Town planning

The bulldozing of Covent Garden

Minette Marrin

Che sera sera is the motto of the Russell family, who until the beginning of this century owned the Covent Garden area as part of the massive Bedford Estates. The phrase has an ironic relevance today — "What will be, will be" is lamentably true of developers' plans for Covent Garden. The plans that so many people object to are already being implemented — there will be about two million square feet of office space, a massive conference centre, a major open space reduced from four acres to two and a half acres, a new road network, a futuristic pedestrian walkway lifting pedestrians out of the way but not Out of the fumes of more cars, more parking space and new housing much of which will be too expensive for Covent Garden residents. The Minister for the Environment has not yet given permission for the GLC comprehensive plan to go into action, but developers' activities seem to show their confidence that he will.

Although the GLC has the means, the expressed intention and the duty of restraining private developers, here and elsewhere in London, from imposing unacceptable change for enormous private profit, it is failing to do so. It is now more urgent to discover the reasons for this failure than to discuss the general and hydra-like problems of town planning, or the failings of the Covent Garden plan in particular. Despite the difficulties of obtaining and following maps, plans, company reports and answers from men in high places, despite the frustrations of contradictions and silence, it is possible to get some idea of the ways of developers in Covent Garden, and their relationship with the GLC. (It should be said in passing that the GLC's information centre in Covent Garden -is disarmingly helpful, without, according to the Covent Garden Community Association, supplying the precise information that counts.) What emerges most clearly is the impotence of the private citizen, who wants to know what's happening, or wants to object. Not che sera sera in many cases, but "What is proposed has already happened." Here are some cautionary tales for apse who still have faith in the workings of bureau-democracy in a mixed economy.

An extremely interesting fait accompti, it would appear, is the sad story of the Adelphi Theatre, the climax of which coincided with the dramatic exit of Lady Dartmouth from the fray — a very welcome expression of disaffection with the GLC's comprehensive plan, and, possibly, with the Council's methods. The Adelphi, in the Strand, is one of five to be pulled down if the plan receives Ministerial approval. On June 30 this year the Evening Standard reported the GLC's re-routing of a sunken road, originally proposed to go through the Adelphi Theatre. On July 5 Mr Peter Walker, the Minister of the EnvirOnment, endorsed the listing of seventeen theatres as scheduled buildings, mysteriously excluding the Adelphi, even though it is the oldest theatre on its orig inal site in London. More precisely, the additions were made by the Secretary of State for the Environment in the week of June 26-30, the same week as the GLC's announcement about the sunken road. It is interesting that only three days before the re-routing was announced, on June 27, Country and New Town Properties Ltd, owner-developers of the Adelphi site, beld a meeting. The Chairman stated that "Estimated market value (of the property portfolio) remained conservative pending clarification of plans for Covent Garden Area." But even before ' clariffication ', loan stocks were increased by almost E2 million, by funds from British and Commonwealth Shipping whose Deputy Chairman is in fact Lord Rotherwick, one of the directors of Country and New Town Properties. By the beginning of July, Lady Dartmouth was expressing especial doubts to Sir Desmond Plummer about the sunken road, and on July 28, she resigned. Curiouser and curiouser, and good for Lady Dartmouth.

At the side of the Adelphi site are the Civil Service Stores. The Civil Service Supply Association Ltd were bought in May 1969 by Country and New Town Properties. Their later acquisition of the Adelphi is typical of the 'packaging' developers find essential to high profits, and which residents and visitors find so inimical to the character and social structure of a community. Packaged anonymity and exorbitant rents and (here) a new flood of traffic at the centre of a city are a poor exchange for the diversity and individuality of Covent Garden. The apparent inevitability of the change only makes it worse.

There seems to be inevitability, too, about the destruction of Cambridge Circus, at the north-western edge of Covent Garden — the last remaining Victorian Circus in central London. The GLC owns all the land fronting the circus, and the Town and City Property Company have wanted to develop it for some time. At present there are two Victorian residential blocks, which give the Circus much of its character, and which contain thirty-five low income flats. On street level there are bookshops, a costumier and some offices. To the rear of the site are two car parks, leased by Town and City to the ubiquitous National Car Parks. Westminster City Council leases thirteen of its seventeen car parks to NCP, w'ho are not national, of course, but private. This sort of digression is almost unavoidable in discussing what is happening in central London — the issues are so inter-woven, and objections so tangled, that it is hard to think, still less argue, along a single thread.

To return to Cambridge Circus: Town and City want to build an office block of 326,000 square feet, one and a half times the capacity of Centre Point, with accom panying showrooms, shops and splendour. The GLC has ignored vociferous protest, including over 2,000 signed objections from the Covent Garden Community Association, who also objected to the widen ing of Charing Cross Road to six lanes.

