What do you do when somebody wants to erect a monstrous carbuncle on your
doorstep? Or even a modest carbuncle. A fairly inoffensive carbuncle, of
which you’d be all in favour, provided it was just somewhere else. What
then?
Increasingly, Britain’s Nimbys are taking a stand. As The Times
reported yesterday, the Prince of Wales is backing a new initiative, called
Street Pride, which aims to encourage communities to mobilise in order to
protect their own environments. Gryff Rhys Jones, the comedian, is the
figurehead.
“I am proud to be a Nimby,” he says. “Because this is not my back yard. This
is my garden, and if I don't look after it, who will?”
At most, Street Pride will be a unifying force: the seeds of dissent are
already there. Look in the right places, and the internet seethes with
well-heeled protest.
Let us start small. We could start with eco-towns, or windfarms, or
supermarkets, but instead, let us start with the case of Little
Green Street in North London. I first heard about it when I had phone
call from Tom Conti. Yes, that Tom Conti. Him out of Shirley Valentine,
and Ross’s father-in-law from Friends (comic actors and urban
planning — there must be a link).
We’d never met, Conti and I, but I’d written an article about getting my car
towed away, and this is the sort of thing that gets him into a real lather.
“Rage,” he tells me, when we do meet. “Rage. That’s why I’m involved. It's
just the idea that there is a local authority that makes a decision, and the
Government simply overrules it. They just ride roughshod. And it is so ill
considered and people’s lives are going to be so badly affected, and they
just don’t care and . . .” But more of this later.
Conti doesn’t even live on Little Green Street. It’s not his own back yard
he’s worried about, but that of his friend Elizabeth Payne. She’s an actor
too, and the pair have been working and writing together for more than a
decade. In 2006, they appeared together in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.
As an outspoken critic of the London congestion charge (not so much the
charge itself, more the fines) and a founding member of the London Motorists
Action Group, Conti was already well primed for a decent fight against The
Man. Within 18 months, thanks to Little Green Street, he was lying down in
front of a truck. No, really. But more of that later, too.
At issue here is a road in Kentish Town that is extremely little, even if it
isn’t particularly green. At one end of it you’ll find the busy Highgate
Road, which is absolutely not little or green at all. At the other end,
you’ll find a patch of derelict ground that used to be a British Rail staff
clubhouse. This was bought by a developer in 2001 for slightly under a
million pounds and is basically your dream urban brownfield building site,
apart from one important consideration. Namely, that there’s no way of
getting there, apart from by going down Little Green Street.
This is a problem. You can drive down Little Green Street, but apart from the
Camden Council rubbish truck once a week, which struggles, virtually nobody
ever does. It’s not much wider than your car, there’s nowhere to go, and you
can’t really turn around when you get there. It does seem strange place to
want to build twenty houses, ten flats, and a thirty-space underground car
park.
The residents have two objections. The first is the development itself, and
the second is the almighty kerfuffle required, for years, in order to build
it.
Planning permission was declined, and then granted on appeal by the Planning
Inspectorate. The construction methodology was declined, and then granted on
appeal by the Planning Inspectorate. You try wandering down Little Green
Street and saying the words “Planning Inspectorate”. People almost spit.
“This is a pretty extreme example of the way that planning issues can really
unite communities,” says Simon Ricketts, who is the head of planning and
environment at the law firm S. J. Berwin, and has acted for Little Green
Street residents in their fight. “It’s not rare. People find that a decision
has been taken that cannot be reversed, even if it is an obvious error.”
A decade or two ago, says Ricketts, people were more willing simply to accept
whatever decision the authorities came to, much as they might grumble.
Perhaps it’s just down to the enabling power of the internet, but something
in the British psyche has changed. “The public has got much more confident
in asserting their rights, and exploiting what avenues are open to them,” he
says. “People are much more willing to use modern media in fighting planning
battles.”
Street Pride, the campaign backed by Rhys Jones and Prince Charles, is an
obvious manifestation of this. The Prince could be considered Britain’s
Nimby-in-chief (and we are all in his back yard) but, ironically, he too is
feeling the wrath of the new Nimbyism in his capacity as a landowner. His
estate, the Duchy of Cornwall, owns the village of Newton St Loe, on the
outskirts of Bath. Many of his tenants are in public uproar over plans to
build 2,000 houses on farmland.
Ricketts also points me in the direction of websites such as Tescopoly.org,
which unites opposition against supermarkets, or Wind-watch.org,which does
the same with windfarms. On the former, you’ll find a long list of places
where planning for a superstore has been requested, protested against and
denied. In each one, most likely, you’d find a little interpersonal drama of
grit and determination, motivated by a sudden Nimby horror.
“The planning system has become entirely opaque,” says Ricketts. “The public
feels entirely disenfranchised. People have lost trust in the system, and it
has happened because they don’t understand the rationale for the decisions
that are made in their name. And the people who take these decisions often
haven’t undergone any training at all. These decisions are taken in a
quasi-judicial way, and often by people without the sort of skill set you’d
expect them to have.”
Who takes planning decisions? Councils initially, but if a council vetos
something, a developer will invariably go to the the Planning Inspectorate.
This is an arm of the Department for Communities and Local Government. Their
figures show that about one in three appeals is successful, and that this
has remained fairly consistent for the past five years.
One in three seems quite a lot, and it’s hard to figure out exactly what it is
that this arm of central government feels that local authorities are so
often getting wrong, or why its own inspectors should, necessarily, do any
better. “I suppose they have more distance,” suggests a press officer over
the phone, before e-mailing me a line about the right of appeal being “a
longestablished part of our democratic system”, adding that “it is crucial
that the appeal case is considered by a third party”. Local councils,
presumably, are far too concerned about minor matters such as votes.
