The shadow of Canary Wharf

Here, in the shadow of Canary Wharf, the borough of Poplar and Limehouse, where these photos were taken, the percentage not being paid at least the London living wage is apparently 5.6%, the lowest in Britain. And that's a figure from the TUC.

So is this hooray for the benefits of trickle down wealth? Or is there some other way of interpreting this figure?

Last month, the TUC published a report on the UK's pay blackspots.  The link is to a Guardian report that highlights two of the very worst places in the UK for pay - and they happen to be just outside the North Circular Road. In the suburban London districts of  Harrow West (home to Harrow school) and in Chingford & Woodford Green (represented in Parliament by none other than Ian Duncan Smith), the percentage of working people paid less than the London Living Wage is greater than 42%.

I made a separate trip to Chingford and Woodford Green to find out what is going on there, but how are we to explain the low figure of 5.6% of people paid below the Living Wage in Poplar and Limehouse?

Well, that's 5.6% of the people EMPLOYED in Poplar and Limehouse not 5.6% of the people who live there. You see, dumped in Poplar and Limehouse are the towers of Canary Wharf. While some 95,000 LIVE in Poplar and Limehouse, over 105,000 people WORK in Canary Wharf.

Looking at my photographs of the working class estates of Poplar just in front of those towers, how many people living there do you think may actually work in Canary Wharf? Well a sure sign of that number being low is that I could actually move from my Brighton home into one of the flats seen in these images. Your average Canary Wharf worker may like the idea of a 10 minute stroll to wotk, but they do not want to do it from Poplar. Only a tiny percentage of those occupying those towers will be living in Poplar and Limehouse.

10 minutes to a different world...

As a related diversion, look what was written on the Living Wage in this issue of the Evening Standard....

"Despite London's economic boom, the recovery is not being enjoyed by all Londoners: low pay remains a significant problem. What is more surprising is the fact that pay rises are higher, on average, outside the capital. New figures show that over the past three years, pay here has risen by only half as much as in some regions."

That was a leading article on "Low-pay London" in the same newspaper on that same day. The leader finished "The capital's economy is booming again: low paid Londoners deserve their share." The Evening Standard wants London businesses to adopt a minimum Living Wage of £8.80 per hour.

But out there where it matters there is no sign of London businesses accepting a wage above the very minimum they can get away with - £6.31 per hour. There is no uplift on the national UK minimum wage for jobs in London.

This year the London Assembly published "Fair Pay: Making the London Living Wage the norm" quoting Boris Johnson as saying "I want the London Living Wage to be the norm in London.". The document is full of good intentions but unless legislated for, by making the Living Wage the Minimum Wage, this will never happen.

When London Transport outsources its cleaning work to companies that pay Tube cleaning staff less than the Living Wage, making those staff pay for transport to get to work (and travel between locations!) you just know that these words are just more populist entertainment from the Mayor.

A day out in Chingford and Woodford Green

Two facts:
1) This is a rock solid Conservative constituency, the domain of Ian Duncan Smith
2) This constituency has the biggest concentration of people being paid under the living wage in London, at 43% the second worst such 'blackspot' for low pay in the whole of the UK

Does that make any sense? I had to go to have a look.

A stroll around the Monkhams ward in Woodford Green left me in no doubt why this should be a rock solid Conservative seat.

Woodford Green Broadway - in colour

Monkhams Avenue - a fondness for mock-tudor hereabouts

Whoever was in the car had their audio at full volume. They spotted me taking the picture - and immediately turned it off

Neat gardens on Monkhams Avenue

Monkhams Avenue - Mock-Tudor and grand columns clash...

If the images look a bit Instagramish then it's because those are phone pics. Here are some proper black and white film images from my Pentax:

Woodford Green Broadway - this time in monochrome

The picturesque-in-all-but-name Potato Pond

Walking across the southerly splinter of Epping Forest that separates Chingford from Woodford Green is like entering a different world.

