Picture: Concrete Repairs

Pattern left by concrete repairs to the ceiling of the Stanley Cohen House undercover area close to Fann Street and Bowater House.

Golden Lane Gazette: September 2017

Things that go bump...

‘Bumping’ sounds like a nightclub dance craze from the 1970s. In fact, it is a theory of social cohesion. The citizens of small, tightly-packed communities get on far better if they bump into one another regularly. And the places they do this are held by social scientists and community-engagement experts to be sacred, fertile grounds for a better society.

Golden Laners have their chosen spots. Fusion gym, Waitrose and Fortune Street Park are all well established 'bumping’ places. Lesser known ones are the undercover pavement on Golden Lane alongside Stanley Cohen House and, my favourite, the short tunnel of trees behind the Cripplegate Council noticeboard at the back of the Shakespeare pub.

But bumping also happens outside the confines of our bright and colourful concrete paradise. Often I will see neighbours at the open meetings organised by Healthwatch City of London. These are round-table talking shops at which City residents, workers and service users chew the fat with healthcare professionals in an effort to shape future policy. Issues such as medication passports, community pharmacy, dementia and social care come under intense scrutiny. These talks are important because the City of London shares some health and social services provision with neighbouring boroughs, notably Hackney, so policy needs to embrace a wide range of needs.

The Healthwatch gatherings take place in various locations, but often at the Dutch Centre in Austin Friars, EC2. They are always a great success, and I think I know why: the free buffet lunches they serve to fuel the conversation are mouthwateringly good, so good that I have even spotted some of my Golden Lane neighbours stuffing their faces with free food at lunchtime then disappearing quietly before the serious topical talking starts. This is obviously unethical and I never hesitate to remind them of their poor conduct. And in my experience, all the best ideas come with a full stomach, so ‘Let’s do lunch with Healthwatch’ could be the start of a new trend. It’s good to talk...and eat.

‘Recovery After Heart Surgery’, an examination of patient experiences and priorities, is at St Bartholomew’s Hospital on 5 October.

Healthwatch City of London’s fourth Annual Conference is at the Dutch Centre, 7 Austin Friars on 20 October.

A crystal-ball moment

I predicted in last month’s Golden Lane Gazette that objections to the development proposed for the former Richard Cloudesley site would start rolling in. I wasn’t wrong, and even more piled in on deadline day last week. I also mentioned that a “clever resident from Bayer House” had circulated his own alternative to the existing Hawkins\Brown blueprint. This is the ‘Fred Plan’, a scheme more compatible with the estate’s existing architecture, and its author, Fred Scott, is so clever that to advance his rival idea he has created an artistic photo-composition of what looks like an awayday of 1950s British intellectuals loitering ghostlike over a model of Fred’s insurgent 21st-century Golden Lane redesign. They look to be contemplating, with deadly seriousness, a time in the future when our prize-winning estate will be enlarged in a way sympathetic to the original post-war vision of its architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. In the light of how the Richard Cloudesley project has been managed so far, in which residents’ views have been barely registered, let alone considered, it is tempting to remark “pigs might fly”, but stranger things have happened.

Culture vultures

The reinvention of the City as a cauldron of creativity under the title Culture Mile might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Getting the heritage architecture of Golden Lane and the Barbican to be included in this hot new idea might be a fantasy too far, but at a recent party to mark the closure of our community centre for refurbishment, I learned about Joe Mitchell. Back in the 1960s, Joe was the “Cameron Mackintosh of Cripplegate”, rallying residents of all ages to perform on the Golden Lane Community Centre stage in his famous 'Follies’. Some of Joe's protégés even went on to attend the Italia Conti Academy of Theatrical Arts. Italia Conti has been an incubator of top talent for many years, so don’t be surprised if the next Doctor Who hailed first from the Golden Lane Estate.

Behind the scenes

And if your life is not already dramatic enough, take time to check out the absorbing ‘Life on the London Stage’ exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) around the corner in Clerkenwell.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition number 048 in September 2017

Golden Lane Gazette: August2017

The beginning of the end

The spirit of  Brexit is haunting Bernard Morgan House. The demolition of the old building and the building of a new one has started. The question is whether the journey will be hard or soft.

The contractors want nearby residents to believe it will be a painless transition from old to new, so they are holding a series of monthly liaison meetings in our community hall.

At the first one I arrived five minutes late, missed the introductions and tried to work out quickly who everyone was. I could spot residents and a smattering of councillors, but I was not familiar with the London Demolition crew or builder Taylor Wimpey’s agents. I figured jointly they were the 10 slightly glistening, freshly laundered people who did most of the talking, albeit in a hesitant tone of voice, as if they half expected a mass killing to break out any minute.

The exchange started badly with a bantamweight tussle sparked by councillor William Pimlott asking whether the purpose of this “liaison” meeting was to “discuss” or to “agree” the roadmap for the controversial project's public engagement. That fizzled out quickly and soon we were hearing about the groundbreaking methods intended to be used in the demolition of Bernard Morgan House.

The process is called “Munching”. Briefly, it is this: a state-of-the-art machine bites chunks off the top of an already hollowed-out Bernard Morgan House and spits the rubble into the vacant interior cavity. It is claimed that this method of destruction reduces noise and vibration, and any stray clouds of nasty concrete dust will be “mitigated” by a water cannon, which squirts out a clingy moisturising spritz.

Munching, which makes demolition sound like a sweet-shop treat, wasn’t the only trick of language our hosts used. They also repeatedly pledged to “try not to…” They will try not to work on Saturdays; they will try not to start electrical fires; they will try not to injure any passing children from the neighbouring school. They will try not to destroy forever the retro-heritage tiles that were one of the original building’s outstanding design features.

