herself with rage, was beyond reasoning with.  We walked on and encouraged the young woman to do so too.

Tempers run high.  Until now, never more so than when, about thirty years ago, a ‘caravan’ of travellers arrived on a nearby open space.   Suspected of every violation of householders’ rights imaginable, the only misdemeanour with any foundation and the the one that, understandably, caused the greatest uproar, was their defecating in the street.

But where were they supposed to go?   And why did we have to go down to the Town Hall to ask the Council provide a portaloo?  They knew it took weeks to process an eviction order.  They knew that travellers have the same demanding bodily functions as the rest of us.

That crisis was easily solved.  But you can’t provide a portaloo for every rough sleeper and it was no surprise yesterday to see the trickle of urine that stretched from a makeshift tent to the pavements’ edge in our local high street.

Why on earth, when there is a housing crisis and there are people sleeping in the street, does the government not make providing public toilets – many of them sold off and converted into trendy work-spaces, even restaurants – a priority?

Rough sleepers would not be the only people to use them.

Some years ago, when I was living in a remote part of Yorkshire and my lust for do-gooding had no outlet, I signed up to talk on the telephone, once a week, to a group of old people who had no one else to talk to.    A wonderful scheme, but you needed the skills of a teacher to make it work.

All my five ladies – three of them Welsh and hard to tell apart – always forgot to to say who they were.  But it didn’t really matter when we got on to the subject of public loos, where they spoke with one voice. In the most animated session of my short career as a listening ear, each one spelled out just how far they now had to go when, as it does for rough sleepers – and the rest of us – nature calls.

George Bernard Shaw

I could not even get a word in to tell them that we ladies have George Bernard Shaw to thank for the fact that there were ever any Ladies’ Toilets at all.

 

* A practice known as pre-loading.

IN THEIR WISDOM

29th November 2018 /

In their wisdom, our Council have proposed introducing bike lanes – at great expense and with virtually no preliminary consultation – in a street* that doesn’t need and has no room for them.

 

Were the plan to go ahead, this non-arterial, non-shopping street, with its mostly pedestrian traffic, would not only lose its traffic islands (of inestimable value to the old and disabled) but there would be a stretch of road where cyclists and pedestrians would be SHARING THE PAVEMENT!

How did the Council come up with this preposterous plan?

To pretend, as they do, that this scheme would save lives is nonsense.  I was a cyclist myself for thirty years.  Cyclists are generally young and always fit.  The pedestrian traffic, on the other hand, consists mostly of pram-pushing mothers, often with a toddler in tow, or old ladies (like me) heading for the High Street with their shopping trolleys.

These are not people who can take in two streams of traffic at a glance or jump out of the way of a speeding cyclist.

One can only hope that the proposal bites the dust, as did a previous Council scheme, in the early seventies, to build a pedestrian bridge across this same road when there was nothing but an area of waste ground on one side of it.

The outcry at that time has saved generations since from having to climb up and down circular concrete ramps in order to cross from one side to the other.  The zebra crossing we got instead is all we ever needed.

If only Camden Council would spend the money they collect from driving high-street shops out of business on the homeless, whose lives really are at risk, instead of on a handful of cyclists.

 

* Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town West, London NW5

AND WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO?

10th July 2017 /

The title of this post, written a day or two before the events in North Kensington, has become horribly topical, but this was the question put to me, on my doorstep, almost half a century ago, by a Camden official.

What do you mean? Where would I like to go . . ?   He looked surprised that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

It took a few minutes to discover what had happened. And it took four years to fight off the Council.

It turned out the plan to re-develop the street I live in, where the ‘bijou workmen’s cottages’ (built in the late nineteenth century for railway workers) now change hands for over a million pounds, had been drawn up years before, but only passed for action at the tail-end of a meeting about CentrePoint, by which time no one was paying attention.

One of the proofs that they had not done their homework was the man with the clip-board’s surprise on hearing that I was not a council tenant, as almost everyone else was, but was buying the house (which then cost £4,500) with a Council mortgage.

And no, I did not want to move to Woolwich or Eltham or Thamesmead (nowadays it could be Gateshead or Birmingham).

But neither, to my shame, had I noticed that everyone from the other side of the street had already been decanted.

Somewhere, my husband has written of the learning curve that he experienced and delighted in after agreeing to give a course of lectures on the entire history of architecture. Every week he was tackling a new civilisation!   Well, this was to be my learning curve, for there is no more sedentary and back-room job than being a book editor.

