on #ElephantPark: after 4 yrs denied access to trees/public welfare/space> #HeygatePark
September 9, 2017 Leave a comment
Heygate Park View August 2017 (Photo credit Forestbank)
August to August (A Recap)/
It was in August 2013 that Lendlease completely sealed off the site of the old Heygate Estate, all 23 acres of it, including above-ground pavement to pavement access. This despite having been forced to formally/legally recognise, and commit to restore, the “public welfare” of the forest on the site measured by canopy. Crucially, the “tangible and intangible benefits” of those trees were valued using a measure of their accessibility!
Lendlease had to acknowledge those welfare values after our successful campaign and redraw their greedy Masterplan to be very slightly less so. That meant accepting and embracing existing public investment in those trees, their collective canopy and associated benefits. These were banked explicitly in S106 agreements with related commitments to restore the casually destroyed canopy and Lendlease were able to trade-off these promises in subsequent years to very profitable effect. The PR, in itself, is not a problem (we always said to them that they would deserve credit, even rewards, for honouring and implementing their commitments. They were radical changes and Lendlease and Southwark Council have radically failed to deliver so far…).
August 2013 was also when the last resident (Adrian Glasspool) was forcibly carried from his home and discarded like so much public interest and value in the site. The scale of contempt shown and applied on that occasion symbolises the so-called regeneration, from the casually disastrous 2010 Agreement to the displacement and failures to deliver (returnees? revision of social housing quotient per site app? replacing 640 street trees, i.e. 7 within the red lines of the permitted scheme on Balfour Street?) to this day. A lost decade and counting.
We write at the close of August 2017, when a small section of the same open space has been restored to public access, albeit otherwise privatised in its entirety. If there were any doubt about the latter, the simple recognition of its total enclosure for 4 years on the whim of a global corporate developer and its sudden re-opening for PR purposes should resolve it!
It makes for several issues and problems;
. Should the remaining, surviving, existing community go there?
. What happens if you do?
. If we go and invest our histories, decencies, credibility, how compromising is it? Is it not part of the quick-buck amnesia? An unearned reward for the scandals, profiteering and contempt?
. What does this (all) mean and what should we do now?
We will respond to some of these things now and some later, not least because responses will evolve.
Access, Access, Access/
Firstly, we argued (many things very consistently!) that Lendlease should be forced to conduct a CAVAT survey in 2011, which they were very reluctant to do. Even when doing it, they indulged in a pathetic charade and would not admit that they had until conceding that their valuation of the canopy value, which is to say the public welfare of its commons, was “pound for pound the same as yours” (c£14,500,000). Figures and details can be contested and picked-over (since they’ve failed to honour their obligations and cheated the valuations in the process, replacing street trees with less accessible/’valuable’ estate trees) but the argument was handsomely won.
Part of that argument was that along with this specific recognition it was correspondingly vital that access to the forest, trees and public welfare (which includes, explicitly, ‘soft’ benefits like peace of mind, mental and physical health, never mind lessening of air and noise pollution, never mind convenience, public rights of way, aesthetic pleasure, places to meet and so, again, access, access, access) would continue throughout the process. Of course, there would be days, perhaps even weeks of temporary relocation even closure for some major element of demolition or construction, but access means access. We know what it means (1).
The point was that having publicly recognised the value of the trees and their collectivity as an existing forest, and with Lendlease legally committed to no longer destroy all the trees as intended (2), ongoing access was required. The forest exists ‘now’, it will continue to exist in part and in full restoration ‘afterwards’. As such, continued access was vital as well as common sensical. In an actual regeneration this would be understood as essential to retaining any social or political credibility and even as a duty of care by a Local Authority. They would offer and insist. Not in Southwark!
If this was an ‘unusual’ argument to make, then the campaign and its strategy was so unusual as to be unique. But who cares about unusual; the argument was won and ongoing access was always a key part of it. So, for the political administration and anyone else to continue carping about unfair critics of the scandalous failures of the Elephant and Castle regeneration, except in delivering vast profits for Lendlease, this is a perfect example of why they failed so badly. They failed to understand the social, political, ecological and ethical point (3).
