Diary: A Letter to Emily Thornberry

I sent a handwritten version of this letter sometime in March. I was bored and in a very cheeky mood. Thornberry did not reply but passed the letter to Mark Field, who sent me a creepy letter saying there was nothing he could do, etc, not my place to interfere, blah.

Dear Ms ThornberryIslington Council and the City of London Corporation are about to unknowingly gift up to 300 of your constituents to Mark Field MP (Con).This is the outcome of a proposed plan to redevelop a piece of land on the edge of Islington South formerly occupied by the Richard Cloudesley School to create ‘much needed social housing' and a primary academy.
 On paper, the proposals look innocent by modern standards: a two-form primary school and a 14-storey tower block of dual-aspect apartments fronted onto Golden Lane. In practice, the development is a backdoor extension of the Grade II listed Golden Lane Estate. The Golden Lane Estate is, as you probably already know, a place of worship for architecture students worldwide and a historically important ‘living museum’. It was an attempt to regenerate a badly bomb-damaged area of London after World War II on principles of good functional design, and a socially progressive and humane demonstration of how high-density inner-city living can work and thrive. Key workers from the nearby St Bartholomew’s hospital were among its first residents. 

Today it is a much-loved urban oasis of hard-faced concrete, steel framing, coloured wall panels and green spaces. There is a gym, tennis courts and a swimming pool. There is the multi award-winning Golden Baggers allotment project. And we have a soon-to-be updated community hall that recently hosted herds of excited children crawling around the floor while adults sat gently swaying to the sound of a brass band playing David Bowie’s Life on Mars.Now it has become the plaything of political pygmies. Here we find two councils, City of London Corporation and Islington Council cosied up in a plot to plonk your constituents onto the doorstep of the Golden Lane Estate. Many of them, I am sure, would be very happy about that, but if the current plans go ahead their homes will be managed and controlled by the Corporation of London and, by extension, incorporated into Mark Field MP's constituency of Cities of London and Westminster. The details of this ugly manoeuvre, plus graphic illustrations of its hideous effects can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/GLERA/ Your local Labour colleagues Mary Durcan and William Pimlott can also brief you.

South Islington and Golden Lane residents have lived together happily for many years. We share a lot. We have welcomed our Islington neighbours to events here on Golden Lane and they welcome us to activities around Whitecross Street, King Square and St Luke’s. But now, the partnership of manipulation formed by the City of London and Islington Council in this proposed development is set to blur the borders so much that there is no way your constituents can be adequately represented. In this sense they become hostages to bad politics. I fear Islington has been duped by the dark forces of political chicanery and the desire for an instant solution to key social problems at any cost. The plans are being railroaded forward with unseemly speed and very little proper consultation.This letter is starting to sound like a Nimby rant, so I will finish, but ask you please to check the details for yourself, for the sake of your displaced constituents and for the reputation of Islington South.

Diary: Adelfia, Brighton

To a Greek restaurant, Adelfia in Preston Street, last night with Sue & Lil, Jaq & Lynne. We met beforehand for a drink in the Royal Sovereign. We laughed about the hammering Crystal Palace (Sue) had recently inflicted on Arsenal (Lil) and got tips for hangouts in Cristianos (The Hideaway, a pub near the church and the petrol station). Hotel California started playing on the pub sound system, at which point Sue asked me to name the band. When I replied the Eagles, she punched the air with a yell of EEEEGGULLLS (Crystal Palace), and I knew I’d been had. The music continued and I noticed at one point three of us quietly swaying in our seats to the country rhythm, mouthing the words to Take it Easy: ‘Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.’ Jaq did not attempt to hide her disgust.

Adelfia was friendly in the way we have come to expect from Greek restaurants and the staff’s happy mood infectious. The menu had other Mediterranean touches: halloumi dusted with flour before frying; the cheese stuffed into the peppers was softly spiced. During the mains (me, chicken souvlaki), Sue dropped a biggie. When Sue, Jaq and Jane were at university together, an older student they all knew not very well turned out to be the Westminster bomber. Cue them all trying to remember something about him that set him apart as a would-be mass killer. He was not interesting in any way, they reported, or they would have remembered more about him. Not like the gender fetish bloke who did things with raw chickens on the weekend. I spoke to Lil about Brexit and whether he feared for the future of his two daughters, 17 and 23. He was sure everything would turn out OK.

