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 Gazette: July 2017

A breath of fresh air

The Corporation’s determination to combat bad air quality and help us breathe more easily has been hard to avoid, with electric cars here and pop-up gardens there. One weekend we were given lessons in bike repair and free maps showing the cleanest route from A to B. At Barbican station, they stuck plastic arrows on the pavement, indicating “cleaner air this way”. Then I read a Corporation factoid stating that the air inside a car in busy traffic is dirtier than it is outside on the street for pedestrians and cyclists. I nearly choked.

Golden Lane residents don’t need this kind of horror story to tell them the air we breathe in the City is poor. Sit in Sourced Market on Goswell Road and look across to the iconic sweep of Crescent House and it is pretty obvious that it really could do with a good wash.

Thankfully, the architects of both the Golden Lane Estate and the Barbican - Chamberlin, Powell & Bon - imagined a future where car was king and carbon dioxide the enemy, and took steps to separate people from pollution. The core of the Golden Lane estate is a green haven of lawns and trees, while the Barbican highwalks, as irritating to navigate as they can be, raise pedestrians above and away from CO2 black-spots.

The success of the architects’ vision, and the chance to breathe cleaner air on the south side of the estate especially, is seen in the in the four healthy London Plane trees - originals from the 1970s, I’m told - standing across Fann Street in the Barbican Wildlife Garden.

The London Plane is a miracle of botany. It is an accidental hybrid of Oriental and American planes. They are relatives of the Sycamore and most of the world’s great cities have their own variant, and for two good reasons.

First, it readily consumes nasty particulate pollution into its dappled camouflage-like bark, which then flakes, and renews itself with ease, trashing the toxins.

Second, those big, lobed leaves and short root system work together to suck up and pump out vast amounts of valuable oxygen and water into the atmosphere. No surprise, then, that the Plane is known as ‘London’s Lungs’. I stare at those Fann Street beauties often and give thanks.

Fiddler on the hoof
Open Garden Squares Weekend is always good fun at the Golden Baggers allotments. Baggers bake good cakes and this year more than 400 green-fingered types arrived to ask questions about our varied crops. They like the Baggers because our growing space is a secret idyll, because we have a community café staffed by volunteer residents and, importantly, a toilet. To add spice this year, we invited poet-gardener St John Stephen (@HangingBabylon). He mingled with visitors, offering sizzling stanzas from greatest hits such as Sylvie, Red Pelargoniums and VIII. Sadly, he was not able to perform the poem about the joys of sniffing bushes, because that one is part of his ‘Spring’ cycle, and we were already well into Summer. But there was plenty from his Shrub Fiddler’s Pocket Book to make an already hot weekend even hotter.

It’s a snip

Getting a haircut around here is always a dilemma. Should I stay loyal to Golden Lane and go  to Cliffords, or break for the Islington border and visit Best Gents in Banner Street, off Whitecross Street? Best Gents does the full grooming experience (ear singeing, hot towel, eyebrow trim, nose hair, cranial massage), but Cliffords, with their pot noodles, chipped coffee mugs and bulk-bought tea bags ‘hidden’ in the corner shelf in full view all Golden Lane residents, has the kind of no-nonsense feel I find comforting.

All together now

It was a new experience: a joint reckoning for Barbican and Golden Lane residents of our freshly elected Common Council after 100 days in the job. It started well, with Cripplegate Alderman, David Graves, urging residents to get more involved and hinting at his desire for a more inclusive type of regular meeting.

Fire safety was understandably top of the agenda and the whole meeting soon became a single-issue free-for-all. Touching stories and heartfelt concerns mixed uncomfortably with grandstanding bluster, at times it seemed to be spiralling into chaos and mumbo-jumbo. And hearing Corporation placemen talking about 'learning the lessons of Grenfell' left a hollow sound in the ear.

The mood was electric and fragile, but somehow the simple act of sitting together and struggling to find answers made a difference. I went away wanting more.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 41, July 12-18 2017

Golden Lane Gazette: June 2017

Let there be light...

A decision to improve the lighting around the estate is welcome. Crime is not a big issue here, and the poor lighting is more to do with the safety of residents and how secure they feel walking the estate after dark.

At least that was my concern when I raised the matter with our Common Council team at a group meeting more than a year ago. None of them seemed to think there was a lighting problem. I was dismissed as a fantasist.

But now the Corporation has decided to act. A consultation was set up. We sat and listened, moaned about how frighteningly dark it gets between the Shakespeare pub and Great Arthur House. A man from the police, an ‘architectural liaison officer’, told us how 'smart' lighting can be used to 'design out' crime, if we had any. An official from the Corporation's Built Environment department told us how, miraculously, funding had been found to upgrade the lighting and then described the ways our lives might be transformed with sophisticated uplighting and LEDs. There were diagrams to look at. 

I looked down at my notebook. 'Is there a hidden agenda?’ it said on one page. The one that was screaming at me was that the Corporation anticipates increased footfall across the estate once Crossrail opens at Farringdon and the Bernard Morgan and Richard Cloudesley site developments are finished. And they want to make sure everyone knows which way to go. Oh, and Fusion gym wants it made easier for people to find their way to its front door.

The designation of 'private’ and 'common’ areas of the estate is a hot-potato issue and one the Corporation and the Golden Lane Residents Association have been wrestling with for what seems like forever. It is a fraught conversation and one I’m not sure any amount of 'smart' technology can bring to an early conclusion.

Centre of excellence

There are plans to redevelop our community centre, the flat-top building at the back of the yellow giant that is Great Arthur House. It has been a struggle for residents to get a say in the matter, but that has changed and a steering group of locals is now doing some proper steering. There has also been an effort to show that residents can - and will - organise and run successful events that benefit the whole estate: yoga, chess, knitting (see below).

Two in particular impressed me recently. In January a Hatfield House resident pulled some strings somewhere and a brass band took to the stage of the community hall one Saturday afternoon. Children wriggled and giggled around our feet as the band parped out old favourites such as the Floral Dance and The Typewriter, which featured a live typewriter: clickety-clack, ping, and all that. In the interval, the children got to blow a few horns. Top prize overall went to the band’s rendition of David Bowie’s Life on Mars. Some residents were visibly emotional. 

More recently the hall was transformed into a restaurant and we were treated to a three-course meal of Caribbean food as actors from Off The Wall Players performed structured scenes (soup, main, pudding) based on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the 1967 film starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier.

Like the film, the performance tackled themes of race, class and gender roles, but its centrepiece, served to our tables by members of the cast, was food. It climaxed in a petty squabble in which an idiot boyfriend gets coleslaw dumped on his head by his date. He staggers, spits out a few swear words, then falls over humiliated and dies. Just desserts, I thought, as we finished our main course.

The community centre will close at the end of the summer for refurbishment, but let’s hope that when it reopens, such sparkling events as these get a fair shout. They more than deserve it.

Animal magic

We’ve had displaced ducks stranded on Basterfield lawn. We have a sparrowhawk who arrives with a bearded handler to put the frighteners on the pigeons. And foxes are regulars. Some years ago we had a three-legged fox which, in spite of being seriously disabled, hopped around eyeballing innocent passers-by.

Now we have another fox. It has been named ‘Mr Fox’, but that is a bit dull, so if you have any better ideas, please let us know.

Wool meet again

Every third Tuesday in the month is Knit & Natter at the community centre. No prior skills or fancy equipment is required, just turn up, cast on and chill out. Hats for the Premature Babies unit at UCLH is the good cause.

An edited version of this column appeared in the London newspaper City Matters, issue 37.