Everyday tale of Gentrification

Rummaging around in a pile of newspapers at home I came across an old copy of G2 contain a brilliant article by Hari Kunzru on the fight to save Francesca’s Cafe on Broadway Market. There was a wider battle against rent rises and an attempt to gentrify the market out of all recognition.
In the light of the discussion with ‘Curious’ Rainbow George on Saturday and the attempt to talk about a successful squatted campaign by George, I thought I’d post Kunzru’s follow-up article about the occupation of the cafe that lasted 4 months. Sadly they were evicted but it demonstrates that the smallest thing, such as the closure of a cafe, can sparked a strong and spirited campaign. It also gives a bit of context to the Class War march through Notting Hill on 3rd November.

A dispatch from Tony’s cafe
Hari Kunzru
Thursday January 5, 2006
Guardian
Though my corner of Hackney has yet to attain a Middle-Earth level of cosmic grandeur, the ongoing battle between local people and the forces of regeneration has been growing in stature. We’ve got our very own Dark Lord, in the shape of a property developer called Dr Roger Wratten, who has an underground island base in Tunbridge Wells and a henchman with a glass eye. Ranged against him is a hobbit-like band of local people, who since late November have been barricaded inside Francesca’s cafe at 34 Broadway Market, blocking Wratten from pulling it down to build a block of flats.
Since G2 first covered the occupation a month ago, No 34 has seen everything from espionage to battering rams. There was a large and rowdy public meeting, at which a (presumably heavily-sedated) council official played the role of ritual sacrifice and was duly mauled by the local furies. Wratten’s wife went undercover into the cafe, where she posed as a supporter, stuck 20 quid into the collection bucket and even signed the petition. When she bragged about her mission to the London Evening Standard, the occupiers (who until then had no idea she’d been there) mounted a cheeky legal defence, claiming that as a director of her husband’s property company, her actions could constitute a licence for them to remain on the premises. The judge took the best part of a day to decide the matter, eventually concluding that though Mrs Wratten’s actions had been “foolish” they didn’t actually imply she wanted the protesters to stay.
Just before Christmas, filled with festive cheer and armed with a court order, a van-load of Wratten’s men arrived at the cafe. They broke down the front door and immediately set about ejecting the occupants. Within the hour they’d taken off the roof and were well on the way to collapsing the whole structure into the basement, watched sullenly by a group of heckling locals.
Unfortunately for Wratten, his men were so eager that they didn’t follow basic safety procedures and by mid-morning the demolition had been halted by the Health and Safety Executive. It was then discovered they hadn’t even bothered to disconnect gas bottles from stoves and heaters, risking blowing much of Broadway Market sky high.
The cafe’s destruction was undoubtedly a low point for the protesters, but demonstrating the sort of perverse determination usually only seen in old war movies, a group of volunteers got up on Boxing Day morning, went into the demolished cafe, cleared away the rubble and rebuilt it. By that evening the occupation was back on. By New Year’s Eve there was a two-storey structure with a back wall and a reinforced anti-bailiff frontage. Francesca’s was reborn.
Since the story broke, journalists from around the world have started to appear at the cafe. The other day I found Der Spiegel taking tea behind the barricades and TV crews from as far away as Australia have filmed the battered site. On New Year’s Day a sermon was even preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, which took No 34 (and Isaiah 35) as its text. “So, if this is our city,” asked Father William Taylor, “where the High Way is not so much a Holy Way but a prime development opportunity for international capital investment, where does that leave us today?”
The battle even seems to be taking on the contours of an international diplomatic incident. The mayor of Naro, the home town in Sicily of Tony Platia, who has run Francesca’s for 30 years, has written to Ken Livingstone, demanding to know how he could allow the demolition of “this famous Italian premises”. La Repubblica and Rai Uno are building the story up into a pan-European grudge match.
Meanwhile Wratten has got court authorisation for another eviction. By the time you read this Francesca’s might be a hole in the ground. Or not …

Fore more on the market have a gander at ‘The Battle of Broadway Market’

To see how the battle for the soul of Hackney continues have a look at The Hackney Independent