Chingford Golf Course is between Chingford and Woodford

It seems that Chingford is the natural home of the 'hard working family' beloved by Ian Duncan Smith. Perhaps, just as over the years the LGBT community and assorted slackers (like myself) have congregated in Brighton, people who want to own their own homes and are prepared to work long hours at low wages to achieve that end have assembled in Chingford. With Norman Tebbit as the previous MP for Chingford and Winston Churchill as a predecessor, perhaps an effect of having all these high profile names as incumbent MPs has been to attract more of the 'right sort' into the area.

Typical Chingford terrace - no doubt ex-council

Walking the Pomeranian

Typical Chingford semis

I am guessing that Chingford might be home to quite a few cabbies

No, not THE Guardian! But there was one on the shelf besides the towering Daily Mails

Take your shades to the Chingford United Services Club this Saturday.

Bread Pudding from Greggs, Station Road, Chingford

Spending cuts hitting hard.

Winston Churchill, bottom left. He was MP for Epping when Chingford was part of that constituency but will not have stepped foot in this hall.

End of the line - Chingford Railway Station

So why on earth, given these neat streets and what is a mecca for owner-occupation, does Chingford and Woodford Green pay its workers such lowly rates?

Well, many people living here clearly are very well paid. People getting on the train to their jobs in the City just half an hour away would escape local consideration contributing to the City statistic instead. I am guessing that there are a lot of self-employed in the area which would also take a lot of people out of the equation.

But for those self-employed that are themselves local employers, I suspect that many would be favourably disposed to the abolition of the minimum wage - they would laugh at the idea of paying the living wage. There may also be a tendency for the conservative elements (small c) to accept their lot and avoid organised labour, keeping local wages down.

Visiting a place like this makes me wonder whether the TUC low pay 'blackspots' have any relevance.  Once they once might have, but with people living in dormitory towns to go to their well paid jobs elsewhere perhaps it is far more valid to look at such statistics on a regional basis. But the TUC report and this Guardian article majored on the local statistics, perhaps for the very reason that they produce uncomfortable numbers.

Other curious details from my day in Chingford and Woodford Green:

 

There are very few pubs - I saw two in Woodford Green

The second was on Mill Lane - the Rose and Crown - after walking past this I saw none at all in Chingford

A real Post Office in Woodford Green - the main office in Brighton is downstairs in WH Smiths...

On Chingford Lane in Woodford, real council housing? Unlikely, but proper clothes lines and in the front garden too..

Finally, to underline this is big car territory, it was very difficult to cross the road - fences in the middle and on either side of the A104, Woodford New Road meant I had to walk a large distance before eventually finding a pelican pedestrian crossing to cross this single carriageway road. Here I had the longest wait I can remember for the green man to come up. Yes, it's different in Brighton with our dirty scraggy streets, but it does not take too long to cross them to get to the inevitable choice of pubs.

Final question. Could I afford to move to Woodford Green? Fat chance. Chingford, obviously ex-council - but this looks sweet http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-43802815.html?premiumA=true

Chingford

Today I am off to Chingford and Woodford Green, a place just outside the north western corridor of the North Circular Road.

A place in love with Norman Tebbit and Ian Duncan Smith, and curiously a place where 43% of people are paid below the living wage (for London it's £8.80 per hour), the second worst such blackspot for low pay in the whole of the UK.

What awaits me in this, surely the ultimate stronghold of the Tory working class?

The North Circular Fence

Two days ago I made the effort to get out to the North Circular Road at Brent Cross. For those unfamiliar with Brent Cross it is famous for...

Brent Cross Shopping Centre

I went by tube and subsequently travelled South upstairs on a bus and very quickly snapped the image that sits at the top of this blog. It's a rather poor image technically and I may change it one day - in case I do, it looks likes this...

I was not expecting to find that they have already fenced off the North!

A return to Kentish Town (dream on!)

Let's spell it out up front. I've benefited from getting into - and out of - London. Sufficiently to live a lifestyle from the age of 44 (in 2002) in which I have been able to do more or less what I wanted (albeit modest things!) and heve the freedom to do them when I've wanted to do them.

