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| 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.
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| 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.
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| The Elephant and Castle statue amidst towering new luxury penthouses (© London Intelligence ®) |
© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, November 2020
(Published by London Intelligence Limited ®)
