filed away
N16 asked Nigel Lewis to investigate what actually happened by looking through Hackney Council’s files.

Hoping to shed some light on the Clissold Leisure Centre fiasco, I thought I would try and exercise my right as a Hackney resident to consult papers relating to Council decisions. The most relevant papers seem to be the ‘client files’ of the Leisure Department in Maurice Bishop House not far from the Town Hall. I rang up and was put on to a lawyer, Colin Tucker. We chewed the fat for a bit about residents’ rights under the terms of the Local Government Act, 1972, and the Council’s right under Clause 100 D of the act to hold back ‘exempt and confidential’ papers.

Next day, Mr. Tucker rang to tell me I couldn’t see the files. Against the backdrop of impending litigation between the Council, the architects, and the quantity surveyors, ‘the present guideline’, he told me, ‘is to refer all enquiries about the Centre to the Press Office’. There’d been no mention of this guideline the previous day. In the interim, apparently, the client files had been deemed confidential.

I rang the Press Office. Batting away questions, they referred me to their press release of 11 February. Otherwise, they would tell me nothing. Meanwhile I had another, not very promising, iron in the fire: a request to see the files of the Planning Department. Six days went by. And then, to my surprise, I was told I could come and see them at Dorothy Hodgkin House. One file, the earliest, was missing. According to Salim Varachia of the Planning Register, someone had taken it out without signing for it, and no-one knew where it was. That left three files, covering 1997-1998. In the whole troubled nine-year history of the Leisure Centre, said Salim, no resident had ever before asked to see these files. Later, he assured me that nothing had been weeded from them.

There is tons of stuff that isn’t in the Planning files. There’s nothing about money, for example, and no mention of the main contractor, M.J. Gleeson. Some of the absent information may be in the mislaid file, or in the Leisure Department’s client files. Other papers may be held by other departments, such as those for building control and control of sewers and drainage.

On one small point of timing, at least, Mayor Jules Pipe and the architect, Stephen Hodder, appear to agree. Pipe has criticised the Council’s ‘poor project management’ of the mid- to late 1990s, while Hodder has said there were problems with the project from its ‘inception’ at the same period. At the turn of 1997-98, following formal receipt of the architects’ application, planning co-ordinator Tom Finnan penned a note to the planning officer, Cindy Badoe, about the ‘need for full consultation and speedy progress!’ On top of the same file Finnan wrote ‘Fast track!’ 

Since at least March 1997, the Planning Department had known the proposed building materials of the Centre: the aluminium roofing, white concrete, clay-tile cladding, and so on. A condition of the planning permission was that samples of the materials had to be approved for ‘external appearance’. On 30 July 1998 – a whole year after planning permission was granted – Richard Blackwell of Hodder Associates brought a materials sample board to a pre-arranged meeting with Ms. Badoe. She didn’t turn up. ‘It was unfortunate that you were unavailable’, wrote Blackwell, ‘and that we were unable to discuss the project with one of your colleagues’.

When I rang Cindy Badoe in Ghana, where she now lives, she had no recollection of this glitch, nor of any problems with the planning process. In fact it came as news to her that anything at all was wrong with the Leisure Centre’s building. Her unawareness is hard to reconcile with things going wrong in the early planning stages. However, the Planning files are hardly indicative of the ‘speedy progress’ required to keep such a complex and costly project on schedule.

The building materials were finally approved in late September 1998, only five days short of the 56-day maximum decision period allowed by Town and Country Planning regulations. That seems an awfully long time to decide that the appearance of the materials complied with Policy EQ1 of Hackney’s Unitary Development Plan. What took so long? There is no evidence in the files of any detailed, painstaking consideration of the materials, nor of any consultation – whether of experts, or the public. But it seems the materials may also have been vetted by Building and Development Control Services – which sent the final letter of approval. I rang Building Control. Tight-lipped, they referred me to the Press Office. That faintly Kafkaesque ‘guideline’ again.

It was the same story at Ashgate Development Services, an outside firm at some point brought in as project managers. ‘I’ve been instructed’, said a voice on the phone when I called them, ‘to provide no information to anyone who rings up on this matter’. The voice referred me to the Council. One effect of all this silence is that it is impossible even to do something so relatively simple as to reconstruct the schedule of the project, and so to try and work out which of the problems, if any, may be attributable to overruns in a skewed, disordered timetable.

Another strand in the Planning files concerns the external works around the Centre. Here there is evidence – both of things not going according to plan and of detailed consideration.
Plans submitted in late 1997 by Robert Rummey Associates of Sevenoaks, Kent, were examined and enthusiastically endorsed by Susan Lowenthal, a landscape architect working for Hackney Technical Consultancy. According to Rod McAllister, of Hodder Associates, the ‘inital concept...was the creation of a space or piazza between the Leisure Centre and the School’. Bit by bit, at the planning stage, this concept of a regenerative space was whittled away.

In April, 2000, Construction News reported that the external works were to be carried out by another Kentish company at a cost of £490,000. Its final bill, however, was more than double that – £1.2 million. This company was just one of a number of sub-contractors. If figures like these are typical of the project as a whole, we start to grasp how Hackney’s budget contribution ballooned by elevenbtimes – from £1.9 m. to £21 m.