I did not really know what to expect when I decided to explore Wapping. I approached from the North, from Aldgate, and I think this London street scene captured on my phone summed up what I thought that I was going to continue to see. I could not have been more wrong.
Aproaching from the North, a short distance to the South of this bridge carrying the Fenchurch Street line lies Wapping
I headed for Wapping High Street. I was expecting to find the heart of a traditional East End 'village', but what I found were a profusion of gatekeepers of the new London, estate agents.
The western end of Wapping High Street - across the road apartment blocks with ground floor estate agents. (Shot on film)
I had probably checked out 5 estate agent windows before finding a downbeat convenience store (Shot on my phone)
The ubiquitous Foxtons - a cross between a call centre and a car showroom devoid of cars.
Wapping Pierhead - maybe the most desirable part of Wapping, if scenic architecture and riverside pubs generate desire
Towards the Eastern End, developed warehouses line Wapping High Street. (Shot on film)
The Town of Ramsgate pub. I rather liked the look of the bar and the menu was certainly not over-priced..
Pierhead Wharf - few real wharves remain but that does not prevent developed warehouses from hijacking the name. (Shot on film)
The missing link - the arrival of the London Overground station will have perked up property prices even more
The thing about Wapping is that you can walk or very easily cycle to the City of London. If you are lazy then there are buses or the Docklands Light Railway. The London Overground does not take one directly into the City but it is nevertheless a bonus transport link to south London and the day/night magnet of Shoreditch.
And let us not forget that Wapping is on the River Thames.
Walk to Tower Bridge and your City office past these glassy apartment developments. (Shot on film)
One part of Old Wapping still in place is the Metropolitan Police Marine Policing Unit (Shot on film)
Land at Bridewell Place, Wapping. Brewhouse Lane apartments in the background, awaiting development. "The application also proposes the erection of a five storey building containing 18 residential units" "This building will provide all of the Affordable Housing." (Shot on film)
The same land - the 'affordable housing' squeezed onto this patch of land will be part of a redevelopment of King Henry's Wharf, Phoenix
Wharf and Swan Wharf, all riverside buildings that will contain expensive
warehouse apartments. (Shot on film)
The White Swan and Cuckoo pub - just North of Wapping overground station, it seemed a real East End pub and suddenly marked a transition to the Wapping of a different character. (Shot on film)
Chancellor House - Washing hung out to dry on the balconies means that Tower Hamlets local authority housing holds sway as one moves North East from the river (Shot on film)
More typical East End council flats. (Shot on film)
Where ugly warnings abound - it seems that the residents of Presidents Drive are worried for their security. Fortress Presidents Drive replaces Rupert Murdoch's Fortress Wapping? Does this profusion of warnings make them feel safe or merely heighten their nervousness? (Shot on film)
The 'Ornamental Canal' is bounded by private developments with Park Vista Tower at the head. A single roomed studio flat in that tower costs about £400,000.
The Wapping Sourdough bakery - re-purposing of a public toilet block maybe? Now convenient for the folks living in nearby St Katharine Dock to get their daily bread.
As the sun sets, the view along The Ornamental Canal in Wapping towards The Shard and Tower Bridge
Another view to The Shard at dusk
What came across as I wandered about was the housing divide - on the one hand the redeveloped warehouses and swanky new apartment buildings on the River Thames or clustered around the "Ornamental Canal", on the other hand regulation East End tenement blocks, and very little in between. A divide between people who earn bonuses in the financial institutions of the City of London and those essential workers who keep those institutions clean, in the hygiene sense, and secure, in the sense of keeping the riff raff out.
The lack of people on the streets themselves was interesting, highlighting this as an area populated by people who are out at work, or home at work. When I did see large numbers of people they were primarily Moslem groups of children with mothers, probably of Bangladeshi origin, and with the time at about 4pm, I guess they were walking home from Hermitage Primary School in the South West of Wapping to their homes to the North East in or near Shadwell. I hope they do not give the citizens of Presidents Drive palpitations every day as they walk near to their homes.
I walked by the school but did not photograph it. It's ranked 'good' by Ofsted but I can tell you that those who live in the high end housing around the school do not send their children there. How do I know this? Well at the time of writing the school's website outlines thatin terms of ethnicity, the largest group is Bangladeshi (65.6%) and the next is white British (7.3%). In Wapping as a whole however the Bangladeshi community is only about 10%. What a shame that the school is ignored by the majority of the local population who must feel so insecure of their children's success that they feel they have no choice but to bankroll them through education.
Moving on from the relatively low key developments in Brixton featured in my last post, I took myself to Nine Elms. There is nothing low key about Nine Elms.
With its Canary Wharf style agglomeration of high rise towers that look north across the Thames over Pimlico, residents will be able to view less than a mile away what will be for many of them their aspirational homes - Knightsbridge and Belgravia. Just look at the Lebanese restaurant that has bagged its place in the base of one of the Riverlight towers to get a clue where much of the marketing will be directed.
