Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre: Loss of vital shops, stalls and community asset to be delayed by court challenge

Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre
(© London Intelligence ®)

By Paul Coleman

Local resident campaigners can now mount another legal challenge against developer Delancey's plan to demolish and redevelop the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre.

Court of Appeal judges have decided longstanding local resident Jerry Flynn, supported by local campaigners Up the Elephant, can appeal against an October 2019 High Court ruling from Mr Justice Dove. 

Flynn, a stalwart of the 35% Campaign and Elephant Amenity Network, will once again challenge Southwark Council's decision to give shopping centre owner Delancey planning permission.

Delancey, in a statement to the London SE1 website, said it was ‘disappointed’ by the Court of Appeal decision. At the time of writing, (2 November 2020) no appeal date has been set.

Traders, residents and students have protested against the demolition and redevelopment
(© London Intelligence ®)

Destructive

Traders, residents and students protested as Delancey closed the shopping centre on 26 September 2020 and began to ready it for demolition.

Southwark Council’s politicians and planning officers gave planning permission for Delancey’s scheme in July 2018.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan - Labour - backed the scheme in late 2018.

Delancey’s 2.5-acre redevelopment scheme, first presented to Southwark Council in October 2016, (ref 16/AP/4458), also aims to demolish the London College of Communication buildings to provide the University of the Arts London with a new campus. 

A new Northern Line tube entrance is also planned.

However, many UAL students have protested against Delancey and Southwark Council alongside Elephant and Castle traders and local residents (above). 

Many condemned the scheme at Southwark’s area neighbourhood forums and at planning committee meetings. They see Delancey’s scheme as having a destructive impact on an inter-generational and ethnically diverse working class community.

 

Desperately

Flynn and fellow campaigners continue to focus their legal challenge on Delancey’s lack of social rented housing.

The scheme includes 979 new homes but most will be offered as ‘Build to Rent’. 

Of these homes, 330 will be ‘affordable’ with 116 offered as social rent.

Delancey though wanted to own and manage this small number of social rent homes.

Up the Elephant’s high-profile campaign led to the developer altering its plans so that the 116 social rented homes will be owned and managed by Southwark Council or a housing association. 

The expectation is these homes will be offered as priority to local people.

Campaigners, though, say these 116 homes remain only a paltry fraction of Delancey’s overall scheme.

They also say even these ‘116 social rented homes could be at risk, if Delancey fails to deliver on the ‘West site’. The developer concedes this will not to be built for another ten years.

 

Quashed

Campaigners contend Southwark Council’s planning committee was ‘misled as to the maximum amount of affordable housing the scheme could viably provide and that, with Mayor of London funding, there could be at least another 42 social rented homes’.

“Delancey are not building the homes and new shops that local people need,” says Flynn. “Their planning permission should be quashed. Homes and shops that local people can afford should be built instead.”

Average and lower income families desperately need genuinely affordable homes in and around Elephant and Castle.

 

Destroy

Delancey’s scheme has also displaced independent traders, many of whom are African, Caribbean, Asian and Latin American.

Many are indignant that just 40 traders have been relocated through a Delancey-Southwark relocation process. Three other traders had to find their own their premises. 

That still left at least 80 businesses without alternative premises, according to research by the Latin Elephant community group.

Trader Shapoor Amini says: "I've worked at this market since 2001.These people promised 'we'll give you a space' but they've done nothing for us. I've been to countless meetings, and still nothing."

Edmund Attoh, a local trader for 20 years, says: "We don't know where we are going now. They turned us down. But they didn't say why."

Concessions

A three-year Up the Elephant campaign led to Delancey and Southwark making concessions to provide affordable retail space, temporary space for 26 traders on Castle Square, a traders’ panel, and an overall £634,000 trader relocation fund.

Traders and residents also secured 15-year affordable retail leases with rents to held at 75% of market rates in years six to 15 of Delancey’s scheme.

They say Delancey has tried to spin these concessions as the result of its own community sensibilities. “We’ve been working very closely all shopping centre traders to ensure they can find new premises,” says Diana Barranco of Delancey.

 

Bingo

Traders and local people say the shopping centre was not simply a place of business.

“It is where we would meet our friends, get a haircut, where we first landed in London and went to ask for a job and a room,” says Santiago Peluffo of the Latin Elephant campaign group.

“We could hear distinctive Latin American accents and we might end up chatting for hours over Colombian coffee,” says Patria Roman-Velazquez.

The closure also killed off the long-established and popular London Palace bingo hall regularly used by people of all ethnic backgrounds but particularly by elderly people of Caribbean origin.

 

Crowdfund

Over one thousand people and local organisations objected to Delancey’s original application, forcing Southwark Council to defer it three times.

Up the Elephant, a coalition of local people and traders, has had to crowdfund £7,500 so far to support its legal actions. 

Hyper

On the other hand, corporate players in the global real estate market have spent the first two decades of the 21st Century hyper-commodifying the Elephant and Castle’s public and privately owned land and properties.

Southwark Council’s ruling social democrat Labour politicians have spent two decades eagerly ‘partnering’ these developers. They say the Council is extracting ‘planning gain’ and financial contributions from developers that can help build new council, social rent and ‘affordable’ homes in and around the Elephant and Castle. Hence, Southwark Council brands this policy as ‘regeneration’.

Heygate

Flynn and the 35% Campaign have fought for over a decade to try make sure Labour-run Southwark Council sticks by a formally adopted policy to grant permission to developers on condition that at least 35% of any new proposed homes are ‘affordable’ to local people.