Diary: Western Road, Brighton

Walking west along the north side of Western Road, about half way between Currys-PC World and Argos, I spot an outstandingly overweight woman bouncing along in front of me, pitching and rolling from side to side as if trying to keep her balance during a choppy sea voyage. I started to think unkind thoughts about her. Should she have equal entitlement to nhs services? Should she be charged double for the two seats she occupies on buses and trains? That nasty sort of misanthropy. Then I spotted her male companion. He was much thinner, but still probably obese by modern measuring methods. His outstanding feature was the pair of grey cotton jogging pants he was wearing – loose fitting and stretched droopy enough to exhibit his arse crack, but murkily stained in the rear toilet area. The single mark wasn’t big enough to spot from a distance, so not majorly embarrassing, some might think. But walking behind him was not a treat. Just as I expected to again to be taken over by hateful snobbish thoughts, instead I started to wonder whether I should tell him about it, and if I did, what might be his response. I found it hard to believe that his wife/girlfriend/spouse-equivalent wasn’t aware of his soiled state. Then I thought maybe they both knew but didn’t care. Maybe it had only just happened and nobody but me knew about it. All the time these thoughts were distracting me, my eyes were fixed on that humiliating patch. It got to the point where I started deliberately to look away in case anybody thought I had a thing about staring at men’s dirty arses. Then they both squeezed through the door of Foodilic and I was free.

Picture: Easter

Diary: Bridges Support Group

Mary is my favourite. Quietly determined, destined to succeed. I think the progress line should be called the Rocky Road and be randomly jagged.

Diary: Headway

B is whingeing to P about his dire financial situation. 'They’ve cut my money off,’ he tells him. B is possibly one of the scraggiest-looking people in Britain. He is a spit for the 1970s TV character Catweazle. His hair is long and grey. His beard is full of waves and knots. His simple rectangular steel-frame glasses sit on the bump of his supposedly once broken nose. As his chin drops in fixed concentration while he rolls a cigarette, furtively, closely to his chest, the glasses slip over the nose-bump to the tip, where they sit, waiting to fall off their orange-peel landmass into his lap, which is more often than not clothed by a pair of heavily and variously stained jogging pants. Grooming is not a word that will ever be used to describe B, but he is astonishingly witty.

Diary: Shoreditch

At the #artskickers2017 awards with #submittolovestudios manager #michellecarlile, who cuts a better Peel than I do a Steed.

Local: Golden Lane Rant2

The Orwellian Golden Lane development plan is a game about to enter its second half, reckons Billy Mann

Campaign poster

The proposed development projects around the estate have triggered in me a number of proverbial sayings and the like. First it was all about trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, now it's the one about doing one thing well rather than lots of things badly.

In the case of the Bernard Morgan House proposals, I am still stupidly baffled as to why the project was not conceived from the start under the title ‘heritage’, the existing building with all that lovely flint and retro tiling retained and its interior modified into contemporary living spaces. The determination to smash it up just seemed like destruction for destruction’s sake, the product of a hubristic mindset on acid that had cruelly infected the decision-making process. I am told the police needed to sell the land for a maximum return (to Taylor Wimpey) because funding from central government has been cut so deeply they could no longer do their jobs properly. All I know for sure is the more I look at that building, the more I will miss it when it's gone.

Over at the Richard Cloudesley site, I am haunted by the memory of an early meeting with the Hawkins\Brown architects in which we were told how the team had completed a ‘zonal analysis’ of the Golden Lane Estate (leisure zone, community zone, recreation zone, etc) and that the Richard Cloudesley project would become an ‘education zone’ extension of the estate. This sounded reasonable, sort of. Here was once the site of a school, so putting a new one in that spot wasn’t such a controversial step. 

Then an elephant walked into the room in the shape of a 14-storey apartment block and my already passionate dislike of that pretentious backslash in the title ‘Hawkins\Brown’ turned into something bordering on hysteria\psycopathy. A school on the Richard Cloudesley site and housing on the Bernard Morgan site would have been a fair, sympathetic and manageable solution – balanced, in keeping, and all that.

But what were are left with instead is a crazed seek-and-destroy masterplan of excess in which playmakers at both the City of London Corporation and Islington Council daily score points off one another in a display of tit-for-tat blundering. This sorry situation has left residents forced to take part in an Orwellian game that was both rigged from the start and is now being reframed at every turn to subdue any meaningful discussion. 

