Mayor slams home nimbys

"If something's bloody ugly, I will refuse it," says Mayor Ken Livingstone

11 April 2012

Property developers, and their lawyers, agents and architects, thronged the Croisette in Cannes last week. City suits in their thousands paraded beneath sunlit palm trees along the drag where starlets pose during the French Riviera's film festival. The property men had come for MIPIM, an annual get-together of the people with the money to rebuild the world's cities.

This was the scene of an unlikely love-in between property investors and the socialist Mayor of London who, in a series of three speeches, exhorted developers to make as much money through development in London as they can. If the pernickety planning departments of London's boroughs get in the way, Ken Livingstone will, he says, "crush them". A supporting cast of other politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, delivered similar messages.

For property developers, long regarded as pond life, or at best an unfortunate necessity on a par with digestive enzymes or earthworms, such attention from ruling Leftwing politicians makes a welcome change.

The reason for the courtship is simple: Livingstone and Prescott want more or less the same thing as the developers, which is for tens of thousands of desperately needed new homes to be built in and around London, together with a sprinkling of skyscrapers. But it is developers rather than politicians who have the means to deliver all this construction.

Livingstone is buoyant. "I'm sorry I'm late," he says when I meet him, "But I had to try the Jacuzzi in the Hilton." His upbeat mood is not just the effect of the water jets. "I am more optimistic," he says, "than I have been at any time in the past four years. The polls show that Londoners feel things are a bit better, a bit cleaner and a bit more safe. There is a five per cent swing to being more optimistic. By the way, we achieved exactly the same thing at the GLC."

He has won battles. "We have seen off English Heritage," he says, in the planning battles over the proposed Heron Tower in the City and Renzo Piano's "Shard of Glass" at London Bridge station, two test cases for the Mayor's pro-tower policy. English Heritage opposed them, but both won planning permission after public inquiries.

His London Plan, which sets out his proposals for new homes and towers, is now in place as the basis of London's planning policy. He has won the Government's permission

to borrow £400 million next year, and more in following years, to spend on transport projects such as the extensions to the East London Line and the Docklands Light Railway. He claims to be "close to a final funding package on Crossrail".

As for the little matter of the mayoral elections this June, no one seems to doubt that he will get back in. Neither the election, nor his opponents, come up during our conversation.

So the scene is set for his building plans which, he says, are necessary to ensure London's future prosperity, and reverse "25 years of underinvestment in housing. We were building 50,000 a year until Thatcher came to power. Her polices created the same scale of housing shortage that Hitler created with five years of bombing."

Livingstone's official target is 30,000 a year, but you get the feeling he would like more. He loves to recite ever-expanding figures for the number of homes that could be built in the Thames Gateway area in the east of London, from the Government's estimate of 60,000 to his office's 90,000-plus, and "I suspect we'll get to 120,000 by the time we have worked our way through it".

He sees his greatest enemy as what he calls the "stupid approach" of English Heritage and "a real outbreak of Nimbyism" by the boroughs. "For example, there are four sites paralysed, two by Lambeth and two by Southwark refusing planning permission ... People say, 'We have enough housing. There are enough people here already.' Most probably, the farmers whose land had to be taken to build London in the first place said the same thing. But you can't just freeze London with a Nimby mentality."

He insists that there is nothing to fear from so many new houses. "Even if the whole of London were knocked down and rebuilt at the densities I am talking about, it would not have the density of Paris. Everyone who goes there says, 'Isn't it lovely, isn't it wonderful?'" This is a favourite argument of the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside, who is also an adviser to the Mayor.

Here, though, is the nub of the issue. If the developers and architects cruising the Croisette truly are about to create new districts of Parisian beauty, few Londoners would have much objection, but it remains to be proved that they will. It is all too easy to see how, in the rush to achieve housing targets, beauty and quality might be lost.

The first of the new wave of towers, like the Gherkin and the Shard, are designed by leading architects and are of above-average standard, but in the next wave the flimsy, hard-to-define concept of "quality" is all too likely to be eroded.

Proposals made in response to Livingstone's calls for both towers and new buildings, like the towers proposed at Waterloo, Vauxhall and next to the Tate, are not encouraging. It is debatable whether they would create an environment around them of Parisian beauty.

Livingstone supports the less-than-magnificent Vauxhall tower, although with the qualification that it is good in comparison with a different, lower but "bloody awful" design by the same architects. He says that the Waterloo tower is "not adequate for its site", before remembering that he is not supposed to have a view on it yet, as the proposal has not been formally submitted to him. "But, of course, I will keep an open mind," he adds.

He insists, however, that he is not about to drop his standards. "No one should underestimate my capricious will," he says. "If something's bloody ugly, I will refuse it. No developer should think that now we've got the London Plan we can do second-rate schemes." He says that he wants "world-class" standards of design. Anyone who doesn't understand this can, he adds, "bugger off ".

He had better be true to his word, especially as his "crushing" of English Heritage and the boroughs would leave his point of view almost unchallenged. In Cannes he recalled the bad old days of the 1970s, when the arrogance of developers led to furious planning battles with local communities. If a Mayorally approved property industry leads to crude and insensitive projects, those days will return.

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