Non-Doms are in the news, but whatever the policy on this tax issue for the government elected in the May 2015 UK general election, there will still be a queue of the non UK resident rich to get themselves into prime real estate in London and get themselves a foothold on long term residency in Britain.
When it comes to immigration to the UK there is one rule for the rich and another for everybody else, however much more deserving their case may be. By February 2015, the UK has taken in only 143 refugees from Syria, but when it comes to the rich there is no problem.There will be 18,000 new homes built in Nine Elms. Of these only 15% will be 'affordable", way below the targets Councils should be striving to achieve, so there will be about 15,000 opportunities for newcomers to London.
If you are rich and desire UK residency then this is one way it can be achieved:
1. Buy £2m shares in Barclays Bank.
2. Buy yourself an apartment in Nine Elms
3. After 5 years of residency you get 'indefinite leave to remain' in the UK.
Actually, step 2 is not strictly necessary, but it's good to have somewhere to live. If you are in a hurry, buy £10m shares and after just 2 years you get that desirable 'indefinite leave to remain'. And once you have that 'indefinite leave to remain' you can flog your Barclays shares (probably at a profit) to some other super-rich bod who wants to come here too.
This all may seem a bit of a racket (yes, it is) but it has a fancy name - the Tier 1 (Investor) rules for entry into the UK. It's a bit more complicated than the 3 steps but the handy guide is at the link. There's a pretence of a points system - we've heard a lot about the one in Australia recently - but the way ours works is summarised on this Home Office website questionnaire "Do you have at least £2,000,000....?" Answer yes and you have 75 points and you're in!
The author of this blog is dubious of the benefit of the ultra rich coming to London because, by creating up-market ghettos and causing a ripple effect pushing up house prices all over London, they are contributing to the erection of The North Circular Wall, the barrier to ordinary people coming to live in London. In the main they are also not very nice people who will do what they can to ensure that anyone who gets a job because of their presence is paid only the minimum wage - and that will probably be at the end of a two hour bus commute...
Within London are vast numbers of ordinary people who live from day to day without being touched by the wealth which makes London stand apart from the rest of the UK. True, if they work, some of them may receive wages that directly come from the wealthy and their businesses, and if they run their own small businesses, some of them may even sell goods or services to the well-to-do.
Those touched by the wealth will be very much be the minority and you can be sure that such contact will often be only of the minimum wage variety. I strongly suspect that it is only a minority within that minority who are lifted away from minimal wages and are better off than they would be if these 'wealth creators' had parked their businesses in an alternative location.
Until recently, these ordinary people could usually at least feel safe in their homes. But there is a new phenomenon of housing developers influencing hard pressed local authorities to push long term residents out so that new development can proceed. It may sometimes even be local authorities taking the lead.
A common factor is that the people who live in these homes are being pushed out against their wishes away from the community in which they may have spent a lifetime. Some may be able to come back to the new development, but there is uncertainty of that outcome. While the development proceeds, one thing is certain and that is the gross intrusion of the unwilling dislocation of individuals and families from their homes and community.
The Cressingham Gardens estate, adjacent to the wide open spaces of Brockwell Park, Brixton, is a little different to most of these threatened communities. It is relatively low rise, built in the sixties with a mix of owner occupation and council properties. Ignoring Brockwell Park, it benefits from some green space of its own too. All this makes it a perfect candidate for redevelopment, dramatically increasing the housing density to maximise income for developers and council alike.
There is a pattern of councils failing to invest in repairs, and then declaring that an estate needs regeneration. Councils will argue that responsibility for the largest part of the failure to invest lies with government policy. Austerity cannot afford borrowing for repairs. For councils with the headache of making their ends meet, sell offs of their assets provide a temporary reprieve. The consciences of councillors will be comforted by the thought that the doubling of the housing stock within these few acres helps solve a little of the housing crisis. The reality is that they and the residents of Cressingham Gardens are pawns in the hands of developers and others who relentlessly wish to make London more attractive to the right sort of people.
The residents explain what is going on here:
Option 1 is renovation. Sorry, too simple when a grandiose scheme is in the wings.
It's not just people in their homes. Small businesses are not immune to the pressure to move on, especially when they are the wrong kind of small business - small businesses that look like this:
All a bit scruffy you might think. Why not turf out these businesses, smarten up those arches, hike up the rents and bring in a new class of business?
Indeed. And as you might be able to guess that is what is going to happen. Businesses more fitting to the new gentrified Brixton in this prime area adjacent to the station.
Of course to placate resistance, existing businesses are being told that they can return. But most will probably not be able to deal with the rent hikes because their customers would not be able to afford the higher prices they would have to charge.It is inevitable that rents will be only affordable to businesses that match the aspirations of the new residents of the high rise developments that are to be erected as part of the plans. For a nice glossy presentation of the 'masterplan'... http://futurebrixton.org/brixton-central/brixton-central-masterplan/
The masterplan does not talk about making Brixton attractive to the right sort of people, but then it would not be called a masterplan if it were not devious!
