Column: April 2019

My hometown Liverpool is famous for many things – footballing greatness, pop music, comedy, the Grand National. It’s famous also for having two cathedrals: one is ancient, gothic and Anglican, the other modern(ish), metropolitan and Roman Catholic.

So when I arrived on Golden Lane many years ago to find it had two residents’ associations, nothing seemed odd. There was GLETA, the Golden Lane Tenants’ Association and GLOA, the Golden Lane Owner’s Association.

Back in the 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher offered council tenants the right to buy their rented properties, and many on Golden Lane went for it. The estate thus became a mixture of tenants and owner-leaseholders, hence the two resident associations. It made sense at the time. The issues for the two groups of residents were different. 

But slowly their interests (maintenance, cleaning, privacy) came together and the two associations became one – GLERA, the Golden Lane Estate Residents Association. GLERA’s standing among residents is split. Some see it as a helpful negotiator and mediator in matters with the City Corporation; others see it as a self-important talking shop with its head in the clouds. There’s no joining fee and all new residents gain membership automatically, so there’s not much to lose by tagging along (contact: chair.glera@gmail.com).

A sign that GLERA has found its form as a residents’ champion came recently with the launch of its ‘Community Conversation’ initiative. Crime was the subject for the first meeting and residents got the chance to have frank talks with officials from both the police and the City Corporation about issues such as drug-dealing. Two of our ward councillors also turned up and another from Portsoken to tell us how Middlesex Street residents tackle problems. It was a great start to a new idea that has the potential to work well for all residents, be they tenants or owners.

Residents of Cuthbert-Harrowing House woke up one Friday recently with hope in their hearts and a spring in their step. The ugly colony of six steel container units that have sat outside their homes for what seems like forever were finally to be removed. The makeshift village was a fixture of the repair work that is in progress on the estate. The metal modules acted as offices, toilets and storage sheds for the contractors.

The removal of this implanted eyesore had already been signalled twice earlier with optimistic-sounding letters saying that parking on the estate for Removal Day was banned. Residents hastily re-scheduled deliveries or risked missing them altogether. Nevertheless, this most recent announcement seemed confidently to predict some kind of closure on what has been a testy time.

Friday morning arrived and silence hovered. By midday a heavy-duty crane-lorry and a flatbed transporter were in place. Men in high-vis jackets buzzed around, preparing to lift the burden of congestion that had festered for so long. One hour later they were gone, as was their butch machinery, but the six iron boxes stood exactly where they had the day before, and the day before that.

A week later residents got another letter (number 3) stating that the offending structures – by now satirically nicknamed ‘Cans’, as in Cannes – would disappear the following Tuesday. And when last week they eventually did go, the expected sense of relief and celebration disappeared with them, replaced by the flat feeling that an obnoxious guest had finally gone home.

You’re never far from a quirk of history in the City of London, and one of the quirkiest is the annual wardmote, a strange ritual – outlined in both Charles Dickens’ ‘Sketches by Boz’ and in the last issue of City Matters by my colleague Ian McPherson – in which voters get to eyeball and question their elected representatives, whose honorific title is ‘councilmen’, regardless of gender.

The Cripplegate Wardmote takes place in a side room of the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall in Monkwell Square (motto: ‘How Would You Like It Cut?’). I was pleased this year to hear that most of the residents present were unhappy about the same things as me (public/private spaces, invisible councillors, the City Corporation’s anachronistic voting rules) and that nearly all of the key issues have been covered more widely in City Matters, and specifically in this column.

The news that I was editorially on the same page as my neighbours allowed me time to explore the BS Hall's impressive meeting room, its polished wood-panelled walls decorated with paintings of barbers and surgeons from the deep past. Surprisingly, one was a woman, a dead ringer for Jane Austen. In one corner of this hallowed chamber is a cabinet displaying Tudor surgical instruments. Among them were Sinus Forceps an Eyelid Retractor and a Tongue Depressor, which had a strangely ironic ring to it, given the purpose of our gathering. I returned to my seat feeling queasy and unable to speak for some time afterwards.