I still had to work, but did it for myself, latterly as a photographer. My family grew up. The two children completed school where we wanted them to complete school and went off to university. Most holidays were in our VW campervan.

This blog is not meant to be an autobiography but there will be references to personal stuff so it makes it useful to know the timeline. It looks like this:

1956: Get born in Rhondda Valleys. Grow up. Go to University in London.

1978: Leave University, become a nuclear physicist based in Derby, quit after 4 months

1979: Start working for Peat Marwick Mitchell (now KPMG) in London. Rent housing with friends.

1985: Spend two years working with KPMG in Toronto

1987: Return to London. Buy 1 bed flat in Kentish Town.

1991: Now married with one child, move to 2 bed flat in Kentish Town

1994: With second child, (you guessed it) move to 3 bed maisonette in Kentish Town

2000: Move to 3 bed house in Thames Ditton (Zone 6, so some would still call it London)

2002: Take voluntary redundancy (after 22 years with KPMG)

2009: Sell house, renting accommodation in Kingston area for 18 months before buying in Brighton where we are now.

The return to Kentish Town takes me back to 1987. Having spent two years living in Toronto and returning to London, I absolutely wanted to live centrally.  Property prices had more or less peaked but I did not know that at the time. Like everyone around me, I wanted to get on the property ladder and, before going to Canada, having lived in a room in a flat above the Job Centre in East Finchley for £51.50 per month, I had enough saved up for a deposit.

I was drawn to Kentish Town, home of the Town and Country Club (now the Forum) and the Bull and Gate, favourite live music venues that I loved and they were less than 5 minutes walk away. And they are still there today:

The Town and Country Club (as I prefer to know it!)

The Bull and Gate - a poster on the window said 'temporarily closed'

I took out a 95% mortgage sold to me across a desk by none other than Ray Boulger (yes he of John Charcol and the numerous TV appearance). I was firm about wanting a repayment mortgage and to his credit (despite the high commissions) he did not try and push one of those now-known-to-be-well-dodgy endowment mortgages. Had I gone that way the finances would have been well and truly screwed up by one of the first financial sector selling scandals. But still, Ray messed something up and it resulted in Charcol's halving their fees. I was probably kind to them because whatever it was probably cost me more.

But there I was with something like a £80,000 mortgage on a property I had bought for £84,000. Status wise, I was 31 years old manager - being away for two years I was making this move into property later than many of my contemporaries but I was there, in 76 Lady Somerset Road, Kentish Town - this is it today

Top floor flat now would be £300,000 - wall and fence flat too - bargain!

'Spacious loft conversion'

That one bed top floor flat has now been converted into a maisonette. In 2012 the asking rent was £1,647 per month. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/property-history/flat-a-c/76-lady-somerset-road/london/nw5-1tu/17684402

Zoopla now prices one bedroom flats on Lady Somerset Road in a range from £290,000 to £370,000. Crappy outside but smart inside is the way these places tend to be - had I stayed living in one bedroom top floor isolation, I would now be able to get £300,000 for the property.

So could I move back, to London, to this flat?

No. It's now a probably unaffordable maisonette. But, if it was still a one bed flat and if I wanted for me and my wife to move back to the street where we first live together, we could afford it, although it would swallow up a major chunk of our savings given the upward price differential between it and our four bedroomed, two bathroomed (count them) house in Brighton.

And of course this flat is tiny. With no back garden access. And with front 'garden' walls and fences fallen down (no change from 25 years ago!) it's a sign of what you have to live with as being quite normal when living in a leasehold flat in a shared building. All too often, nobody cares about the shared areas. Or if they care then they cannot afford to do anything about it.

Five years ago Zoopla tells me that the flat was worth £200,000. Then I could have swapped it for the Brighton home and had cash left over. But since then there has been a £100,000 gain on such one bed flats in the last five years.....

What does it take to live there now?

Well, a manager with a big 4 advisory firm could live there. With salaries now around the £60,000 pa level for 28 - 30 year olds, it would be possible. With a 95% mortgage, the 5% deposit would be £15,000.