Flynn once lived with his family on the Heygate Estate that used to be next to the shopping centre. The destruction of the Heygate hinged on one of the most powerful market state 'regeneration' partnerships signed between a global developer and a London local authority.

Australian-listed Lendlease and Southwark politicians, like council leader Peter John and ex-finance and regeneration chief Fiona Colley, combined the financial power of global real estate with the legal powers of the local state to demolish 1,212 council homes on the Heygate. These homes, starved of maintenance investment for decades, could have been refurbished.

Broken

Instead, Southwark Council spent millions of taxpayers' money to 'decant' 1,034 households from the estate with a promise there would be 500 homes for families wishing to exercise a much-vaunted 'right to return' to Lendlease redeveloped estate. 

However, right of return amounted to a broken promise. The Lendlease-Southwark 'regeneration partnership' compelled many council tenants and leaseholders to leave the Elephant and Walworth neighbourhoods permanently. Academics researched their destinations and found many had been compelled to live elsewhere in the borough or outside of London altogether.

In place of the Heygate, Lendlease are still building 2,924 private new homes on the 23-acre site.

However, local residents claim this ‘regeneration’ is more than just the area’s partial gentrification but amounts to the wholesale ‘social cleansing’ of an established working class community and the destruction of family, neighbourhood and social networks.

Pink

The shopping centre with its pink elephant statue (below), was symbolically chosen as the venue for the MacPherson Inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s failed investigation into the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. 

The Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre opened in 1965 as one of Europe’s first purpose-built indoor shopping malls.

The Elephant and Castle statue amidst towering new luxury penthouses
(© London Intelligence ®)

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, November 2020 

(Published by London Intelligence Limited ®)

Reflections on the Coronavirus pandemic: London June 2020

A cat displays social distancing typical of its species.

By Paul Coleman

Londoners knew little about Coronavirus at the start of 2020.

So what do we know now after seven months of the pandemic and three months of lockdown?

Firstly, there's the death toll across the United Kingdom, estimated at over 60,000 people.

We do know for sure, from official sources based on laboratory testing and death certificates, that at least 42,647 people have died in the UK from Coronavirus, as of Monday 22 June 2020. 

Of those officially recorded deaths, 6,266 people died in London, some 15% of the total UK death toll. 

Imagine a full Royal Albert Hall. 

Now visualise it empty. 

Absorbent

This rising death toll was a grim tale frequently retold during April and May.

Yet in June, people don't speak about others dying.

The media has largely moved on to the story of lockdown relaxation.

Football is back on the telly. Life is 'normal' again.

Have we really gotten used to the idea of such deaths? 

Are we that absorbent? 

Or just fearful?

Clap

Londoners no longer weekly clap for the nurses, doctors, care home carers, porters and cleaners - the people who work around the clock at great personal risk to themselves to save the lives of Coronavirus patients.

We no longer routinely and publicly show our appreciation for transport, telecommunications, supermarket and postal workers who have kept us supplied and connected during lockdown.

Yet it doesn't take much, though, for us to still show that kind appreciation on a one-to-one and daily basis.

Say thank you in person next time.

Pupils and teachers at Barnfield Primary School in north London display their gratitude to NHS workers.
Photo: © Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ® London 2020

Positive

We are though constantly told the number of new confirmed virus cases is falling; 958 new cases of infection were reported yesterday (22 June 2020).

Fifteen people died - the lowest daily death toll for months but still a grim tragedy for those people and their loved ones.

The United Kingdom government - often a chaotic bunch - tells the world it actually has a plan that is 'getting the job done' - that London and the rest of the country is entering a positive phase.

Is such optimism justified, especially since the government's plan has involved a late lockdown, discharging untested hospital patients to vulnerable care homes, zero border controls and a debacle over testing, tracing and tracking?

Cautiously

Despite the deaths and debacles, some people in London seem less afraid of the pandemic now.

People who have survived their symptoms - or who know people who have suffered and survived - remain cautiously hopeful.

Coronavirus, for many others though, is still something that happens to other people but not to their families or friends. 

Anxious and financially precarious, Londoners want to get back to their jobs.

Bored and frustrated by lockdown, many want to go back to their idea of normal.

They want to go out and shop - and to pub, puff, party and rave.

Let's hope they - and hospital workers and the rest of us - don't pay a heavy price for their fun.

Time

As Londoners, it's worth bearing in mind that just a few months ago - at the start of 2020 - Coronavirus remained a distant news story from China. 

We do now recall that people were getting sick back then with what we thought was just a bad case of flu.

Six months later, Londoners are fluent in the language of pandemic - R numbers, test, track and trace, social distancing, flattening the curve, and the dangers of aerosol.

So where might this pandemic lead us to now?

Transmission

Coronavirus still depends on surfaces and air to successfully transmit infection.

Scientists - sometimes a messy bunch - say that just breathing and talking alone can generate thousands of micro-droplets that might carry enough of the virus to spread and infect.

We can't see the droplets we continuously emit.

And, we don't need to laugh, shout or sing to emit them.

Outdoors

Scientists say these droplets are particularly risky indoors or on crowded public transport. 

People are generally less at risk when they're outdoors - as long as they are not in crowds and their encounters with others are fleeting.

The virus doesn't transmit and infect so well where there is wind, sunlight and heat.

The mantra remains. 

Keep washing your hands. 

