PEOPLE'S MUSEUM Recording & preserving local voice in an area of urban change.
Meeting: Somers Town a conservation area?
Next Heritage Meeting Workshop October
Want to save the area? Come to our first meeting about the Conservation Area on the basis of its Social housing – a radical idea?
On Monday 7th October 6.15pm A Space for us! People’s Museum Somers Town
Address: 52 Phoenix Rd NW1 1ES
This is a follow up to a workshop held on the 14th of September to celebrate the Housing Story in the centenary year of the St Pancras Housing at St Mary’s Church. The workshop after the performance showed clear support for the idea, including from author John Boughton; Micheal Parkes; urbanist Nabil Al Kinani and others from Just Space.
The Workshop brought together residents and supporters to workshop the scope of a possible Conservation Area based on the heritage of social housing in the area. Participants included Origin CEO Carol Carter and writer A.N. Wilson, and facilitators included urbanist Nabil-Al Kinani, Middlesex Uni lecturer Jason Scoot, Slaeny Devlin, Michael Parkes, Michael Edwards and Tom Young of Just Space. Alex Gordon of the RMT joined.
Support from Michael Parkes:
“..it is exciting to view Conservation as a radical instrument rather than a toy of the elite and / or the nimby. Remember at the very least – new development can take place in Conservation Areas as long as it enhances the special (and in the case of Somers Town it would be) “historic” character of the Area . At best, however, in Somers Town it might be used to facilitate genuine community participation in novel Social Housing / Housing Delivery Vehicles of all kinds .
So I am also including a weblink to , and an extract from , an article I wrote for the People’s Plans project in January 2023:
In terms of contemporary development and regeneration, the days of people or profit are sadly a distant memory. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was a fundamental part of the Welfare State. The associated tax on the increase in development value conferred as a result of high value land use planning designation has long gone. Promotion of Community Development via land use planning designations and/or tax-based carrots or sticks seems unrealistic. For the foreseeable future, I suspect we are looking at planning and delivery based on people and profit.
In high-value cities such as London, a Gold Belt of gentrification, including empty investment property, surrounds and extends out from the City Centre. Yet many essential (as we saw during the Pandemic) remaining working class communities and small businesses would prefer to stay and get a slice of the action. And I think it is strongly in London’s interest that they are enabled to do so. A pragmatic / imaginative approach may be the best that can be achieved.
If the growing gap between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless is to be bridged then, under the umbrella of the current Levelling–Up policy, whenever a major threat or opportunity occurs, Community Planning processes and resources should be available to working-class and ethnic minority communities as and when required. I am tempted to say that this should be mandatory. The process should be high quality and far better resourced than it is at resent.
Neighbourhood Planning in disadvantaged areas might present such an opportunity.
In such situations, if Community Planning is to be embedded effectively in the conventional town planning and property development processes, then many of the lessons set out above need to be understood and applied. Effective partnership working and delivery vehicles, possibly along the lines of the Spitalfields model, need to be considered as and when appropriate.”
Support from John Boughton of Municipal Dreams
Writer and national social housing expert John Boughton was not able to attend but offered a letter of support:
‘Firstly, there is clear precedent for supporting a conservation area in Somers Town and, secondly, it is hard to think of a small area of such concentrated significance in the history of social housing. Walk up Churchway, among the first buildings you see are the Wellesley, Seymour and Somerset Buildings as they were designated when they were first built by the London County Council at the beginning of the last century – rare, very early council housing, some of the just 24,000 council homes built before the First World War. At the top of the road along Doric Way and Drummond Way, you come to some of the housing schemes developed by the St Pancras House Improvement Society in the late 1920s and 1930s – remarkable housing developed by the charismatic priest Father Basil Jellicoe, supported by pioneering women such as Edith Neville and Norah Hill, founder members of the Society, and Irene Barclay and Eileen Perry, the first women to qualify as quantity surveyors who worked for it. The social purpose of the housing was enhanced by careful design and specifically, of course, by the decorative ceramic work of Gilbert Bayes. If you take the alley to the right, you come to the Ossulston Estate developed by the London County Council between 1927 and 1931 that some compare to the famous municipal schemes built by Red Vienna in the interwar period due to its striking appearance and form. And there’s much more, a lot of it unremarkable but typical – the five- storey, walk-up tenement blocks that are very common in inner London; the maisonette blocks built widely after the Second World War, for example. And it’s that range and concentration that gives Somers Town its significance and character. It’s really quite a special place – a laboratory and repository of social housing and, above all, a home to the many who have needed it. Declaring it a conservation area – recording and celebrating that history, preserving its character for the current residents who value their housing – would give the area the recognition it deserves and the protection it needs.”