Billy Mann lives in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate. He is a teaching assistant, a City of London Community Builder and blogs at scrapbookbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 095

Column: March 2019

The Golden Baggers AGM always raises the bar in the dull-but-necessary meeting category. The homemade cake on offer is superb (this year a yummy ginger parkin), making it a truly pleasurable way to start planning for the growing season ahead.

The allotment project is now in its ninth year, yet the energy and enthusiasm for progress never flags. The scheme is based around 42 wooden planters (it started as one-tonne builders’ bags, hence the name Baggers), which residents can rent for an annual subscription of £20 ('Friends’ can join for £5).

Membership is open to all residents, experts or beginners, and on the first Sunday of every month they share more scrumptious home baking at their Social Sunday events.

I was especially disappointed this year to learn that one of our Hatfield House residents and veteran Bagger has gone to live in America. He was always very generous in sharing his show-stopping tomatoes, so I never needed to grow any of my own.

Key issues at this year’s AGM were the election of a new Chair and the agreement of a new constitution, the need to attract more ‘Friends’ and to promote the project’s core community values.

We also discussed the failed attempt to save the trees that border the allotment but will soon disappear as part of the development of the former Richard Cloudesley School and suggested locations for this year’s annual outing. Last year’s trip to Turn End house and gardens in Buckinghamshire will be hard to beat. Anyone wanting to join should write to goldenbaggers@gmail.com.

The Golden Baggers is clearly the most successful resident-led project on the estate and its example is proving influential, most obviously in the activities at our refurbished community centre. 

The Christmas Day tea party was a riot of festive fun and the recent jumble sale added to the feeling that residents revel in the chance to do things together, preferably with cake included.

Jumble sales are a great chance to hone your people-watching skills. One minute residents will be chatting amicably about family fortunes and local issues; the next they will be cutting a tough deal for that old teapot, holding out for the last 50p.

If anything can take the shine off this neighbourly bliss it is the clumsiness of the council. A number of residents met recently with housing chief Paul Murtagh, who arrived in a foul mood to explain and apologise for the City Corporation's stuttered response to a potentially deadly gas leak at the building site next to Basterfield House.

He’d hoped to make his task easier by fixing the meeting (two months after the event) as a drop-in rather than a full-throated Q&A grilling from the residents most affected. Unfortunately, his plans went awry when some canny individuals promptly rearranged the set-up and started firing their questions. Mr Murtagh looked more and more uncomfortable as the volleys of verbal shots whistled his way.

While admitting that the City Corporation had failed residents and was searching its soul for “lessons learned”, he stuck to the script that the site work met with all existing laws and regulations. He expressed this forcefully, but tripped slightly when it came to evacuation policy and revealed that, unlike almost every large building in the developed world, there are no emergency muster points or marshalling for the Golden Lane Estate.

On the day of the accident back in December, it was residents, acting on advice from the gas board, who cobbled together a plan of action until the emergency services arrived to offer some leadership. Confused residents eventually found a safe point at Prior Weston School, shaken and feeling sick.

Mr Murtagh told the meeting that the City Corporation's advice when faced with an emergency is to sit tight, keep calm and carry on until help arrives. Yes, even if, as has happened before, an unexploded wartime bomb is uncovered! It later emerged that the City Corporation is reviewing how it handles “events such as this one”, but is unable to share or publicise the findings.

The Square Mile's emergency plan to swerve Brexit appears to have paid off with a hush-hush deal in Paris last month to make sure all the City's hedge funds and derivative thingies do not turn to dust at midnight on March 29.

The best revelation about this mysterious caper would be proof of my suspicion that the audacious plot was hatched not at the Bank of England but here on Golden Lane with the help of Bayer House resident and YouTube sensation Elly Space, whose infectious Europop anthem 'Cancel Brexit’ is powerful enough to turn the tide of history. If you’re still in doubt, go to https://youtu.be/mf4mqPGwtN4 and turn the volume up to 11.

