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A Big Hello From Armani and Trotskyliving in Stoke Newington by Ken Worpole It’s the way they sell them. Would-be buyers of apartments in the new development at the junction of Balls Pond Road with Southgate Road are promised an ‘lslington lifestyle with Armani-suited concierges’, whereas up in Stoke Newington, trading on the area’s erstwhile cutting-edge political reputation, home-seekers are invited to ‘Trot along to the Revolution’. Hackney today is development crazy, and new refurbishments, conversions and wholly new apartment blocks are springing up on every street corner and down every back alley or derelict industrial mews. In many ways this is a good thing. The government’s new Urban White Paper is very keen on promoting housing on 'brownfield' sites in the inner cities - largely to save further encroachment into the Green Belt - but it is also keen on promoting new higher-density living too.
Stoke Newington therefore seems ripe for the intensification of the new Richard Rogers’ style inner city ‘cappuccino culture’, based on live-work developments where young entrepreneurs work from home via mobile phone and email, shop locally and network furiously in local cafés which become the centres of the new e-commerce industrial clusters. Red Square, in what used to be quite a large industrial estate off Carysfort Road, is already famous (or infamous) for its tongue-in-cheek advertising blitz on billboards and in the property pages. It sells Stoke Newington as ‘a bohemian quarter where diverse communities contribute to a rich cultural mix’, a place where the new artisans of the e-revolution will work from home, and in the evenings cruise Stoke Newington Church Street with ‘5,000 artists, 50 pubs, untold restaurants and the best Jazz joint in town.’ It is at least designed by professional architects- the well known practice of Campbell Zogolovitch Wilkinson and Gough - and it has a certain insouciant flair in its design. The extensive glossy literature says nothing however about local schools and Council services, and one assumes that the apartments are aimed at young, childless couples who will not be settling in Stoke Newington for life, but passing through. Red Square offers 115 housing units with car parking for 90 cars, but there is no private gym, unlike the proposals for the former Defoe Road Depot comprising 45 residential and 10 live/work units with 33 carbays and a two storey gym. Admittedly cars are a part of everyday life, but the whole point of the government’s urban renaissance was to discourage car-use for these small inner city developments, and indeed even suggested that some should be built with no car parking provision at all. And why a private gym at Defoe Road, when the nearby state - of-the - art Clissold Leisure Centre - finally due to open next year - is within easy jogging continued on page 3
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