Apologies for the circuitousness of this, which demonstrates why it’s hard to write about in brief! The immediate purpose is to respond to the Now. However, this stolen access is very important to understand as one of the many large elements in the failure of the Elephant and Castle regeneration in just about every respect. There is and can not be any justification for this single element alone.
Bingo/
So, now, bingo: a bit of access again (4). Bingo; here we are standing next to maturing London planes imprisoned for 4 years, able to embrace them as we did when measuring their trunks to establish their canopy value using the CAVAT mechanism. Literally hugging them, yes. Only the kinds of vile spivs at Lendlease don’t touch trees, feel their warmth and textures, listen to their rustling leaves, the song and dance of bird and other companion species.
The Six Old Men Heygate Park August 2017 (Photo Credit Forestbank)
We are standing before two of the Six Old Men, as we called these liberated trees. Stand in the middle of the two that almost hold hands and the other survivors fall into place in their background to the west. This pair stood just beyond the common green area between Cuddington blocks where many a party, occasional Forest Feast and other gatherings took place. The zig-zagging staircase that was so often beautifully lit on the gable end of the last Cuddington block running westwards, detailed with a stencilled white reindeer in the last years, was right beside them. Adrian’s rear garden opened out to the shared green area nearby.
Should we be grateful that Lendlease stuck to some of their obligations and didn’t also destroy these two trees, for example? Well, given how many other abuses and serial ‘minor’ planning changes that they cheated through since permissions were gained in 2013, the answer has to be in expletives. Of course not. These trees, their collective value, their commons and those precious canopy benefits were recognised as ours before being confiscated and now returned when they should have remained with us all along. So, no. No. Definitely not.
The Great Silver Maple/
There is a little more for now. Go to the north east corner of this restored greenspace and look through the pretty cut-out shapes made in the fence there. Oh isn’t it all such FUN!! – on the site of such violence and brutal contempt for people and all public values. Peer through there or climb up onto the chunkier parts of the fencing nearby and get a better view; you deserve it, there’s no question of stealing a view here. It’s yours. What do you see? You see The Great Silver Maple. Reduced but recovering and still standing in place (5).
The Great Silver Maple changed everything, at the time. It was the first sign (along with Chearsley Copse), that Lendlease were going to admit defeat and recognise the forest. In June 2011. In speech and emails, well archived. We said, oh goodness knows how many times and in how many inflections, that The Great Silver Maple was going nowhere, that it would still be here after Lendlease had upped and gone, with or without their garbage dump regen (6). And so it proved on paper and so it proves in fact.
Look through there, turn to the right side and there are the two/three even more pollarded London planes, behind which was the raised pond and beyond that was the Information Centre and people’s pop-up cinema where many a thoughtful word was exchanged, commitment made and kept, song and dance made. Where food growers gathered to cook, share and eat soundly organic produce. Where things could have continued to be so different, instead of predictable and thoughtless in the face of the machines of global capital and all its desperately over-eager little helpers…
London planes Heygate Park August 2017 (Photo Credit Forestbank)
Look through and you can see The GSM, the LPs and one or perhaps two of those fine lime trees that were central to the shading of the allotments. Allotments which were an attempt to tackle the 10 year long waiting list in the area by making good use of small parcels of the 23 acres owned by Southwark Council. Sadly, they felt differently, desperate to give the land away to global-corp investors so that those developers could do further lucrative deals with chain restaurants to return and sell you back some garbage with flaky claims about provenance knowing very few care to remember or just care. Right?
HOW DIFFERENT JUST THIS MODEST ELEMENT MIGHT HAVE BEEN!
Chearsley and Cuddington Copses Heygate Park August 2017 (Photo Credit Forestbank)
Look through and in the far distance, still completely enclosed, there remain the eleven trees of Chearsley Copse, and beyond those it seems the five of Cuddington Copse. Of course, without public access to this community wide regeneration space we can’t be sure.
