How to Save Your House From Demolition

Dave returns home from walking his two daughters to school and steps through the door. He feels the unmistakable sensation of stepping on a letter on the doormat. Once the scooters were put away, he notices the letter is addressed to “The Owner”. Now usually, with the kebab menus and Pizza GoGo ads these indirect messages would go in the recycling bin. It would be another hour before his first pupil of the day arrived, so he thought it best to read the one addressed to “The Owner”. After all, this is his first mortgage and 6 months of renovations deep, he’s proud to be the owner of this North London terrace house.

The letter, delivered early March, read along these lines:

(shortened for your reading)

“To the Owner,

Haringey Council are changing Wood Green. We aim to improve public services and increase the levels of housing. We’re sure you’ll be happy with the changes, we want you to be involved in the decisions so there will be consultation representatives.

Once he tediously copied the link from the paper into his search bar, the information on that document would take days to sink in and a year to fix.

The Victorian terracotta homes that sit behind Tottenham and Wood Green’s highstreets of blueish hue, although well built, feel ancient in an evolving London. They’re artefacts in the museum of Haringey.

Other displays at the museum include: the Latin Village in Seven Sisters — the 2nd largest Latin community in the UK. The 1960s experiment in high-density social housing, the Broadwater Farm Estate — important in understanding one of the most ethnically diverse locations in London. As of 2005 it’s 3,800 residents originated from 39 different nationalities.

The Northumberland Park Estate in the East wing also holds interest. It’s in the top 5 per cent of most deprived areas in Britain. With crowded apartments and high youth unemployment, it was destined to be at the heart of 2011’s summer riots.

Haringey’s Development Vehicle (HDV) is a ‘regeneration strategy of an unprecedented scale’. If unopposed, the Council would have these estates (and a few more), the Latin Village and Dave’s entire road, demolished.

Dave hardly understood the online pdf file at first. What he was looking at was the Wood Green Area Action Plan (AAP), a piece to the puzzle of the HDV. It’s dense text and colourful artistic representations seemed interesting, but why should he carry on reading?

Well Dave, if you hurry up and get to Page 125 you’ll see the council have divided your area into sections. You and your neighbours are circled in with the dated Shopping Mall and disused petrol station. “None of the buildings [in that area] need to be retained.” Wood Green’s future didn’t include Dave’s family nor his neighbours’.

The document then started to make sense more as a property developers handbook rather than public information handout. Dave and his wife noted they “do feel a bit violated the council can just turn up with a document that goes ‘oh by the way, we’re going to destroy your life.’”

The HDV would see £2 Billion pounds worth of publicly-owned land given to a private company half owned by Haringey Council, half-owned by private developer Lendlease. To quote Haringey’s website: they “simply do not have the money and cannot sustainably borrow it…councils are also not as well equipped as the private sector when it comes to development projects on this scale.”

In late October, the council were proven by the Royal Courts of Justice to have consulted the public properly. Do the people have reason to be angry?

Approximately a hundred residents from the breadth of Haringey turned up that day to appeal for a Judicial Review of the HDV on October 25th — forcing the courts to move the case to a larger room. A train of lawyers, Northumberland Park residents and journalists wandered the historic halls of Justice for an hour that morning like a silent comedy. Infuriated Liberal Democrat councillor for 3 years Clive Carter, said “all of this [development planning] has been done without the full knowledge of the council…it’s ridiculous.”

The appeal for the court to review the ‘Vehicle’ failed. But Phil Rose who ran the StopHDV campaign with Gordon Peters, which crowdfunded the legal team, always knew the battle was “never going to be won legally. The aim was to delay them and apply political pressure.”

“The first thing we did was knock on doors” Dave remembers late March. “We quickly realised none of our neighbours or the landlords knew this was going on. Had we not knocked, who’s to say they would even know now.”

Daily work as a Maths tutor hadn’t prepared him nor allowed much time to stop the demolition of his and two other neighbouring roads. “You shouldn’t have to spend a month of your life, telling the council you don’t want your house knocked down.”

He received lesson after lesson in council operations. Firstly the wider aspects of the HDV were saddening, then he experienced how they conducted consultations through “biased” non-council representatives. The AAP had four options: consultation representatives “sold” the fourth option and when Dave asked where in Wood Green one of the images was supposed to represent, the rep replied, “oh that’s Venice, but you get the picture”.

Using the AAP’s own figures and the London Plan’s density matrix, they showed preserving their Victorian homes would impact the net amount of homes built by less than 0.5%. Appendum II states: “Saving our homes, community and historic buildings therefore entails very little (and entirely reasonable and justifiable) compromise to the AAP goals.”

“This is the most controversial and contentious political issue that I have seen in Tottenham since I was first elected to parliament 17 years ago” says local MP David Lammy on the HDV. The other MP in the borough, Catherine West, has also urged the predominately Labour council to rethink their methods.

Hotspurs’ executives promised 200 new homes, half of these “affordable”, and boasted other benefits to the area. However, a recent change in the plans proposes they will sell 285 privately sold apartments to keep in tow with Haringey’s previous two years of building zero social homes.

A football club is a multi-million-pound franchise, and cannot be expected to make commitments to the public as much as the council’s joint venture with Australian developer Lendlease.

Every window on Dave’s street had posters reading “Save Caxton Road”. By late December the posters read “THANK YOU”.

On December 18th, 2018, the council decided their goals can be achieved without the demolition of Dave’s and his neighbours’ roads.

His wife and daughters are pleased Dad can try and relax. “It would be nice to trust the council, but it does feel like they’re going to try and knock my house down when I’m not looking.”

In the grand scheme of things Dave says he does want some form of regeneration happen, “a swimming pool would be nice.” Digressing he says “poverty is a threat to the area if businesses can’t stay open, but turning the area into a building site bit by bit might not help that. Also, another 20,000 people, might make it difficult to run public services properly.”

The HDV has torn Haringey’s Labour Councill apart, forcing council leader Claire Kober to quit, blaming sexist and bullying behaviour from Labour group Momentum. Council elections in May will see newly elected councillors, and any serious candidate understands the public’s clear opinion on the HDV — the fate of which is therefore is uncertain. Mandate for the venture hangs in the balance.

The Labour national executive committee has spoken. The boroughs’ MPs have spoken. Dave now knows his neighbours better and saved his home from demolition.

One would hope councils partner with their people rather than private corporations.

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