Don't touch your face.

Wear masks in public and in shops.

Keep your distance.

Asymptomatic

What else do we know?

We know temperature checks don't detect possible carriers who are asymptomatic - as they don't have fevers.

Mandatory frequent testing of everybody for Coronavirus in workplaces and schools is therefore essential.

Results need to be returned quickly.

Testing must become as omnipresent as CCTV.

Politicians might say this will be crazily expensive.

But Coronavirus has meant we're already resorting to a lot of ideas grabbed from the box marked 'crazy'.

Furthermore, investment in comprehensive testing would allow more Londoners to go back to work. 

Immunity

People who have recovered from Coronavirus symptoms - and those asymptomatic - have Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. 

Medical experts say IgGs 'indicate' immunity.

'Indicate' is one of those words that sits on the fence.

You can assume you might be immune if you're tested positive for IgG but scientists also say don't bet your house - or your life - on it.

Complex

How much IgG do we need to be immune?

The experts don't know.

Even doctors and nurses might behave as if they're now immune having recovered from Coronavirus. 

They're entitled to feel happier but scientists cautiously add that our knowledge of Coronavirus is still too primitive to definitely prove immunity.

And, how long does immunity last?

Again, the answer is a deafening 'dunno'.

Immunity remains a complex science. 

Kindness

The simple truth now is that we're in flamin' June 2020. 

The sun shines.

People bask in parks.

Illegal raves mingle thousands of younger people.

The government has already introduced 'bubbles' - artificial family and household circles that Coronavirus doesn't have the social manners to respect.

Government has also relaxed the two-metre social distancing rule to one metre. 

The one-metre rule will only work if Londoners behave thoughtfully and with kindness.

Yet virus testing for everyone is struggling to get off the ground.

Treatments for sufferers are only slowly beginning to emerge.

Anxiety remains that scarred lungs - pulmonary fibrosis - will hamper the lives of those still recovering from Coronavirus.

What next?

Winter 2020 already worries public health officials.

People naturally go indoors in Winter to eat, drink and be merry. Indoors, they will be more vulnerable to transmission and infection.

What does history tell us?

Past pandemics - especially 1918-19 - faded in summer months and then returned virulently in Winter.

Government needs to prepare.

Big hope

Vaccines remain the big hope.

Some 150 possible vaccines are currently being worked on around the world.

Vaccine factories are being built.

But when will a vaccine emerge?

We don't know.

How many doses will each Londoner need?

We don't know.

How long will a vaccine last?

Six months into the pandemic, all we know amounts to not enough.

Shelter

In the face of such uncertainty how should Londoners react?

Scientists did warn about an impending panic. 

Public Health England officials warned about it in 2014.*

Politicians ignored their warning.

Hence, Londoners are expected to believe the Coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20 struck like a bolt from the blue - like some lightning strike.

It's often said our chances of being struck by lightning during a thunderstorm range from minimal to almost zero.

So why do we instinctively shelter from a lightning storm but seek to roam freely in a deadly pandemic?

* See 'Pandemic London: The Unheeded Scientific Warning of 2014, © London Intelligence ®, 27 May 2020 

Note: Of 305,289 Coronavirus cases confirmed by laboratories, 27,455 (9%) were Londoners, as of 22 June 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Sources: Office for National Statistics, Greater London Authority.

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ®, June 2020

London householders threatened by the demolition of 35,000 council homes

Thousands of Londoners face the loss of their homes, writes Paul Coleman.
Developers and politicians plan to demolish some 35,000 council homes on 100 London housing estates.
Research published by Estate Watch, a new website, shows the Coronavirus pandemic has not halted the destruction of London's publicly owned council homes. 
Local authorities - many Labour-controlled - remain determined to sell publicly owned council estate land cheaply to developers and collaborative housing associations.

Net loss

Estate Watch, produced by the London Tenants Federation and community group alliance Just Space, provides information for tenants and residents whose homes and settled ways of life are threatened by estate demolition and redevelopment - a process marketed as 'regeneration' by developers and politicians but condemned as 'social cleansing' by residents' groups.
Some 55,000 homes on 161 council estates across London have been demolished since 1997, says Estate Watch. 
Some 131,000 people have lost their homes as a result. Entire communities have vanished.
These London regeneration schemes result in the net loss of genuinely affordable and publicly owned housing.

Heygate
These net losses across London have intensified since Southwark Council 'partnered' with global developer Lendlease to demolish 1,212 council homes on the Heygate Estate in Walworth. 
Southwark Council had valued the 25-acre* Heygate site at £150 million in 2007 but then sold it to Lendlease for just £50m in 2010.
Research by Loretta Lees at the University of Leicester shows 3,000 people who lived on the Heygate were forced to move to other parts of Southwark and London - and many were financially compelled to leave London altogether.

Of 2,704 new regeneration homes being built at the site, only 82 might be offered at 'social rents' - but even these 82 might charge up to twice as much as council rents and thus unaffordable to Southwark's lower income households.

'Council house boy'
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan belatedly decreed in 2018 that housing associations and local councils - wanting Mayoral-controlled public funds to knock down and replace any council estate with more than 150 homes - must secure resident support.

This money can only be released if a majority of residents vote 'yes' to the regeneration scheme.

Mayor Khan, since being elected in May 2016, has approved millions of pounds in funding for the demolition of 82 estates. Khan resisted and delayed the introduction of ballots allowing many schemes to go through before the ballot requirement. 
Estate Watch further highlights how Mayor Khan has exempted 44 council estate regeneration schemes across London from having to seek residents' support through ballots.