The wrecking crew answered questions from a dictionary of platitudes, but it all unravelled slightly towards the end of the meeting when a Bowater House resident made a sincere last-ditch plea for common sense: why was a perfectly useful, not to say historically important building being smashed to smithereens? Wasn’t there a better way of doing things? The wrecking crew all looked at their shoes and changed the subject quickly.

If the intention of this gathering was to reassure, it failed. Claims of poor site management and corner-cutting got the feeble response of “we’ll look into that” and residents walked home feeling the road ahead was a rocky one.

Wedding announcement

The storm clouds have yet to break over at the Richard Cloudesley site on the north side of the estate, but it is only a matter of time. Expect a slew of objections to the current planning application submitted jointly by the City of London and Islington Council. In anticipation of argy-bargy to come, one clever resident from Bayer House, a grandee of modernist architecture, posted on the estate’s website an alternative design to the one currently proposed by the appointed Hawkins\Brown team. The ‘Fred Plan’ meets the stated specifications and complements the existing design of the estate in a more measured way. And it envisions the planned residential tower block as a companion building to Great Arthur House, with the added bonus of a cocktail bar on the roof. Needless to say, this triggered a flurry of excitement online to name the ‘new’ partner tower, assuming it were ever to be built. ‘Merlin’ and ‘Guinevere’ were early contenders, but top marks goes to a marriage of the paired skyscrapers as ‘Arthur & Martha’.

Party time, excellent...

Our community centre is closing for refurbishment on Saturday September 2. It’s an excuse for an end-of-an-era knees-up and we have fantastic day of events planned, including silent discos for all ages, films and pictures from the estate’s past, top nosh, bags of banter and lots of cake and biscuits. Everyone is welcome, and if you have any skills you’d like to bring to the party (home baking, face painting, magic tricks), email goldenlanegazette@gmail.com. City of London time credits will go to the best offers.

The Exhibitionists

Golden Lane Estate resident and City Matters columnist Billy Mann with fellow artists Yoki (left) and Tirzah at the opening of ‘Making Faces’, an exhibition of work by survivors of brain injury from Headway East London, at the Southbank Centre until August 23.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 45, p14

Golden Lane: Sue Pearson's rhubarb

The Councillor’s racy red past

Newly elected Cripplegate Councillor Sue Pearson is always happy to talk rhubarb, especially when the subject is her own contribution to that trusty filler of pies and crumbles.

Sue’s rhubarb has a life story. It sits today in a quiet corner of the Golden Baggers allotment, but the road it took to get here is a story in itself, a kind of rhubarb version of Who Do You Think You Are? It was born and raised in Wales by Sue’s Dad. Once it reached maturity, he outsourced cuttings to his children, who grew up and left home, but took a piece of Welsh rhubarb with them wherever they went. And from that day on, the hobo life of the plant began.

The muscular red beauty you see in the pot against the east wall of the allotment has journeyed with Cllr Pearson from Wales to Wilmslow and Derbyshire before it found its present home here on Golden Lane. It is clearly a survivor. The number of tarts it has parented is unknown, but please feel free to speculate. If​ you need any proof of its health and fertility, gently push back those big green leaves and check out the silky stems. Awesome.

Councillor's Choice: Look at those legs!

Golden Lane: Rant No.2

The Orwellian Golden Lane development plan is a game about to enter its second half, reckons Billy Mann

Campaign poster

The proposed development projects around the estate have triggered in me a number of proverbial sayings and the like. First it was all about trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, now it's the one about doing one thing well rather than lots of things badly.

In the case of the Bernard Morgan House proposals, I am still stupidly baffled as to why the project was not conceived from the start under the title ‘heritage’, the existing building with all that lovely flint and retro tiling retained and its interior modified into contemporary living spaces. The determination to smash it up just seemed like destruction for destruction’s sake, the product of a hubristic mindset on acid that had cruelly infected the decision-making process. I am told the police needed to sell the land for a maximum return (to Taylor Wimpey) because funding from central government has been cut so deeply they could no longer do their jobs properly. All I know for sure is the more I look at that building, the more I will miss it when it's gone.

Over at the Richard Cloudesley site, I am haunted by the memory of an early meeting with the Hawkins\Brown architects in which we were told how the team had completed a ‘zonal analysis’ of the Golden Lane Estate (leisure zone, community zone, recreation zone, etc) and that the Richard Cloudesley project would become an ‘education zone’ extension of the estate. This sounded reasonable, sort of. Here was once the site of a school, so putting a new one in that spot wasn’t such a controversial step. 

Then an elephant walked into the room in the shape of a 14-storey apartment block and my already passionate dislike of that pretentious backslash in the title ‘Hawkins\Brown’ turned into something bordering on hysteria\psycopathy. A school on the Richard Cloudesley site and housing on the Bernard Morgan site would have been a fair, sympathetic and manageable solution – balanced, in keeping, and all that.

But what were are left with instead is a crazed seek-and-destroy masterplan of excess in which playmakers at both the City of London Corporation and Islington Council daily score points off one another in a display of tit-for-tat blundering. This sorry situation has left residents forced to take part in an Orwellian game that was both rigged from the start and is now being reframed at every turn to subdue any meaningful discussion. 

Whether there is a great deal of support outside of the Golden Lane Estate for the residents' campaign is hard to tell. Comments online and recent local election results suggest the game is not over yet. Yes, this estate is a temple of worship for architecture students the world over. Yes, it represents an enlightened vision of society from the past that says intelligent, creative planning and building can transform lives. Yes, it is a totally fab place to live. But does all that count for anything anymore? I would like to think so, but defending it is getting harder every day and requires a huge leap of faith.

My mind goes back to Istanbul, 2005. Liverpool are losing 3-0 at half time in the Champion's League final to a rampant AC Milan. I won’t tell you what happened next. 

 Sign the petition.