In my new parish at Elephant and Castle, flats sell for £1.6m in a glamorous tower. But those in deprived housing are ignored
Dating back to the early 13th century, the ancient name of the parish is St Mary, Newington, though most people know the area as the Elephant and Castle. It's a stretch of London that runs from Kennington in the south to the six-lane traffic nightmare that circles the notorious postwar Elephant and Castle shopping centre in the north. One end of the parish is full of MPs in touching distance of the division bell area for the House of Commons, and the other has some of the most deprived housing in the whole of London. The parish opened its first workhouse in 1734 and was constituted as a poor law parish a century later.
Like pretty much everything else in the area, St Mary's church was bombed during the war. Its present state reflects the scars of the past as well as those of the present. A lonely church tower sprouting weeds stands disconnected from the 1950s building that is the current church. The church hall is no longer considered safe and has had to be closed down. The congregation is loyal but small. Welcome to my new world. I begin as priest-in-charge of St Mary, Newington, in a few weeks' time.
I arrived at St Paul's Cathedral in September 2008, the same month that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in the US. Having borrowed over 30 times its own wealth in order to play the markets with sub-prime mortgage-backed securities, Lehman Brothers became a byword for greed and irresponsibility in financial markets. It was far from alone. As stock markets around the world collapsed, it became obvious that whole countries had borrowed off what they expected to be a better future. And so the financial sins of the fathers came to be visited upon their children and their children's children, with the poor feeling the effects more than anyone else. In this country, more than 1 million young people are currently on the dole.
My time at St Paul's ended abruptly with Occupy. When so many others tiptoed around the problem, Occupy returned the issue squarely to one of basic fairness and inequality. And for all the personal darkness that resulted from my resignation, Occupy may well have saved my soul. What better place than Newington to play for those terrifying stakes described by St Matthew: that those who lose their life will find it. And what better place to reflect more about the devastating effects of financial irresponsibility on ordinary people.
Before the war, the Elephant was a bustling hub of cultural activity, known as the Piccadilly Circus of south London and full of theatres and clubs. The Metropolitan Baptist church was this country's first megachurch, with up to 6,000 people packed in to hear a succession of famous preachers. It wasn't just the Nazi bombers that did for all that, but the hubris of postwar planners who wanted to think big and redesign the whole area according to one rational and integrated plan. If I have a suspicion of the sort of thinking that eagerly claims the mantle of rationality, it is partly out of a distrust of modernist architecture and the whole "machine for living in" philosophy. The supposedly rational scale is not always the most human.
The question is: are developers doing the same thing to the Elephant all over again? Currently the old estates are being demolished to make way for a massive £1.5bn, 55-acre redevelopment, funded by Australian property developers and supported by Southwark council. Bill Clinton praised the proposed scheme as a model for low-carbon development. Others see it as an attempt at gentrification and relocating the poor further out of central London. In 2006 Southwark council insisted that "all new residential schemes have a 35% affordable provision, and in premium sites – such as Elephant and Castle – that figure rises to at least 40%".
Last month the latest plans were unveiled for the Elephant and Castle leisure centre site. It includes a 25-metre swimming pool and a glamorous high-rise tower of private flats, but no affordable housing whatsoever. None. Two-bedroom flats in the nearby Strata tower (with built-in wind turbines) go for £1.6m. Flats in the leisure-centre tower will go for a similar amount. "The decision not to include homes for rent in this scheme is an exception to normal policy," admitted the Labour-run council.
The heart of south London is being re-made. But what values will be inscribed into the fabric of this new adventure? And who will really end up as the beneficiaries? Artists' impressions depict a bright new world of leisure and community. They always do. Out with the old and in with the new is a compelling narrative, especially when the old had so much that didn't work.
But many residents claim that the problems with the old housing stock were overplayed – less to do with bad design and more to do with badly funded maintenance. Indeed, some residents have gone so far as to argue that the whole area has been deliberately run down in order to justify bringing in the property developers.
This week the story in St Mary's church will be one of death and resurrection. It's not a story that can be rationally calibrated. But it has the human scale at its very heart. The question is: will the redevelopment of the Elephant have the same?
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