Worse still, says Estate Watch, Khan - who campaigned for the mayoralty as the 'council house boy' - is also 'turning a blind eye to ballot papers where other options, such as estate refurbishment, are absent'.

Woodberry Down Estate

Ballot-exempted regeneration estates include the Woodberry Down Estate (below) near Manor House in north London where some 1,000 council homes remain threatened with demolition.
Labour-run Hackney Council 'leased' the 64-acre site for 999 years to a 'joint venture' between housebuilder Berkeley Homes and Notting Hill Genesis, the latter being a corporate merger of two housing associations.
The 'masterplan' is for 1,980 council homes to be demolished and replaced with 5,557 new units. However, none of these new units will offered as secure council tenancies; 3,292 will be for private sale and 2,265 will be 'affordable'.
Corporate profitability will determine how many of those 2,265 'affordables' will be offered as 'social rented' homes. Low-income, former secure council tenants - who take up these insecure Notting Hill Genesis social rent tenancies - will risk rising rents, higher service charges and more costly utility bills.

Overseas buyers
About 900 Woodberry Down council homes have already been demolished in a first phase. Overseas investors, mainly from Asia, reportedly snapped up between 42% and 55% of the new 3,292 private sale units - a brisk trade for the Berkeley Group's Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing sales offices.
A one-bed Woodberry Down apartment was marketed for re-sale in June 2020 for £560,000 with running costs estimated at £2,310 a month, including mortgage repayments.

The Woodberry Down estate's regeneration will lead to the loss of
genuinely affordable homes for local people (Photo: © Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ® 2020)

Love Lane Estate

Estate Watch also features the Love Lane Estate in Tottenham, where families in 297 council homes are threatened with the demolition of their homes due to a regeneration agreement signed between Haringey Council and Lendlease.
The scheme also threatens dozens of long-established, family-run businesses on the Peacock Industrial Estate.
Labour-controlled Haringey Council says the scheme, branded with Lendlease as 'High Road West', would build 2,500 new homes.
The Council, led by Joe Ejiofor, says it will 'own 500 of these replacement homes'.
However, the Council says these new homes depend on a 'viably deliverable scheme' that will enable Lendlease to make a profit.
Developers, like Lendlease, aim for a 20% return on such London council estate regeneration schemes - a corporately-driven level of return that frequently leads to initial promises of affordable and social rented new homes later being broken.
Haringey Council says it needs the Mayor of London to release public funds to help make the Love Lane Estate regeneration viable to keep Lendlease on board.
But residents must vote 'yes' in an upcoming ballot before those public funds are released.

Secure and temporary

Haringey Council began rehousing secure Love Lane Estate council tenants in February 2015. Many of these tenants lost their secure council tenancy status by being moved off the estate to housing association homes on insecure renewable shorthold tenancies.

Since then, Haringey has moved homeless families into 'temporary accommodation' on the Love Lane Estate.
Some 190 homeless families, many with children, now form the majority of the estate's households. Many have now lived on the estate for several years.

These families have since established strong links with local schools and workplaces.
The majority of these households are in low-paid work and are ineligible for benefits - and many are families of Caribbean, African, Indian and European heritage.
They will not be able to afford to buy or rent new private homes on Lendlease's 'High Road West' development - nor even any of its planned 'affordable' homes.

Localism Act
So, why would a council - intent on demolishing a council estate in order to replace it with luxury private housing - temporarily house homeless families on an estate targeted for regeneration?
Haringey Council has a statutory duty to house homeless families living in hostels and other temporary accommodation.
However, in terms of the law, the Council can more easily move these temporary tenants off the estate into housing association and other private sector accommodation - particularly if the Council assumed responsibility for these homeless families after 9 November 2012.
That is the day the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's Localism Act 2011 came into force. A council can end its duty to house a 'post-2012' homeless individual or family if that household refuses an offer of an assured shorthold tenancy in a housing association or private sector home.

Hindered
This clause makes it easier for Haringey Council to legally shunt post-2012 temporary residents off the Love Lane Estate. Their removal would enable the developer to begin demolition.
But, since 2018, Mayor Khan's ballot requirement - albeit belated - has hindered Haringey and Lendlease's plans. Temporary accommodation householders must be allowed to vote.

Viable

Haringey Council says it is 'consulting' with all Love Lane Estate residents in advance of its Landlord Offer to be published possibly in late summer 2020. This offer is centre on another promise; in the shape of a 'local lettings policy' which would the council to 'prioritise' residents currently in temporary accommodation on the Love Lane Estate.
The implication is that the Council could offer temporary households new secure council homes on the redeveloped site - of course, once there is a 'yes' majority vote and after these temporary accommodation residents 'temporarily' move off the estate.
The Council hopes this packaged offer will lure residents to vote 'yes' to demolition'.