Along with my two neighbours, the only other owner-occupiers in the street, we formed a Residents Association of which the Chairman was my next-door neighbour John, electrician and Communist Party member*; the Treasurer was Bill the builder, a working-class Tory; the Secretary, me.

For the next four years, I became a mix of pamphleteer and social worker. I learnt as much about the inhabitants of this street and the weaknesses of local democracy as R was to learn about entire civilisations.

The arrogance with which people are treated! For once in my life I was glad of my middle-class accent; also of owning both a telephone and a typewriter. Not everyone had the first, and no one else had the second. In fact, in my survey of every household, I found one house had no electricity, and the old couple who lived there preferred it that way. Arguing their case (they were the age I am now) was one of my more unusual assignments.

Looking back, I feel lucky to have had the chance to do something worthwhile: my proudest achievement was arguing the Council into allowing their tenants to move into the empty houses across the street and then back again, after the re-hab which took the place of wholesale destruction.

I am not sure that my fifty-year old son has such warm feelings about this period when I was often absent at meetings and endlessly pounding the street, with him in tow, distributing roneoed information sheets.

Not that I don’t have one or two unsettling memories myself: at one door, I was greeted with a diatribe about the Jews. The old man didn’t realise he was talking to one and I didn’t tell him. And there was the young couple, one of the few tenants of a private landlord, who were embarrassingly grateful to me for getting them out of his grip, but were later to abscond with some association money . . .  And then, to crown it all, by the time the long battle was over, our four local councillors had all left the area: one of them leaving behind him a house with an extra storey which still sticks out like a sore thumb, as no one since then has been granted planning permission for this most common of improvements.

You can’t win them all.   And how things have changed! If the street were threatened now there would be a galaxy of lawyers, architects, journalists ready to spring to its defence.  Meantime, the only topics that can be relied on to produce a torrent of e-mails are Litter, Parking, Noise and BINS!

Which is why I preferred the way it used to be, and fear for the tenants who are going to be decanted from their homes to make way for the development of our local Morrisons site (see artist’s visual below).

They will be told they can return. But no one returned to the other side of our street.

 

* When he retired, John moved out of London and sold his house to Tessa Jowell. But that is another story.

ON BEING A LANDLORD

10th February 2017 /

Forty years ago when Camden Council decided to pull down the street I still live in, I cobbled together a Residents Association and proudly proclaimed it was there to protect the interests of everyone threatened by the Council plans, except those who owned a house but didn’t live in it – that nefarious group, the Absentee Landlords.

Thirty years later I became one myself.

To get my son off the housing list, I bought a flat from a Right to Buy family who were selling to move out of London.  Two years later, my son moved out of London too.  I now had to sell or to let. I chose to let, and so became the old enemy.  But, curiously enough, it is still Camden Council that I am fighting.

Camden hates leaseholders the way we hated absentee landlords, who deserved to be hated, as I found when I did a house by house survey in our street. In the early ‘70s, there were still a lot of mini-Rachmans about.

But things have changed and at least some of us who, for one reason or another, own and rent out what was once a council flat, expiate our guilt by doing our best to be good landlords.

In my own case, I took the Council on to get them to pay the rent direct to me and not to my indigent tenant during an imbecilic government initiative to teach the penniless how to handle their own affairs.    P***, whose last address had been a doorway, asked me to do this.   I pretended not to notice what I suspected was a marijuana jungle another of my council tenants was growing in the bedroom, and helped yet another (but all the credit is due to her) start a vegetable garden in the back area, the produce of which she shared with the other flats in our entrance.

Which brings me to the entrance.

Five years ago – they must have time to waste or, perhaps, a friendly manufacturer they want to support – Camden notified leaseholders that they intended to install a new ‘entry system’. This meant replacing a perfectly good front door and set of ‘loud-speaker bells’, with the door you see below.  And we now have fobs instead of keys.

The cost of this door to me – the bill arrived the other day, five years after the estimate – is £1,290.  Multiply this by six and, Behold, a door which cost £7,740!

At the moment a numerate friend is looking over the figures for me: not because I can’t afford to pay, but because there are now many families throughout the borough who have bought their flats in good faith and been driven to sell their homes by these lunatic and inexplicable costs.

Something is wrong.   And it needs to be put right.

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