Whether there is a great deal of support outside of the Golden Lane Estate for the residents' campaign is hard to tell. Comments online and recent local election results suggest the game is not over yet. Yes, this estate is a temple of worship for architecture students the world over. Yes, it represents an enlightened vision of society from the past that says intelligent, creative planning and building can transform lives. Yes, it is a totally fab place to live. But does all that count for anything anymore? I would like to think so, but defending it is getting harder every day and requires a huge leap of faith.

My mind goes back to Istanbul, 2005. Liverpool are losing 3-0 at half time in the Champion's League final to a rampant AC Milan. I won’t tell you what happened next. 

 Sign the petition.

Diary: Westminster Attack

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, was impressive this morning on the radio, the day after an attempted attack on the UK Parliament in which young overseas visitors were mown down on Westminster Bridge by a crazed motorist. The attacker then stabbed a police officer. Khan spoke clearly and with pride and authority on the issue of London being a great city because people here like to celebrate their differences with openness and tolerance. He also talked about being a Muslim and about the British tradition of the citizen police officer and 'policing by consent’.

Diary: Prime Suspect 1973

Watching the TV drama Prime Suspect 1973, it is hard not to imagine some of that inter-police-officer hankypanky going on in Bernard Morgan House in days gone by. Any first-person stories would be welcome.

Posted to goldenlaneestate.org

Film: Personal Shopper

With the (very arty) camera invading every corner of her existence, Kristen Stewart has to act out of her skin. Very compelling and gripping in parts. It was probably trying to say something, but I couldn't work out what it was.

Diary: The French Elections

I used to respect the French, but Monday night! Bordel de merde! Their TV schedulers have clearly been touched by le digit d'insanité. The only thing a Friday night in France needs other than four bottles of red wine and a takeaway is a three-hour political boxing match on the telly.

Local: The Siege of Golden Lane

Two big development projects on the fringes of Golden Lane Estate have got residents pushing back the boundaries. Billy Mann reports

Down your street: the architect's view of life on the edge of Basterfield House

There is a feisty north-south alliance growing on the Golden Lane Estate. The north of the estate is in a frenzy of disgruntlement over the proposed development of the former site of Richard Cloudesley school. The south is similarly irked by what is happening on the site of Bernard Morgan House. This looks like a straight fight over which 'development' project can piss off residents the most, Bowater or Basterfield. But what in other circumstances might be a friendly fight (who has the best window boxes, for example) is actually a case of two teams on the same side. The opposition is somewhere else, somewhere remote.


The former police section house (decommissioned in 2013), Bernard Morgan House, on Golden Lane, is the proposed site of a City of London development to create 'much needed high quality new homes'. The project is to be handled by Taylor Wimpey. After a number of 'consultation’ sessions, activity seemed to stop. Then recently an email from vigilant resident was circulated that purported to expose a crafty manouevre to get the building razed to the ground before the new one had even been approved. The document listed a host of Year 5 homework mistakes in the plan. Whoever penned it didn't know the difference between north, south, east and west, and couldn't spell Bernard ['Benard Morgan House']. The 3 March target date for demolition to start came and went and red faces were said to be seen rustling through the bushes of Fortune Street Park. I never got a reply to the email I sent asking whether the building's vintage decorative tiles might be saved and recycled.

Meanwhile, Up North on the estate, the City of London Corporation and Islington Council have got themselves into a bipolar 'partnership' to renew the area around the former Richard Cloudesley School. With indecent haste, plans emerged from architects Hawkins\Brown, and the blue touchpaper was lit. The proposals showed a primary school, plus separate school hall-cum-kitchen, and a 14-storey block of duel-aspect 'affordable' apartments. To the untrained eye, the plan also appeared to show the theft of part of the service road that runs alongside Basterfield House. That's where the ambulances and fire engines are meant to enter the estate in the event of an emergency. The drawings were very nice, and eventually a scale model appeared that looked like it was made from polystyrene offcuts and a matchbox. 

The revolution starts here: Campaigners' montage of the view from the heart of the estate

It's hard to argue against schools and houses, but the diagrams did look as if too much had been crammed into a fixed space; the proposed tower block was a scary monster that would loom over the entire estate (it didn't even have a funny hat on top, like Great Arthur does); the two-storey detached school hall would not only stare threateningly at the Golden Baggers but its proposed kitchen would soak Basterfield residents with the free perfume of cooking chips. I could carry on, but the rap sheet is far too long. A dedicated working group of People Pissed Off was started. They meet often in a revolutionary huddle and post damaging counter arguments and incriminating evidence on Facebook (see picture). With all this anger floating around, some previously unseen councillors eventually turned up to offer sympathy. The elections are on 23 March.