Salaried council officers and developer-paid staff about to 'consult' residents
on the Love Lane Estate in February 2019
(Photo: © Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ® 2019)

TAG

Many temporary accommodation households on the estate are exhausted by being moved from one temporary home to another; so yet another 'temporary' move is not welcome.  New homes will take several years to build even if Haringey and Lendlease stick to their promise.
Residents also distrust Haringey Council and Lendlease. They feel the council and developer are pressuring them into voting 'yes' to demolition.
A cluster of council officials and Lendlease employees (below) - based next to the estate in council premises - has sought to convince Love Lane Estate residents that developer-led demolition and regeneration is in the residents' best interests.
The Temporary Accommodation Group, or TAG, a genuinely independent residents-led group, continues to rebuff what it says is 'deceptive' regeneration propaganda. TAG says this propaganda is 'aggressively' peddled by Council officers and 'community development' staff hired by Lendlease.
TAG states the local lettings policy is a 'bizarre promise' used by the Council to mislead tenants into voting 'yes'.
The residents' group suspects that households would be moved off the estate where they would likely remain indefinitely - during which the Council would look for ways to discharge its homeless duty to them.

Better deal
Estate Watch says such strong residents' groups, like TAG, are vital to protect tenants when it comes to ballots and estate demolition. It says councils and housing associations are 'conducting ballots on terms that go against the Mayor of London's Estate Regeneration Guidance', a document supposed to help council tenants and leaseholders secure a better deal from regeneration schemes.

For instance, the Mayor of London's own guidance requires councils and housing associations to thoroughly consider the option of refurbishing council estates - but Estate Watch says most fail to do so.

Councils also routinely fail to offer residents the options of owning and managing their estates - and they dismiss community plans that residents do put forward.
No such options seem likely to be offered to Love Lane Estate residents.

False choice

Worse still, some London councils are offering ballot residents a false choice of demolition or neglect. Luise, a leaseholder on Camden's West Kentish Town Estate, describes how council visitors 'helped' residents fill in their ballot paper.
"We were basically told that if we voted against demolition the estate would be run down even further," says Luise.

A majority of residents voted in favour of demolition.

Labour-controlled Camden Council says the tenure mix on the new development will include 40% 'affordable' housing - even though the Mayor of London requires a minimum of 50%.

Right to Buy
Regeneration mirrors the sale and net loss of council homes under Right to Buy. Only 28,090 council homes have been built across the entire country to replace 85,645 such homes sold under Right to Buy since 2012-13.
The irony is that council estate regeneration schemes threaten to demolish the homes of Right to Buy leaseholders too.
Many such leaseholders have been at the forefront of resisting regeneration schemes - notably at the Heygate and Aylesbury estates.
Leaseholders are offered compensation at only a small fraction of market prices, leaving them unable to buy homes locally.

Meaningful
Estate Watch highlights these ongoing net losses and community destruction.
A post-pandemic lull could see more ballots taking place in what remains of 2020.

'Tenants must be fully informed and have meaningful choices before a ballot,' states the London Tenants Federation.

'We've joined with Just Space to establish Estate Watch because of concerns that this is not happening.'

Sources: https://estatewatch.london, Mayor of London, Zoopla, Hackney Council, Haringey Council, 35% Campaign

Further information: London Tenants Federation, Just Space, TAG #TAGLoveLane, @TAGLoveLane

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ®, June 2020

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The statue hidden in plain sight that revealed the City of London's cruel history

Robert Milligan was a key figure in the development of the City of London as a global financial centre. Milligan exploited African people as slaves in the eighteenth century. Londoners walked past his statue for over 200 years. But no more. Protestors have forced the removal of Milligan's statue from a Canary Wharf quayside. 

The statue of slave owner Robert Milligan at the West India Docks has been removed after 211 years
(Photo © London Intelligence ®) 

By Paul Coleman

Robert Milligan was a major figure in the growth of the City of London as a financial centre. Milligan was also a slave-owner. 

At the time of his death, Milligan owned 526 enslaved Africans.
They were forced to work on his two plantations in Jamaica. 
When Milligan died in 1809, the West India Dock Company erected a statue in his honour (above photo). 

Barbaric

Milligan is chiefly responsible for the construction of the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs in the late eighteenth century – one the first systems of enclosed docks built anywhere on Earth.
Milligan's statue stood for nearly 200 years at West India Dock's main gates. Then it was repositioned outside the Museum of London Docklands.

The Museum is housed in Warehouse No.1, one of nine West India Dock warehouses used to stash sugar, rum and coffee harvested by African slaves. The Museum includes a gallery that graphically depicts the central involvement of Britain's wealthy elite in the barbaric system of African slavery. Surprisingly, the Museum did not incorporate the statue or link it to its gallery's grim narrative about slavery.

Genius

The West India Dock Company's statue and its plaque stood unexplained for over two centuries. The plaque states: ‘To perpetuate on this spot, the memory of Robert Milligan, a merchant of London to whose genius, perseverance and guardian care the surrounding great work principally owes its design, accomplishment and regulation.

'The directors and proprietors deprived by his death on the 21st May 1809 of the continuance of his invaluable services by their unanimous vote have caused this statue to be erected.’

Escape
West India slave traders, plantation owners and sugar, rum and spice merchants – people like Robert Milligan –felt they needed secure docks in London to safeguard their precious cargoes. Their profits needed protection from criminal elements, drawn from London’s masses trying to escape poverty, starvation, disease and violence.
The plantocracy and merchants in the West Indies, drawn from Britain's wealthy merchant elite, boomed sugar exports to England. Slave-harvested exports from Jamaica, for instance, rose from 21,730 tons in 1699 to 49,738 tons in 1729. 