Street Pride aims to concentrate on fixtures and clutter — abandoned bikes,
stupid signs — as much as on actual bricks-and-mortar developments.
For a future potential large-scale Nimbyish victory, keep an eye on plans for
the eco-town of Middle Quinton near Stratford-upon-Avon, still awaiting a
final verdict from the Planning Inspectorate after a lengthy and
high-profile campaign.
That one has Dame Judi Dench and John Nettles on board. Locals have set up the
Bard campaign (Better Accessible Responsible Development), created a
website, dispatched press releases, and are generally raising merry hell
about the proposal for 6,000 homes and a business park to spring up on their
doorsteps.
The battle of Little Green Street is far smaller, but just as fiercely fought.
First, the residents complained that vast trucks were going to thunder past
every three minutes for the next few years and make their little
18th-century listed houses, which don’t have foundations at all, fall down.
The developers said that the trucks probably wouldn’t make them fall down,
and even if they did, they’d rebuild them.
The residents pointed out that one early diagram actually showed cars passing
on Little Green street, which patently wasn’t going to be possible, never
mind the damn trucks, and the developers stuck with the truck thing, and
pointed out that the truck that Conti lay down in front of (which we will
come to, I promise) was actually the wrong type of truck altogether. And, as
a result, eight years later, still no work has actually been done. That’s
the thing about Nimbyism. It takes a lot of effort.
I visited last month, for an open house day. Some of the houses are tiny, such
as the one-up, one-down occupied by the architect Jim Beggs. Others start
tiny but open up inside, like the Tardis, such as the one occupied by the
family of Amanda Blinkhorn, a freelance journalist, or the sprawling,
interiors-magazine-worthy homes of the street’s other architects, Peter and
Cathy Thomas. Inquisitive Londoners were trooping in and out of all of them,
marvelling at their cuteness. “All those cars will actually be coming up and
down here?” I kept hearing people say to each other. “But that’s
unbelievable.”
I’d assumed that the celebrities must have turned up in a job lot —
round-robin at the Groucho Club, that sort of thing. Conti says not. He and
Liz Payne organised a demonstration against the development — for which he
hired, and lay down in front of that seven-and-a-half-tonne truck, and they
just kept turning up, all of their own accord. Suddenly Roger Lloyd Pack and
Ken Loach were involved. Jon Snow was there. Bill Nighy called the
development “senseless”. The street had inspired the Kinks’ song Dead
End Street (and was used in the video), so Dave Davies of the band came
along, too. “It’s sad that they feel they have to run slipshod over this
lovely enclave of road,” he said. “How are they going to build it? By
helicopter?”
“One or two of the other residents actually found it incredibly frustrating,”
says Elizabeth Payne. “We’d been plugging away for years, and now that there
were celebrities involved we were suddenly getting somewhere.” That was when
the campaign shifted up a gear. There was a petition, signed by almost 2,000
people. Numerous articles appeared in the local and national press, and
there were items on the local TV news, for which the street’s seven kids
went out to skip and throw balls around. That was when Camden Council
rejected the developer’s construction methodology, only to be over-ruled by
the Planning Inspectorate again.
“It is becoming more common, with brownfield development sites, that
celebrities get involved,” sighs Satish Patel, of PTP Architects, for the
developer. “It is not helpful. Some of the things that Tom Conti has said
are totally false. Nobody would use a truck that size.”
To put it bluntly, reckons Patel, Little Green Street just isn’t worth
preserving. The houses are listed with English Heritage, but the street
itself is not. “They tried to get it listed,” he says. “They didn't succeed.
It’s special, but it just isn’t special enough. The street has been dug up
many times. The light fittings are not original. Nothing is original, except
for two timber posts. It’s very emotional, with the cobbles, but it has all
been lifted many times.”
All the same, Patel admits that if the same plans were submitted today, they
would probably not be approved because they are not car-free.
“But they were approved,” he says. “And if we changed them now, we’d have to
resubmit them.” That could take another eight years.
As with any local drama, there is more to the battle of Little Green Street
than could ever be squeezed into one article. There was a High Court spat
between one developer and another. There’s the fact that Camden Council owns
the road, and is responsible for it, even if the developers are responsible
if any of the houses fall down. There is the question of how some of those
30 cars are going to get out, if others of those 30 cars are trying to get
in. There are bits of land that may be pavements but may be roads. There’s a
hole, really quite small, that may have been dug illegally but may not, and
about which everybody concerned grows quite apoplectic (“The whole mystery
of the hole,” frowns Conti, “is very suspicious.”).
Mainly, though, there is just the usual, ever-present friction between people
who live somewhere, and other people who want to change it.
“If you’ve got half a brain,” says Conti, “you’ll see that you can’t use
Little Green Street as an access. You’ll have trucks going up in low gear,
belching fumes straight through people's front doors. It’s just outrageous
and nobody really gives a damn. They have guys who are paid to sit there and
just say ‘Whatever’ all day, in various forms, don’t they?
“I used to support Labour. I must have been out of my mind. They just don’t
care about people. It’s like a religion with them. It’s like dealing with
nutty old Catholics. I think that making life difficult for people is not
what Governments ought to do.”
Since the Planning Inspectorate delivered its last verdict in September, the
residents of Little Green Street have been braced for work to start any day.
“They have to build on this,” said Jon, the photographer, when we went to
look around the site. “People like us need places to live, too.”
And he’s right, because not everybody can afford to live in a lovely,
picturesque little English Heritage townhouses, on an effectively
pedestrianised street.
London needs houses, just as Britain needs eco-towns, towns need supermarkets,
and airports need runways. Preferably not in my back yard, though. Nor,
presumably, in yours.
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