Stylish housing, a model redesign: so what went wrong in Angell Town?

Minister Lorraine Jones, who was trying to set up a boxing club in memory of her son Dwayne who was killed last year, said: “Lambeth police are supporting us, but we’ve been tearing our hair out with the council.

“We simply want a base on the estate to give the kids a positive outlet, but all the council seem to care about is balancing their budget.”

Yet residents were also quick to praise those who have championed their cause — such as councillor Rachel Heywood, who is widely respected as “caring and dedicated”.

Lambeth council, it must be acknowledged, has a terribly difficult job with £238 million in spending cuts scheduled between 2010 and 2018 as a result of reduced government funding. It amounts to a 60 per cent hit to its budget and has led to a significant reduction of services.

As the biggest landlord on Angell Town, Lambeth council is responsible for the community facilities — which is where residents’ mercury begins to rise. The community centre they had, known as the Boiler House because it once housed the boilers that heated the estate, has been boarded up since 2012. And the 33 business units that were once let for the benefit of the community no longer generate any income for the estate.

The council makes £150,000 in rental income a year from these units, but the money is re-invested elsewhere within Lambeth in contravention of an apparent agreement between Lambeth council and the estate when it was rebuilt 15 years ago. What’s more, it generally lets them to the highest bidder, including evangelical churches that open for just a few hours a week and have no link to Angell Town. For residents like Lorraine, unable to get a base on the estate for her boxing club, it can feel like a betrayal.

But is the council to blame? We set out to understand what has gone wrong and how things might be turned around.

Ms Heywood has represented Coldharbour ward, which includes Angell Town, for a decade and she joined me on the 10-minute walk from Brixton Tube to the estate. “Brixton has become an incredibly vibrant place, but as we spill out of the town centre and onto the estate, it suddenly feels terribly quiet,” she said.

She pointed to the shuttered business units. “Everybody lauded the wonderful redevelopment that was done here with resident consultation 10 years ago, and justifiably so, but I am tired of bringing experts down to marvel at the housing when the community facilities have been wiped out.”

The terrain had changed, she said, in the wake of government funding cuts that had forced councils into becoming “increasingly obsessed with wealth creation”.

“Instead of prioritising the needs of people, councils have begun to think too much in terms of income and assets,” she added. “But this is short-sighted, because unless we support and empower residents, I fear we could see revolt in places like Angell Town.”

Yet the situation was nuanced, she added, and there were many “good people” inside the council, such as John Kerridge, assistant director of communities commissioning, who were fighting behind the scenes to give places such as Angell Town a better deal.

I met Mr Kerridge, 54, and we, too, took a walk on the estate. “In the last 34 years I have worked on some of the toughest estates in England, but Angell Town is the most challenging of all,” he said. “It’s an enigma — as if somebody dropped the jigsaw puzzle and we are still trying to pick up the pieces.”

To grasp what went wrong, he said, you had to understand the history. The council was praised for the way it engaged with residents in the radical redesign of the estate — a rebuild that was initiated by inspirational resident Dora Boatemah. She set up the Angell Town Community Project, won funding to start regeneration, and stylish new housing was delivered between 2000 and 2006 by five sets of architects. The estate was cited as “an outstanding example of community-led design” by the government urban design watchdog. As part of that process, 33 disused garages were converted into business units with ATCP collecting rent and ploughing it back into the community.

But Dora died in 2001 and a few years later ATCP fell into disrepute when an audit report revealed fraud by a few corrupt individuals. The result, said Mr Kerridge, was that in 2010 the council took back control of the 33 business units and, faced with spending cuts, deployed the rental income elsewhere in Lambeth.

“There had been a local agreement that income from the business units would be ring-fenced to support community activities on the estate, but the council now applied the money to everywhere but Angell Town,” said Mr Kerridge. “The losers were the residents,” he added — first at the hands of the corrupt few running the ATCP, second at the hands of the council.

Then came the Boiler House fiasco: it was closed down three years ago by the council because its youth club had become a hotspot for gang rivalry. You can still see the pellet holes and broken windows and it remains derelict. Again, it was a case of the many losing out because of the criminal activities of the few, and being abandoned to their fate by a cash-strapped council. What was needed to get Angell Town onto the agenda of those in the council who control the purse strings?

“I have been thinking about this for five years,” Mr Kerridge said. “For starters the estate needs crusading advocates like Dora. There are many strong women on the estate and perhaps somebody like Lorraine Jones, who is widely respected, can lead the way.”

He laughed. “I know it might sound strange, but when people outside the council speak up, it helps people like Rachel Heywood and me and many others inside the council to fight the good fight and force it back onto the agenda.”

Mr Kerridge said he sometimes took walks on the estate to gauge the atmosphere and was disturbed by its “eerie silence”. Gang activity and the shuttered business units contributed to it being, as he called it, “like planet moon”. “For an estate with lots of families, it should be buzzing, but you don’t hear the kids.

“For me it is personal. I come from a Northern working-class community and I was the first person in my entire street to go to university, so I relate to this place. I feel like the people of Angell Town are my people.

“There is a team of us seeking to create a funding stream, perhaps by reinstating the old ring-fencing principle of income from the business units to support community cohesion, but the reality is that we face so many cuts in Lambeth that finding resources from this ever-diminishing cake is hard. We might need a push from the outside, a bit of magic, to help light the blue touch paper.”