West India Committee
War and slave revolts threatened the lucrative trade in sugar and slavery. The 1775 outbreak of the American War of Independence against British colonial rule cut off the West Indian plantation owners from their cheapest sources of flour, meat, dairy produce, fish, and lumber. 
Rising prices for such American goods threatened the plantation owners financially. 
Milligan’s lucrative slavery and sugar trade was in peril. 
Milligan, and other slave traders and plantation owners, like the enormously wealthy George Hibbert, held an emergency meeting at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate, in the heart of the City of London.
They formed the West India Committee, a pressure group designed to flex political muscle against vested interests in Parliament and rival wealthy merchants in the City of London.
This West India lobby also helped to defeat attempts by the anti-slavery movement and its supportive minority of MPs to abolish the slave trade.

Revolt

The tumultuous 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, led to the temporary abolition of slavery in France's Caribbean colony. Plantation owners throughout British colonies in the West Indies – and merchants like Milligan and Hibbert – feared similar revolt. African slaves outnumbered white people in British colonies by almost three to one.

West Indiamen
In 1793 France declared war on England, forcing ‘West Indiamen’ – merchant ships – to convey their precious cargoes in convoys guarded by navy warships.

Even as the war intensified, convoys of West Indiamen ships still arrived in London laden with 40,000 hogsheads (large barrels) of sugar at a time.

Sugar
Warehouses in the chaotic and cramped port of London could only accommodate 327,000 hogsheads of sugar in one year. In 1798, 120,000 sugar hogsheads arrived. 
Sugar, rum and coffee piled up on quaysides. 
Eight thousand vessels of all sizes clogged the Thames up to four miles east of London Bridge. 
Streets off the river were constantly blocked. 
Corruption and chaos reigned.

Violent
Patrick Colquhoun, a former Virginia merchant, estimated the value of total booty in the Port of London at £75 million – “all of it subject to speculation, fraud, embezzlement, pillage and depredation”. 
Thousands of lightermen, watermen and porters all benefited from delays, inefficiency and corruption in the handling of West Indian slave-harvested produce. 
Licensed by City of London aldermen, these groups formed tight and violent brotherhoods.

Ships watchmen were robbed or bribed by crooked watermen known as ‘night plunderers’. ‘Scufflehunters’ disappeared as soon as they had hidden enough produce under their long aprons. ‘Mudlarks’ - groups of children – pretended to sift through the low tide silt for scraps but acted in cahoots with dockers who dropped merchandise over the side of ships. Sugar, coffee and rum was removed under darkness from their casks and hogsheads. 

Ratcatchers sneaked the same rats from one vessel to another to claim payments. 

Opposed

Colquhoun told Parliament only a high-walled, fortress-type dock system would protect the sugar, rum and coffee. Patrolled by a river police, such docks would secure revenues and profits. 

However, many City of London aldermen and owners of the existing legal quays fiercely opposed Milligan and Hibbert’s desire for a walled and policed docks. 

A lengthy tussle ensued for power and profit. 

West India Dock Act

Using Colquhoun’s proposals, the West India Committee members lobbied Parliament and the City of London over six years from 1793. 

Eventually, their lobbying led to the West India Dock Act 1799.
The Act decreed all West India produce - whether for import or export - had to go through the West India Docks.
The Act led to the formation of the West India Dock Company (WIDC).
It was a corporation that would enjoy a lucrative monopoly.
Over 120 initial subscribers, some investing as much as £500,000, sought to consolidate their profits from African slave trading and West Indian sugar plantations.

Ornament
Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and his cabinet joined the WIDC directors at the ceremonial laying of a foundation stone at two o’clock in the afternoon of 12 July, 1800.
Inset into the stone were two glass bottles; one contained coins marking the reign of King George III, the other a Latin inscription that said of Milligan and Hibbert: ‘The two latter distinguished to direct an undertaking, which, under the favour of God, shall continue Stability, Increase and Ornament to British Commerce’.
That day was declared a public holiday.
Newspapers reported that ‘elegant entertainment’ followed at the London Tavern where the ‘nobles and gentlemen’ made repeated and prolonged toasts to the ‘prosperity of the West India colonies’. 

Devoted

By 1802, the West India Docks were completed under the protection of a military guard armed with muskets and bayonets. 

The Docks comprised two parallel stretches of water, both 2,600 feet long and between 400-500 feet wide; one, an Import Dock, and the other an Export Dock.

Both docks were surrounded by large five-storey warehouses ‘devoted to the storage of merchandise’. 

On the south side of the Import Dock was a quay reserved for Jamaican slave-made rum held in underground vaults.

Marred

At each end of the docks a basin connected them to the Thames itself. 

The Blackwall Basin to the west was for the West Indiamen cargo ships, and the Limehouse Basin at the east for lighters, the small vessels used to unload moored West Indiamen. 

Tragedy ought to have marred the opening of the West India Docks. 

On 22 July, 1802, a labourer called Kent warned building site foremen about a weakening coffer dam wall at the Blackwall Basin. 

The foremen ignored Kent. 

The wall collapsed soon afterwards. 

Water from the Thames burst into the basin where 20 men were working. 

They scrambled to save themselves but six workers drowned; Richard Bough, supervising the work, four labourers, and a young boy. 

Shame

The WIDC paid compensation to their families.

The Times reported their deaths.

However, white working people's lives seemed to matter almost as little as the lives of black African slaves.

Resident docks engineer Ralph Walker was not struck by grief and guilt but angered by alleged inaccurate reporting and by implicit criticism of his engineering. 

‘That the number of unfortunate persons who lost their lives which were six, should be multiplied into sixty is consistent to a practice nothing uncommon with persons who feel pleasure in misfortune,’ wrote Walker. 