Return, Revisit, Recover?/
Should we return, revisit, recover? Yes, of course. It’s ours. It was ours, the trees symbolise that it was, is and always will be and so despite the privatising of our space, welfare and interests, assume a short life for triumphant spivery and meanwhile reclaim the space! There are many problems with this, which we fully recognise. Already Lendlease and their no-brainer army are trying to rebrand, instrumentalise the space for their own ends. Their ends were and are never about public access though are they? They didn’t and won’t walk through the space under the trees to get from A to B. For them the word ‘walk’ is part of that vacuous lexicon of opportunity, vibrancy, long-term, green, community, place-making, healthy lifestyle choices…
We need to restore the publicness of this space otherwise we demonstrate that it meant nothing all along. It is not a defeat to stand there under the canopy fought for so successfully or in the public space lost but recoverable, or in exactly the same common space as there was before so many vile and thoughtless people took a percentage out of it. Instead, stand there and feel the way that nothing elemental has changed at all. Actuality, common wealth and interests cannot be erased so easily, they are not today’s special pizza and you can feel that between the two Old Men we began with.
They wanted you, all of us, to take their contemptuous punches and disappear in the shadows they want so desperately to make with their penthouse-extensions. The whole point of their exercise: profit, now relies upon well hedged predictability. So let’s not be. Predictable.
Heygate Park/
That is today’s business, easily done. But we would like to offer some further thoughts about all this, where it might go, or ideas to develop in the coming weeks. It comes down to something simple; they will make it in their vapid, banal, sweat-shopped image and we might want to force a rethink on that. What we might do instead is resume Urban Forest School activities, which were, you may recall, premised upon Irish hedge schools, the radical democracy of the rural Indian panchayat, soft and ecological anarchism. What we should do is hold to the long-term (and perhaps our noses) against their obsessively short short-terms.
Anyway, what better place to gather and exchange upon bolder, brighter, radically different futures than Heygate Park? What better way to begin than by renaming it as such, after its landmark connecting road?! What better way to upset and sideline them…
To be continued (less verbosely: it’s been a while!) …
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(1) Access: to declare a sustained interest, Southwark Council were prepared to discuss, engage, acknowledge and eventually make verbal assurances to be developed on this, with regard to the main site. It was substantially progressed over months, the arguments above found persuasive, all objections addressed, work done steadily. But LL categorically refused to entertain any conversation about the main site, re-offering a hanky plot off Wansey Street that we’d not taken up from LBS months earlier, and making furious assertions about how they overrode LBS in all such respects in autumn 2011. They found their breathless urban parsleyites and that ended the long strategic battle for the main site and access, which you can see is tightly woven into our argument. Urban parsley means developer’s flotsam; always the same wherever it wheels up… In any case, you judge whether there was meaningful public access and interim use of the Heygate Estate site post 2013, or not.
(2) But also replace one to one every tree they chose to destroy, plus 1200 linked to site and yet off-site or radiating beyond the site to restore, yes, restore, that public welfare value in the destroyed canopy of the Heygate forest.
(3) To be fair, they were aided in that by desperate narcissists who leapt at a chance to perform as urban parsley and so got them off the immediate hook. The details of that pitiful surrender, very well documented, may yet one day find a public stage. Suffice to say that the forest -its public space and access to both- was never ‘mobile’.
(4) Or no bingo for much longer, of course, if Southwark and their far too close friends Delancey get their way at the commercial hub of their plans.
(5) It’s noteworthy that the Robinia pseudoacacias -aka Black Locusts- to the north of The GSM have all gone, as have almost all of the original 22 in the forest. They obviously regard Black Locusts as an unwelcome element in their neat little worldview…
(6) That is: however nicely detailed, it’s a grossly inflated heap of facade, at least-double scale anything appropriate and all private at public expense: socially, politically and even ecologically regressive. Emblematic of everything wrong with our era, it should be ruinous of the careers and reputation of everyone involved.
Forestbank 