The Historic Buildings Department refused to 'list,' the buildings involved (not that listing proves much protection — think of Gerrard Street). On June 10 the Guardian reported that the GLC had agreed to sell land to a property company to build a nineteen storey office block. It is hardly necessary to say which property company, or to point out how much darkness, wind and anonymity is created by such huge buildings. The GLC, on the other hand, was reported to have said "Terms have not been agreed, and negotiations for sale are not being proceeded with at the moment." (Is it is coincidence that public servants always seem to write in the passive?) But Town and City said "A price has been agreed and negotiations have been concluded — the GLC has undertaken to sell the site to us." In their Annual General Report of March this year, Town and City's project here was described as being "in the course of development," and coded to show that it would be completed by 1975-76. Yet in theory they have not yet even bought the property.

It is also illuminating to know that on June 5, 1972 workmen sub-contracted by the GLC moved in to destroy the services (baths, lavatories etc) at the Victorian flats, Trentishoe Mansions. The workmen resented questions, and manhandled and threw out a reporter. At the same time as the place was being torn apart, the last tenant, Mrs Souhami, was hurrying away with her possessions. The Covent Garden Community Association claims that the GLC has a policy of promoting deterioration in the area. Why not? It is a common enough practice. The tenants of Sandringham Flats nearby, who are in the way of redevelopment plans, feel that they are being purposely driven out by fear: empty flats are allowed to go unlit, unclean, unguarded, and are haunted by vagrants and drug addicts. It is ironic that the GLC justified the spoliation of Trentishoe Mansions in Cambridge Circus as an effort to keep squatters away. One way and another squatters can be useful — for example at Odhams Press, which would have been a listed building in the Covent Garden Plan, and which the International Publishing Company subsidiary of Reed International has interests in pulling down. The mysterious fire which destroyed the building was started by squatters, according to the owners. Mr Bernard Perkins, Chairman of the GLC Housing Committee, explained that Trentishoe Mansions was "surplus to the GLC's needs." The GLC has repudiated all charges of official vandalism, and, as far as I know, no public announcement has been made about any decision to sell the site.

A footnote: Simon Jenkins of the Even ing Standard reported on August 1 that Sir Desmond Plummer, leader of the GLC, has not sold his shares in Town and City Property Co., though after considerable pressure he sold his shares in the three property companies doing well in the Piccadilly Circus Scheme.

Sandringham Flats and Newport Dwel lIngs, a little further south along the Charing Cross Road are now being emptied. They are part of a block owned mainly by the Westminster City Council and the GLC, and the whole thing is to be redeveloped. It is worth remembering that Westminster only made details public after the setting up of a Tenants' Association in July this year. All the buildings will be demolished for a multi-storey car park (377 cars), offices, showrooms, shops and 123 luxury flats. There are countless obvious objections to this, but two particularly underline the persistent feeling •that public servants are not dealing as they should with the problems of town planning. The way the site changed hands is typical of bureaucratic inefficiency, whereby public bodies buy and resell to each other for no particularly good reason. For example the GLC sold Sandringham Flats to Westminster City Council for over £600,000 with the provision that Westminster would sell back to the GLC for £60,000 the land needed for the widening of Charing Cross Road. A worse example of this is the incestuous loan relations between the Government and the Market Authority to meet costs of the new site for the Market at Nine Elms, which is discussed below.

A second disquieting feature of these proposals, here again, is their seeming inevitability. The site forms an important link between the Piccadilly and Covent Garden developments: it is unlikely that such a strategic area will be preserved and renovated just because of the objections of a few working class tenants and a mere 2,000 or so residents of the area. And once this site has been re-developed, it makes sense to redevelop the sites it was designed to connect, otherwise public money would have been wasted.

Gerrard Street suffers the same disadvantage of being an important link. Here again the wishes of a few Chinese and the memories of a few visitors seem unimportant compared with the millions of pounds already involved. Gerrard Street is bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue, Lisle Street, Charing Cross Road, and Wardour Street. Development has been under discussion for about four or five years: the first indication of the redevelopment came up at the Public Enquiry on July 12 this year. Mr Hirsch, the chief planning officer of Westminster City Council, discussed the link between the schemes, which would go through Gerrard Street. During the past year Stock Conversion, of which Mr Joe Levy is a managing director, has been buying up a large part of the site, and a month ago began acquiring property east of Macclesfield Street to Newport Place, joining up with the proposed development of Sandringham West. Then in February this year office development permission was given to the Post Office for a proposed development of 36-41 Gerrard Street and 14-23 Lisle Street, (effectively all the land Other than the Stock Conversion block), for about 100,000 square feet of office space. The Post Office has applied for detailed planning permission from Westminster. The architects are Sidney Kaye and Firmin, who sometimes collaborate With Fitzroy Robinson and Partners, who are the architects for Trust Houses Forte's development of the Criterion site in Pic cadilly. THF are in turn associated with Stock Conversion. It is a small world. The many people who are fond of Gerrard Street may know that 36-41 are listed buildings Grade Two, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in Lisle Street numbers 14-27 are listed as Grade Three, and were built in 1791. These would all come down. Instead there would be the much discussed pedestrian deck at first floor level, and offices, luxury flats and show rooms. There is no proposal for public authority housing. The future face, or facelessness of Gerrard Street first ap peared, somewhat surreptitiously, in a drawing in the GLC's contribution to the Stockholm Conference on Human Environ ment in May this year; it was therefore a well-formed concept some time before Mr Hirsch's explanations. Westminster has ar chitectural drawings from Sidney Kaye which are even more alarming, with what appears to be a futuristic cab-track for shoppers' transport, at second floor level. The Chinese community of Gerrard Street are organising opposition, just as the CGCA is doing.

