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Continued from page 2 distance? Is it because it is assumed that the people moving into these apartments don’t really want to mix? Shaken, not stirred? The Defoe Road proposals suggest another disturbing trend about these new loft-style developments, which is that they are being built with little or no attention being paid to the impact upon the local infrastructure. In fact a number of them actually have replaced the historic civic infrastructure: Fleetwood is formerly Fleetwod Primary School, Scholar’s Yard in Ayrsome Road was once Stoke Newington College, and Defoe Road is where the Council’s refuse depot used to be, until very recently the base for Hackney’s half-hearted attempts at re-cycling. If some of the new residents have children, where will they go to school? How are the new e-revolutionaries going to cope with uncollected rubbish, poorly managed and maintained parks, libraries and street repairs - or are they going to go away their worries on a private exercise machine while watching re-runs of ‘Friends’ on cable TV? And what also of the government’s - and one assumes Hackney’s - commitment to halting social polarisation and creating mixed communities? The new report from the Mayor’s Commission on Housing for London has argued that inner London needs up to 50 per cent of all new housing to be ‘affordable’ to people who may be on benefits or without savings, as well as key workers such as nurses, teachers, hospital doctors and others who work and yet still don’t earn enough to secure a mortgage. The government’s own planning legislation. PPG 3 (Planning Policy Guidance 3) recommends that all new developments of more than 15 units should contain a significant element of affordable housing, and in London the Housing Commission has argued that this is now needed as a matter of urgency. But Red Square appears to contain no affordable housing, despite its revolutionary marketing rhetoric, although the development on the Wilmer Place site opposite William Patten School, does include a number of units for rent. There’s something fishy too about the sudden enthusiasm for live-work units which suggests that these may have been imposed by Hackney’s planning department as a means of trying to avoid Stoke Newington becoming wholly a restaurant district. Live-work developments were pioneered locally by arts and crafts workers in the early 1980s, but one suspects that there will be little monitoring by Hackney as to whether people really are working from home and sustaining some kind of local economy, or whether it is developers simply taking advantage of planning loopholes to get new private housing built with a veneer of social contribution. Elsewhere in Stoke Newington the building frenzy is throwing up other examples of the good, the bad and the ugly. The new housing development for NHS workers at the junction of Brownswood Road and Green Lanes is as cheap and nasty as it can get, on a corner site where a bit of uplift was badly needed. Contrast this to the Peabody development at Newington Green, at the junction of Albion Road and Green Lanes, where a real landmark building has been designed and constructed. This is a fantastic building enhancing rather than destroying one of Stoke Newington’s most treasured places, Newington Green. It works on every level - as a bold statement on an important corner, a tower of beauty by day and a lighthouse at night, and with real public interface at street level with a surgery and shop units. It too contains a mix of tenures. Unfortunately while writing this article nobody in either Hackney’s planning department or press office was willing to discuss what are the current guidelines on design, affordable mix, and wider ambitions for new housing development in Stoke Newington.
But if Stoke Newington is to be a successful mixed urban quarter, retaining people rather than giving them a frisson of cosmopolitan café culture for a couple of years before they go off to raise their families in more propitious settings, then much more thought needs to be given to improving the basic infrastructure which, in the closing weeks of the second millennium looks distinctly close to meltdown. Ken Worpole was a member of the recent Mayor's Commission for Housing in London, and is
the author of a new book, Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in 20th
Century European Culture reviewed on page 25.
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One suspects
that given Hackney’s parlous financial state, not too many arduous conditions are
being imposed on developers, other than those which attract the maximum income for the
Council. It’s good to see some stylish development in the area, and the refurbishment
and re-use of some public sites and buildings that may have languished empty.