I wanted to find out who to blame. The architects and contractors are at the frontline of the projects and an easy target. The City of London Corporation has turned avoiding proper consultation into a dark art. Invisibility is the watchword. Transparency has too many syllables. But residents' fears might never have grown to fever pitch had housing and planning officials been more assertive in explaining that, despite what looks like two cans of worms half opened, the management talent is in place, ready to make it work out happily ever after. This, of course, is a fantasy, so what passes for reassurance instead are weak variations of "we hear what you're saying", "we're listening" and "we're taking this all on board". 

The feeling from the north and south sides of the estate that the walls are closing in and Bowater and Basterfield residents especially are about to be squashed into submission by ignorance, stupidity and blindness. As a Basterfield resident and Golden Bagger I wanted to know on whose doorstep I should empty my sack of smelly compost. At one meeting I collared a man from the Corpy and gave him my very best psycho-killer gaze. He spluttered then told me plainly that the buck stopped with them, the City of London Corporation. Islington council, he told me, was merely providing the land and the tenants for the sky scraping tower block. He forced out a spluttered laugh when I told him it would be his head Golden Lane residents would be throwing rotten tomatoes at. He obviously thought I was joking.

Picture: Northern Ireland Elections

Picture: Tiny Dancer

Studio scrapbook image based on mishearing the lyrics of the Elton John song 'Tiny Dancer'.

Picture: Tony Blair on Brexit

Diary: At HMS Belfast

A tourist excursion turns into an unexpected discovery

Tower Bridge and museum ship HMS Belfast

You can always rely on a six-year-old to open your eyes to the realities of the world. A friend's son was 'doing' ships and boats at school. The Cutty Sark was the first idea on the table for a visit. But self-interest soon stepped in and I proposed HMS Belfast. The reasons were pathetic. First, it is closer to where we live than the Cutty Sark and thus an easier journey. Second, I had never 'done' HMS Belfast and I'm always up for visiting somewhere new. Plus, I knew it was 'a floating museum', a project by the Imperial War Museum and the IWM I knew to be a class act.


It was snowing as we arrived, but the staff were cheery, helpfully telling us the tricky ladders an old disabled crock such as myself should avoid. Yes, this is as pretty much as close to a real warship (it's actually a 'light cruiser') as most of us will ever get. Very little has been modified to accommodate the lily-livered landlubber, and as you scramble and duck around the decks, life at sea in wartime moves quickly to the front of your brain.

One concession to modernity is the audio guide. Our youngster was keen to get on with it and quickly embraced its button-pushing attractions. I'm going to guess it was his first time with an audio guide because it wasn't long after he had started listening to the commentary that we heard him seize a pause in the recorded description to exclaim, "Can I just ask you one question?" 

As we moved around the ship's nine decks, snapping pictures and absorbing the claustrophobia, it was hard not to marvel at the technical complexity of all the wires and tubes, the guns, the radar and the proper deference to the hierarchy of command. It was a masterpiece of engineering, both technological and social. How on earth did they work out where to put everything? This I came to see as a 'British' skill, the kind of expertise envied by other nationalities. The kitchen (galley) is a design classic all by itself.

The visit was timely because the very next day the Observer ran a story about the British arms trade and its controversial dealings in Saudi Arabia. The piece claimed that the Saudis were using British mad weapons to massacre civilian populations in Yemen. The export of lethal wespons is restricted by law. Killing children is not permitted by licence.

Whenever I read these pieces I can't help wondering where all our Great British weapons factories are. I've never seen one, or if I did it did not have a sign on it stating 'intercontinental ballistic missiles sold here'. Visiting HMS Belfast the previous day and having my jaw floored at the magnitude of Britain's technical accomplishments, strengths that saw us through world wars and to chequered flags in grands prix across the globe, seeing this wealth of talent directed towards extreme violence rather than to improving the lives of millions, was sickening. Maybe that should become the nation's big post-Brexit idea to re-establish our great talent for innovation and invention as a cause for good, something to be proud of and to make our children proud of us.