But public opinion ought to be galvanised against the principles, as well as the practice, of implementing change — against for example, the vicious circularity of justifications. On the Post Office's site at the moment there are only 22,000 square feet of office space (the rest is taken up by low income housing, industry, clubs, etc). The Post Office wants to abolish this for 100,000 square feet of office space. Why do they need this? Presumably to provide postal and telephone services for the future 500,000 square feet of office space in Piccadily, for the future two million square feet in Covent Garden, and for the future 300,000 square feet at Cambridge Circus. What is this if not a municipal dog chasing its own tail? Elsewhere in Covent Garden the proposed conference centre justifies the proposed road development, and vice versa.

For anyone who still feels unbounded confidence in the GLC, there is the story of the Haslemere development in Drury Lane, at the High Holborn end. The GLC has repeatedly claimed that one function of its comprehensive plan is to prevent private developers destroying the character of the area for pure profit. The planners argue that where development has to be private, for whatever reason, they can ensure some public gain. But it can be argued that this gain often manifests itself in ' trade-offs ' whereby the public body and the developer scratch each other's back. It is said that Centre Point was allowed its monstrous height because the base was designed to form a roundabout for the public benefit. Haslemere Estates will be serving the public by building a new sunken road, as well as by providing 65,000 square feet, mostly of office space. However, Haslemere Estates had a little trouble in acquiring 12-15 Drury Lane, so it is not surprising to find these properties marked for compulsory purchase between 1972 and 1975 in the GLC publication 'The Next Step' (Figure 6). Meanwhile in July Haslemere acquired the remnants of the leases of 13-15 Drury Lane, displacing the offices of the CGCA and gutting number 13 in anticipation of redevelopment, although no planning permission has yet been granted on this date.

But the truth is compensation is so expensive that it is often simpler, or in the public interest, to concede permission. (It should not be forgotten what a powerful lever compensation prospects are for private developers: it is a lever to upturn all London). With splendid, if unconscious irony, the GLC stated in June to Christopher Tugendhat, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, that "The development included a short section of a new road proposed for the Comprehensive Development Area. It is underground, and will be used in the first instance as a car park by the owners; if the Comprehensive Development Area is not approved this use will continue." So whatever happens, Haslemere cannot lose, and is not losing. Their accounts seems to be in the rudest of health.

The final irony of the whole redevelopment scheme is the financial muddle of Nine Elms, the site for the new market. In 1960 the Covent Garden Market Authority was established by Act of Parliament, partly because of pressure from the market traders who wanted the market to be redeveloped on the existing site. The Market Authority borrowed £4m from the Ministry of Agriculture, over seven years at 6 per cent. In 1967 the Market Author ity was unable and still is, to repay the Ministry and had to borrow £345,000 at 9 per cent to pay back the interest owing. In July 1972 just before the public enquiry, the Market authority was given permission to buy six acres of property own ed by various market traders, and the Ministry of Agriculture lent £12 million for this purpose, stating that it was "not quite our line of business" (reported in the Sunday Times, January 16). Altogether the Ministry has lent £30 million to build Nine Elms, £16 million at 9 per cent interest, and has written £8 million off, and the Market authority has suffered the indignity of borrowing from a creditor to repay the very same creditor. There will be more financial embarrassment, since super market operators have said their interest in Nine Elms is negligible. According to the Fruit Trades Journal, chains are using traditional markets less and less — and will be using them less still if there is as much wrong with transport arrangements at Nine Elms as seems to be the case. The Authority's proposed rents are considered excessive by the traders, and one of the leading and largest traders in Covent Garden is unlikely to move to Nine Elms, and has started to make other arrangements.

So the move to Nine Elms, which was the cause, or the reason, or the excuse for the whole redevelopment plan, is founded on errors of judgment and financial embarrassment. The redevelopment scheme rests on the shoulders of a white elephant.

What could be more bitter for the people who are losing their homes, or for the people who love London, and London's natural processes of change? What could be more absurd than the vision of devel opers making millions as a result of public servants' inefficiency, and what more disturbing than the suspicion that it isn't always pure inefficiency, either?