‘May those who feel conscious of deserving this reproof let shame have its proper effect on their minds.’

Vessel
The six ‘navvies’ were little more than dispensable drowned rats as far as Milligan and Hibbert and the WIDC shareholders were concerned. 
Just weeks later, on 22 August 1802, the West India Docks were publicly opened by the new prime minister, Henry Addington. 
Various press reports estimate that between 10,000 and 30,000 people attended.
The opening of the West Indies Docks was a celebrated national event.
Bands played and crowds cheered.
The first vessel that entered the dock system that day was The Henry Addington, bearing the ‘flags of all nations’. 
Immediately behind came the Echo. The West Indiaman, carrying 900 hogsheads of slave-harvested sugar, moored opposite Warehouse No.8. 
The company shareholders and its 21 directors, eight representing the Corporation of London, rubbed their hands with anticipation on the quay. 
Hibbert and the company men toasted Milligan once again.

Sweat
Profits flowed. Shareholders received 10 per cent dividends from 1803 until 1829. 

The WIDC accumulated a large fund.

Milligan’s West India Docks ensured London’s wealthy mercantile class was able to massively enrich itself through surpluses generated by the rapaciously systematic and brutal exploitation of African men, women and children in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. People like Milligan and Hibbert invested in land and property in London and beyond.

Capital surpluses generated from slavery - a trade justified by a racist God-fearing ideology - helped this strata of British society to further exploit and sweat the labour of white working people across Britain.

Logical

Milligan and Hibbert and their West India Docks were a logical outcome of slavery and racism. 

Without slavery and racism, there would have been no West Indian plantations. 

Without the plantations, there would have been no trade in African slave-made sugar, rum, spices and molasses from the West Indies.

Without the West Indian produce, no docks. 

With no docks, no development of the Isle of Dogs marshlands and no working class community in that part of London’s East End.

Today, Canary Wharf, the City of London's continuously expanding financial centre, looms over the West India Docks now calm waters. 

Many of the former West Indian colonies are now tax havens fuelled by City of London financial institutions.

Epicentre
Capitalism, slavery and racism created much of the wealth and power that led to the growth and consolidation of the City of London as a financial centre.
That wealth accumulation led eventually to the City of London being an epicentre of the global banking and financial meltdown of 2008-09.
Lehman Brothers - where that meltdown intensified - had its London HQ close to the West India Docks.

Plain sight
Yet little of these connections are part of the curriculum taught in London schools where pupils and teachers struggle with the harsh cruelties of contemporary racism.
Protestors in Bristol drew mass attention to these connections when they hauled down and pitched a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol Docks.
That action too was driven by a global reaction to the brutal killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer now charged with his murder.
It has taken a racist killing in the United States to reveal an aspect of London's history concealed in statuesque plain sight for many years.

At last, perhaps, a rudderless and depressingly repetitive present can navigate to a better future by means of its painful past.

This article is adapted from an original written by the author and published in The Weekly Journal newspaper on 20 July, 1995.

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ®, June 2020.

Pandemic London: The Unheeded Scientific Warning of 2014

By Paul Coleman

London Intelligence, 

May 2020

Rewind six years to 2014. Duncan Selbie, the chief executive of Public Health England, warns the UK government: 'The prospect of a flu pandemic is one of the highest risks faced by the UK.
'We need to be confident that our planning and responses are sufficiently flexible to deal with every eventuality,' says Selbie.
'Ensuring the country is fully prepared and able to respond quickly and effectively is a top priority for Public Health England, and, of course, for the government.'

Threat

Selbie issues his warning to the Conservative government in Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014, a report published in August of that year by Public Health England, the agency that advises the government and the National Health Service on public health strategy.  

The PHE report, prepared by Nick Phin, John Simpson, Gaynor Marshall, Hilary Moulsdale and Mike Laing, also states: 'Pandemic influenza has been classified by the Cabinet Office as the number one threat to the UK population.'
In their report the PHE quintet warn: 'As a guide, the impact could range from a 1918-type pandemic, where severe disease was mainly in young adults, to a 2009 pandemic, where the illness was mild in most groups of the population.'

PHE Chief Executive Duncan Selbie (Image: PHE)

H1N1
By 'mild', the PHE quintet mean that the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people around the world.

Less than one tenth of 1% of people infected with symptoms died, according to World Health Organisation estimates. 
The PHE quintet state: 'The 2009 H1N1 pandemic certainly tested our plans for dealing with new pandemic strains. Fortunately, it was a mild one.'

1918-19

However, the PHE's reference to the possible return of a 1918-19 type of pandemic - as a worst-case scenario - ought to have prompted all UK politicians to act.
The 'Spanish Flu' pandemic of 1918-19 killed at least 50 million people worldwide - and possibly as many as 100 million. 
It spread in just under two years, killing ten times as many people who died actually fighting in World War I.
Many of those who died horribly from the 1918-19 avian flu were strong, young adults.

Waves

The 1918-19 avian flu pandemic consisted of two waves.
Both waves spread rapidly; firstly amongst young men fighting in World War I and then to poorer people living in bad housing in densely populated cities.

The pandemic quickly became global, transmitted mainly by soldiers, travelling on ships and trains. 
It killed an estimated 17 million people in India alone.
Up to 3% of all people infected with flu symptoms died.

The 1918-19 avian flu pandemic first spread at a Kansas army base in the USA
(Source: Florence Nightingale Museum) 

Londoners
The virus killed 10% of 300,000 British troops infected towards the end of World War I.