Picture: Young Lovers

Studio scrapbook sketch story based on a photo by Wendy Howells of Eva and Gar at Gatwick Airport on their way to India. The imaginary conversation written into the paving stones (added by me) is purely for the viewer's entertainment.

Picture: The Truth That Ran Us Down

The line comes from the Bruce Springsteen song 'Backstreets'.

Diary: Trust World Café

An initiative to put good communication at the heart of stroke treatment got off to a lively start. Billy Mann reports

Tess Baird is an unstoppable force. In November 2016 she gathered together a few colleagues and contacts in a small room in London's Mile End Hospital to explain her bonkers idea. She wanted clinicians and service users to get to understand and communicate with one another in more meaningful and effective ways. The subject in focus was stroke care, which is how I got the call, being a stroke survivor. She reckoned this new groundbreaking bond between patient and practitioner could be found using something called a World Café. I posted a report of that meeting shortly after it took place.

Grand ideas often get lost in what is sometimes called Development Hell, so I turned up to that first meeting, made whatever kind of contribution I could and went home expecting the idea to fizzle out. It didn't. Emails were exchanged and the spark generated at the first meeting was oxygenated into a comfy campfire, around which a whole bunch of people (plus one newborn child, Leo) sat early in the new year to thrash out some ideas for how quality communication might flourish on the stroke ward. This event quickly got its own hashtag, #trustworldcafe. 

Seven round tables in the Garden Room at St Luke's Community Centre, London EC1, each hosting five or six people, fired up and the room quickly took on the buzz of the marketplace, the sound of chatter and earnest declarations bouncing off the walls. Hot beverages were taken and posh cake digested. And to think some people were pretending to 'be at work'. 

Question 1

The event swung around four questions. The first asked us to talk in pairs about a time we "totally trusted someone". What was the experience, what did it feel like? I got chatting with someone who told me how they had 'bonded' with their partner over an intense dislike of dating. As described to me this was a proper meeting of minds and outlook that was recognised instantly by both parties. They saw it as an 'opportunity' and both were 'relieved' to have found a sympathetic ear and a glad eye. It was heartwarming stuff. 

We then moved the topic from the personal to the professional and asked what made trusting relationships function in the workplace. The answers we arrived at jointly sounded like statements of the bleeding obvious, but put under intense scrutiny started to carry more weight. All the time we were jotting words and phrases on to a paper tablecloth. Lines such as "say what you do and do what you say" and "deliver on promises" put some flesh on to the bones of everyday exchanges that involve trust, and which without trust would collapse. Relying on others is how our lives function.

Question 2

From working in pairs we moved to working the table, exploring within the group the mechanics of trust and how that might be nurtured. I learned of one stroke survivor's desire to ride a horse again, having grown up around horses in Romania. By now an artist had been earwigging at each table and was busy creating a 'live graphic' of our thoughts. It was worth stopping just to watch as she gave visual birth to all our ideas.

The #trustworldcafe 'live graphic'

The questions continued. We moved tables, went into huddles, struggled to find answers, but didn't give up. There was still plenty of cake left. At one table I put forward the idea that every 'hard', factual question a patient is asked by a clinician should be offset with a 'soft' question that gently explores the patient's life outside hospital. Cat or dog? was the example I used in a round-the-table demonstration (our table: three dogs, one cat and an awkward "cat and dog"). Questions about football, hobbies, telly, films, etc, can provide the therapist with valuable 'clues' that might open a window of opportunity on how best to advance treatment. There was some concern as to how what is essentially small-talk can be parlayed into 'productivity', the looming presence of a cash-conscious clipboarding nhs manager being the sticking point. I'm not sure my attempt to liken this kind of information-gathering to 'detective work' found any buyers. 

Libby and Aoiffe

So what did I learn at the #trustworldcafe? Too many things to list here, so please check the Twitter feeds for details. But if I had to pick one it would be at the beginning of the session when, by way of a warm-up, Tess gave us a list of questions to ask each other. The last of these was something like, "What is the craziest outcome you can imagine springing from this #trustworldcafe?" To illustrate, Tess told us her answer. It was that news of this event's runaway success reaches a rich publisher, who invites Tess to write a book about it, earning her £4million. Her newfound wealth somehow puts her in contact with George Clooney, who promptly ditches his existing wife and marries Tess. And everyone lives happily ever after. Such is the power of the hashtag.