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The Future of London


Saturday night I went on the excellent Russell Brand Show on BBC Radio2 to debate with Rainbow George who is trying to persuade Russell to stand for Mayor of London. Now Rainbow George is a bona fide London character, should HV Morton or Gordon S Maxwell be chronicling the London of today I’m sure they’d seek George out. He’s the Hampstead eccentric who as Peter Cook’s neighbour taped over 100 hours of their conversations. He also claimed ownership of his Hampstead mansion after his landlord disappeared, he sold it for £710,000 3 years ago and has since blown it all on his political campaigns.
So really maybe he has a vision of London that we could learn from.
Sadly he offered Russell only a series of poetic puns based on a new currency of Gasps and Wonders issued by the Bank of a Zillion Wonders. Other than that his vision is for a “Brand Spanking New London Party. The transformation of London into an inter-dependent leisure oriented – self-governing cash-free wonder City with Hampstead as its capital”
I’m afraid I gave George short shrift, I invited him to advocate the collectivisation of private assets and he returned to Gasps and Wonders. A Squatter City is far more appealing to me than a Wonder City – which we already have.

Thinking about the Mayoral election and George’s bonkers take on it did make me go back to William Margrie of the London Explorers Club. He had a vision for London and maybe Rainbow George could take a leaf out of his book. This is what he wrote on 1934:
The Metropolitan Free State
“London government is muddle-headed, chaotic, idiotic.”
The Metropolitan Free State will include Greater London and five or six Home Counties and the Thames.
– emulate Mussolini and give Londoners plenty of dramas, pageants and shows to wake them up
– if one wants to do anything important in this stodgy world he must be a realistic artist
– foster local spirit and patriotism by means of art, music, flower shows, and athletic combats

And what was I going to propose you may well ask, well this is what I scribbled down in my notebook on my way to the Great Portland Street studios:
– ban all traffic from the congestion charge zone and grass it over
– promote and subsidize walking as primary means of transport
– no new buildings – there are around 75,000 empty homes in London – turn them over to Squatters Groups
– planning decisions to be based on principles of psychogeography with the preservation of the city’s natural topography to be given special priority
– The recovery of London’s lost rivers of the Fleet, the St. Clement’s, the Walbrook, The Langbourne, the Oldbourne, the Effra, the Ravensbourne, and the Hackney Brook with the digging up of roads etc. where necessary
– Scrap the Olympics
– An annual parade of the ‘Mocking of The Rich’ with the unfortunates of the city to lead a procession through Mayfair, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Kensington and Chelsea (see Class War’s Notting Hill ‘Toffs Out’ march on November 3rd)

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Applied Epistemology, psychogeography and the ‘History of Britain Revealed’

I’m 75 pages into M.J. Harper’s brilliant ‘The History of Britain Revealed’, I’m not after a round of applause for that because it’s a right page turner – I’ve got there after about 36 hours (take into account sleep and parenting). Riveting to me because it affirms a lot of the ideas I have previously passed off under the guise of comedy and/or psychogeography.

Harper practices Applied Epistemology, loosely defined as the study of knowledge and how it is acquired and processed, but he comes up with the idea that when looking at history for example, and in the case of his book, the history of the English language, Applied Epistemology would say that “what is, is what was – unless there is bonechilling evidence to the contrary” (MS spellcheck has just flipped out over that sentence – ha!). At this point I could go off on a splenetic diversion about how this is backed up by trying to teach English grammar to foreign language students using the grammatical system imposed by a classically educated elite who were quietly embarrassed about the English language essentially being a brilliant street language (hence its conquering of the world – little publicised fact is that many pan-European companies and organisations that have little contact with native English speaking countries are still adopting English as their working language as it is the most easily transferable and flexible).

But where it resonates most strongly with me is the interface with what we call psychogeography – at best a fraught term. The reason there is such variance in definitions is that we use it to plug gaps in other disciplines where they are deficient. The reason it has persisted though is because of MJ Harper’s maxim of “what is is what was …”, so when we see fragments of footpath that link up across an industrial estate leading to an iron-age earthwork we conclude that here lies an ancient trackway. The archaeologists howl of course because for them there is no evidence, whereas for the psychogeographer the evidence is beneath your feet and in the experience of walking a way mapped out millennia before. When we aim to chart the experience of the landscape we record the present as it is experienced and work backwards from this using what resources we can get our grubby little mits on. But like Harper we are always at odds with an inflexible, philistine paradigm that will not budge unless kicked bloody hard. Incidentally, I love the way Harper speaks not in terms of paradigm shifts but paradigm cracks.

Buy the book or not, but never accept the word of the self-professed experts glibly writing off ideas that lie beyond their frame of reference.

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