It also killed at least 18,000 Londoners, according to the Museum of London. 
London hospitals were overrun with infected people. 
Many doctors and nurses died.
The pandemic compelled a Conservative-Liberal coalition government to create the first ever ministry of health in 1919. 

Health and care
Phin and his colleagues recommended in their Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014 that government and the NHS prepare for a 2009-type pandemic and a worst-case scenario 1918-19 pandemic.
They listed an array of measures involving almost every branch of government and all hospitals and care homes. 
Notably, these measures included the provision of 'personal protective equipment' to staff in 'health and communal care settings'.

Cygnus
What happened also to Exercise Cygnus?
PHE had scheduled this extensive pandemic response simulation for October 2014. 
Local NHS trusts were waiting for this multi-agency pandemic flu exercise involving 'local resilience forums'. 
However, it is said this had to be postponed due to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. 
Exercise Cygnus eventually took place in October 2016, delayed further by the May 2015 general election and the June 2016 Brexit referendum.
The simulation is said to have revealed shortages of intensive care beds, essential equipment and mortuary capacity.
Yet the full conclusions of Exercise Cygnus were never published.

Later warning

The Global Health Council also warned in March 2018 that flu pandemic is the number one health risk to the world's population, estimating three hundred million could die over just two years. 

Other virologists in 2018 warned that a 21st Century virus would transmit much faster and further as it would be borne by infected people travelling by air, contaminating further people at airports. 

A new virus, they said, could criss-cross the world in just 24 hours. 

Worst-case scenario

The scientific consensus in 2018 was that a 21st Century flu pandemic would kill 1% of all infected people.

Scientists estimated that if one third of British people caught a deadly new influenza, then a 1 per cent fatality rate would result in some 200,000 people dying.

Trouble

Professor Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London, an expert in the field of respiratory influenza viruses, spoke in 2018 about the PHE's plan, notably about its warning of a repeat of the 1918-19 pandemic as a worst-case scenario.

"You have to plan for the worst-case scenario, because if that one comes and you're not ready for it, then you're in big trouble," said Barclay. 

"It's reassuring to say we have ways of dealing with influenza pandemics today which were not available in 1918. But I think if we saw anything like a one per cent fatality rate then it would be a terrible experience for everyone."
Barclay said this whilst holding the Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014 in her hand.

Terrible

Two years on, we are now in the midst of the ongoing terrible carnage of Covid-19. 
The UK government says the pandemic has officially killed 37,048 people (as of Tuesday 26 May) - the highest number of deaths in any European country.
The Office for National Statistics say the death toll is likely to be over 47,000 people. 

Other estimates put the UK death toll at over 65,000 people. 

Essential

Covid-19 is now believed to have killed 235 health and social care workers, according to Nursing Notes.

Covid-19 has also killed bus drivers, postal service workers and other workers in essential sectors.
All of this we now know.
But we still know little about the UK government's response to the PHE's Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014.
David Cameron was Prime Minister and Jeremy Hunt was Health Secretary.
What attention did these two key politicians also pay to the later warnings made by Barclay and other scientists?

Emergency
What also happened to the actual authors of Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014?
Nick Phin is now deputy director of PHE's National Infection Service. 

John Simpson is deputy director of PHE's Health Protection Directorate and is head of the Emergency Response Department. 

Hilary Moulsdale is exercise manager in emergency preparedness and response, based at Porton Down, the emergency response department for England.
Gaynor Marshall retired as manager of supra regional emergency preparedness manager and national support in September 2014.

Duncan Selbie is still PHE chief executive.

Scientists

A government spokesman said in April 2020: "This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have take the right steps at the right time to combat it. Our response at all times is guided by the best scientific advice."
Government politicians daily mantra they are vigorously 'following the science' and 'listening to scientists'.
Nevertheless, the UK government remains heavily criticised in May 2020 for presiding over the Covid-19 deaths of large numbers of elderly care home residents and for failing to provide personal protective equipment for staff in hospitals and care homes.

Foresight
'Hindsight is a wonderful thing,' politicians often tell the people when the people challenge them about past mistakes that cause present miseries.
Politicians use the cosy hindsight homily to excuse their procrastination and inaction.
UK government politicians could have chosen to abide by another homily; 'pray for the best and prepare for the worst.'

Myth
So, how did successive UK governments since 2014 respond to the 'best scientific advice' gifted to them by the authors of the Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014?
Did they complacently rely on a blind faith in anti-viral drugs, antibiotics and existing public health plans?

Did they actually believe in the blithering myth of Britain's island nation exceptionalism; of the kind that blathers, 'No virus, please, we're British.'

Or were politicians too busy pursuing their personal political ambitions and agendas?

Accountable
NHS doctors and nurses are drilled daily about how they must own up to errors in real time in order to prevent unnecessary risks that might lead to a loss of life.
UK government politicians, who dictate on policy and pay to those doctors and nurses, behave antithetically to this code. 
The British political class instinctively seeks to cover up fatal errors facilitated by their own clouded judgement.
Will government politicians ever be rendered accountable for their response to the scientific foresight contained in the Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014?

Sources:

Pandemic Influenza Response Plan 2014, Public Health England, © Crown copyright 2014.

The Flu That Killed 50 Million, BBC TV, September 2018.

Nursing Notes
Museum of London
Florence Nightingale Museum

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence ® London, May 2020.