Billy Mann lives in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate. He is a teaching assistant, a City of London Community Builder and blogs at scrapbookbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, edition 093

Column: February 2019

The search for good news this month has been tough. There was a fantastic performance by Whitecross Street comedy duo Rachael Spence and Lisa Hammond (aka, Bunny) at the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in which they tackled the Faustian question “What price your soul?” with the answer: “We’re not sure we've actually got any souls to sell” and went on to make fast and loose with the words “our souls”. It was hilarious.

I got a tip-off on the whereabouts of the estate's missing-presumed-stolen plastic heron, but my lips (beak?) are sealed ... for the time being.

There was a fascinating revelation at the community centre’s weekly techno clinic (Wednesday, 2-4pm) on how to fix a busted TV remote (not working, even with new batteries). The solution, apparently, is to remove the batteries, press and hold every single button for three seconds, replace batteries, and hey presto!

But behind all of these gentle stories was the heavy hand of discontent. It was even a struggle to find the right description: is it a Catalogue of Complaints or a Richter Scale of Rage?

First up are reports from Hatfield and Basterfield House residents of scary vibrations from the nearby building development of the former Richard Cloudesley site. Shattered ornaments and spidery cracks in the plaster top the list of woe. The City Corporation's attempts at colour matching paintwork after their recent concrete repairs have not gone down well, either.

A group of Bowater House residents are hacked off that the area around the fishpond they overlook is being used by non-residents to eat their packed lunches, smoke cigarettes and fill the bins. On the face of it this sounds like a petty whinge, but who’s footing the bill, residents ask, and where do the boundaries between public and private lie? Technically, the whole estate is private. Residents pay for its upkeep through their rents and service charges, yet the City Corporation treats it as a public space. That’s understandable. The estate is open, welcoming and attractive. But, residents argue, public use should be paid for from public funds.

Another Bowater House issue is the proposed installation of a cluster of mobile phone masts on its flat roof. In their objection, residents have been joined by an unlikely ally, Taylor Wimpey, the construction firm building the controversial Denizen block of luxury apartments across Fann Street on the site of the former Bernard Morgan House. They are livid that an eyesore and potential health hazard so close to their prized asset might deter would-be buyers from paying top whack for their shiny new City dwellings.

Residents in Stanley Cohen and Crescent House woke up recently to find zero-tolerance notices attached to the plants they keep in the large open communal areas around staircases. This issue has been a running sore since the Grenfell Tower fire, and few would argue that safe evacuation in the event of an emergency is paramount. But some residents feel bullied because the strict “no-plants” policy seems both out of proportion and inconsistent in its policing, plus it is issued as an order to desist, with the words “or else” attached in a threatening manner.

The final entry in the Catalogue of Complaints (this month) comes from young parents who discovered towards the end of last year that City Corporation funding towards nursery places for Golden Lane families at Prior Weston School's Golden Lane Campus has been cut. This was a deal with Prior Weston’s owners, Islington Council, which I’m told was terminated without notice. The Corporation now advises Golden Lane families to use the facilities at John Cass Children’s Centre instead, a full mile across the City through some of London's worst air-quality blackspots.

This not only has all the hallmarks of thoughtless penny-pinching, it appears to contradict the City Corporation's own stated wellbeing policy of supporting young parents. A report 12 months ago identified young parents as a group vulnerable to loneliness. Until recently Golden Lane parents could meet at Prior Weston, swap stories, support each other and oversee quality pre-school development for their toddlers. Now they are forced to abandon talking to each other face to face and to use WhatsApp instead to keep in touch.

In a last-ditch attempt to find something joyful to report, I crossed my fingers as the City Corporation planning committee met to decide the fate of the four healthy trees that sit on the border of the Golden Baggers allotment and the building site that is causing mini-earthquakes inside our flats. I hoped our council might actually stick to its previous pledge to save the trees, but no, a hooded axeman was spotted surveying the Richard Cloudesley site before the meeting had even finished.

Billy Mann lives in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate. He is a teaching assistant, a City of London Community Builder and blogs at scrapbookbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue 091

Column: January 2019

It’s not unknown for disasters to strike towards the end of the year. Last year it was the December 23 eruption of the Anak Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia, which caused a deadly tsunami to sweep the coasts of Java and Sumatra. At the same time Mount Etna in Sicily was rattling the city of Catania and pumping out clouds of angry volcanic ash, threatening residents and holidaymakers alike.