Under the government's Help to Buy scheme the interest rate would be about 4.8% and mortgage repayments about £1500 per month. But with over £3000 per month flowing in this is apparently as affordable now as it was for me back in 1987. Or probably more so, since interest rates are so low.

But let's put this in proportion, it's way above what is affordable for a shop manager. Or a tube driver. Or a nurse. Even if somehow they could have saved up the deposit.

Does a fourfold increase in prices mean gentrification for Kentish Town?

There are very few signs of that - witness the state of housing on Lady Somerset Road and Kentish Town generally. It's still outwardly shabby, but when you live there you don't notice that, or put up with it.

What has happened to the area? Not much. The most noticeable thing for me is just across the Highgate Road and 50 metres from the flat - a burgeoning warehouse complex with Highgate Studios at the centre "A former Victorian warehouse and newspaper factory, now a creative workplace featuring character studio spaces, cafe and breakouts" - a breakout space is the new media buzzword for meeting room. Creative workplaces are all the rage as the London 'creative' and  'tech' industries grows and Kentish Town is pretty close to the centre of it all.

Kentish Town Meeja City

Or should I say Highgate Studios? Not much evidence of a Bond film being made

The pub one minute from our front door is now a gastro-pub called The Vine. And the pub at the other end of Lady Somerset Road, The Junction Tavern, is an even more up-market gastro-pub. Back in 1988 these were both regulation Kentish Town pubs where Irish accents were much in evidence. Not now....

Super posh gastro-pub  - The Junction Tavern

The Vine on Highgate Road

So, is there anything profound to come out of this visit?

Perhaps not. Compared to 1988, it seems that things are much the same. Salaries for your young urban professionals seem to have increased so that the property that I could afford in 1987 is still affordable now. To them anyway.

In fact, with low interest rates on offer and the Help to Buy scheme in place, it is salaries and demand for those salaries that have driven the property inflation. However, with the current low interest rates not being sustainable, there could be a shock to the system on the way, the same shock that I faced, leading to the reality of negative equity at the start of the 1990s.

But I suspect most professionals in London will find themselves cushioned.  In denying calls for financial sector reforms that would make the majority of us safer, the Government continues its support and the financial sector has the power to shape the London market to do what it must to survive, which includes keeping its workforce in their housing. 

From outside the North Circular, or at least the M25, it would seem that it is only a financial sector collapse that could correct the position so that we on the outside could buy into London again as we once could. But, I forget, we had one of those crises five years ago, and I'm pretty sure that it was the rest of the country that was made to suffer, not London.

The concept of the North Circular Wall

The economy of London, the prices of sandwiches, transport, beer and homes is now inextricably linked to the presence there of the financial sector and related service sector industries sitting alongside the wider establishment, press and burgeoning new media. 

Despite keeping all these people happy, there is another view on this.

Over the last 30 years, from the time I first moved to London from the South Wales valleys, Londoners have found themselves living together in an enclave that becomes more and more exclusive as its population gets wealthier and wealthier. But if things continue in this way, and the differential between London and the rest of the country escalates such that enough people outside London smell a rat, how will London react to keep out the pesky northerners and the like?

The North Circular Wall is a fiction that in a literal sense will never happen. But it already exists in the sense that many of those inside the wall want to keep others out and succeed. This desire for exclusivity is mainly at a sub-concious level right now, Boris would never admit to it, but it is the way things are developing.

Right now I’m not sure how exactly my project will evolve around new photographs I will take and those I have previously taken. At a personal level, once I was part of things and now, just over three year after I left the London area and twelve years after choosing to leave a life of work in a major accounting firm in the City , I feel quite removed from it all. I could even say excluded if I consider whether my wife and I could move back there.

So I intend to visit places where I have lived and look at on what terms it would be possible to move back now. And places where I worked to see how they have evolved, who went bust and who is still there. I may even revisit one or two places where I bought a beer, and the North Circular Road - just to check that it is still passable…

(Photo ©Scott Hortop - the peace camp set up by various activist groups in Parliament Square, May 2010)