Here on the estate, the demolition of the former Richard Cloudesley School came to a halt when a JCB accidentally fractured a gas pipe. Not an earthquake exactly, but tremors were felt just before it happened. All of the residents of nearby Basterfield House were evacuated to the local school. Medics arrived and investigations began as to how so many people came so close to disaster. Some days later, residents picked off their doormat a letter from someone in the City Corporation housing department offering a flimsy apology and a plea to not jump to conclusions about the cause of the incident. That particular horse had already bolted. Residents rightly believed they'd had a lucky escape so were stunned when work continued on the site soon afterwards with no guarantees of future safety or any indication that lessons had been learned.

The estate is currently in a vice-like grip of building work over which residents have had little say. It’s been dubbed ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The Richard Cloudesley site is to become a monster residential tower block taller than Greater Arthur House, to be shared equally by City of London and Islington tenants, plus a primary school. One hundred metres down Golden Lane is the site of the former Bernard Morgan House, where another gigantic block, The Denizen, is under construction, this one offering suites of luxury apartments to rich overseas clients as an investment opportunity.

Nobody expects to see any of these new residents in the Two Brewers, Cliffords the barbers or shopping for lunch in Whitecross Street Market. They are expected to be invisible, which puts them alongside the estate’s resident heron. I wrote about this elusive bird some months ago, describing it as lurking hungrily around our revamped fish pond.

I’ve since learned that this was fake news, because the heron was in fact a fake heron, its skinny legs cemented into a concrete block. It eventually found a home, fittingly, in the shallow waters of the pond, but not for long because, as well as being gripped by development work, the estate is now enthralled by the 'Mystery of the Missing Heron'. Someone’s nicked it. There is said to be incriminating CCTV footage, but no one is quite sure where the camera's rewind button is, so the mystery remains an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.

All of this brings a lighter note to what are heavy times. The TOWIE rendition of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican set the tone, and the Christmas Day funtime family tea party in the Golden Lane Community Centre added to the seasonal goodwill. It was a great success for yet another resident-led event, though I was quietly staggered by the number of very clever people who were unable to work out how to play bingo. They weren't much better when the quiz asked them to name the shop on Goswell Road next door to City Hardware.

The free raffle was a hit. I won six freshly-laid eggs from the chickens they keep at St Luke's Community Centre on Central Street. After that, not winning the luxury hamper was a disappointment I could live with.

I'm filing this column from Tenerife. The island doesn’t have many similarities to London (it is 23C), but there are a few. There is a north-south divide, the north being temperate, the south being hot and arid. Bang in the centre is an active volcano, Mount Teide, with its fabulous craggy lava-landscape that looks very like an artist's impression of the surface of Mars.

Tenerife has its fair share of controversial building projects, too. Close to where we stay in the quiet end of Los Cristianos (the south) is an apartment block some claim illegally breaches planning regulations; 200m away is a newly built parade of what were meant to be luxury shops. They stood empty for two years, then they were occupied by a ragtag group of counterculturals. Today the hippy colony is still hanging in there and the buildings look like they’ve found a niche in the local life of Los Cris. I'm sure these new residents are a headache for local planners and business people seeking a nice profit, but with luck their example will make the local power-brokers think a bit harder in future.

Billy Mann lives in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate. He is a teaching assistant, a City of London Community Builder and blogs at scrapbookbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com

An edited version of this column appeared in the newspaper City Matters, issue 089

Diary: Introducing Basterfield Billy

For the past three years I have been writing short pieces about my local neighbourhood in London EC1. This blog, Basterfield Billy, took the name of the block on the Golden Lane Estate in which I live. The posts in the Basterfield Billy blog are mostly columns I have written for the City Matters newspaper about the goings-on hereabouts, plus a few sketches and vignettes of events and characters locally. But the time has come to consolidate and put all my blogs in one place, so from now on any posts that would have appeared in Basterfield Billy will now appear in the this blog.