Heathrow and the house where I was born - why boundaries matter

Let's start by looking at the importance of boundaries. This is where I was born:



The little arrow marks 174 and 176 Beckenham Road, Beckenham, Kent. This address is located in the London Borough of Bromley. The Bromley Adult Education Centre used to be Cater Park School (alumni including Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West and my mum - although back in mum's time it was Beckenham Grammar School for Girls). The school is in London SE20 not Beckenham, Kent with the boundary between Kent and the London post code following the line of Royston Road and Kent House Road.

Back in 1961 all of this was in the County of Kent meaning that I was born a Kentish Man rather than a Londoner. The London Government Act of 1963 changed all this by creating the 32 London boroughs including the incorporation of Beckenham and Penge Urban Districts into the new borough of Bromley. By the stroke of a pen, my birthplace had shifted from Kent to London (although by the borough's creation we'd moved to Shirley, Surrey another bit of the new London).

All this came to mind from a little video posted on the Londonist website that showed the different boundaries of London - political, transport and postal geography are not, as the saying goes, co-terminous. The idea of London is pretty fuzzy - the futher you get from the original London (the Square Mile of the City itself) the more other place associations become important to people. Not just the distinction of North or South of the river or whether you're on the tube but identity with old towns or villages as well as the old county geography of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex and Kent.

So where I was born is variously in London, Kent, Beckenham, Bromley and, at a pinch since it's the nearest town, Penge (we lived later at 186 Beckenham Road where we knew we were in Beckenham because there was a sign outside the house saying so). Any or all of these answers would be correct for a particular question but equally that answer would be open to question. If I say "I'm from Kent" someone might retort with; "nonsense, you're from South London". And the same goes for all the answers - I'm pretty clear about my identity (it's all of these things) but defining it to someone who doesn't fully understand the relevent history and geography can get a little long-winded and confusing.

And I can hear you muttering "oh, shut up Simon, it doesn't matter". Except it does - Heathrow Airport tells us it does. Or rather the decision about airport capacity "for London" tells us why this argument about places, boundaries and history is important. Here's the current Mayor of London:

Mr Khan said the government's announcement was "the wrong decision for London and the whole of Britain".

He said ministers were "running roughshod over Londoners' views", and that the new runway would be "devastating for air quality across London".

There's more but this is enough for my point. As is remembering that both of Khan's predecessors opposed expanding Heathrow as did the man he beat to become Mayor of London. Now there are many arguments for and against different options but these are not the things determining the position of the Mayor of London. It's the bit about Londoners' views - Sadiq Khan, like Boris Johnson before him, is elected by those Londoners and they want more airport capacity but not actually in London.

Khan's argument in support of expanding Gatwick is about politics. The people affected by its expansion don't live in London so don't enter into the Mayor's calculations - there are a lot of votes to lose in supporting Heathrow but few, if any, votes lost by backing Gatwick. Yet had past spatial decisions beeen different - say a London limited to the old London County Council area or a different location (Croydon, maybe) for the airport - the Mayor might has been gung ho for supporting the third runway at Heathrow (or Croydon).

It seems that the bitterly contested (there were huge petitions from Bromley and Croydon opposing the changes) London Government Act of 1963 is largely responsible for the problem with deciding about an airport for London. That Act created the current boundaries making the new authority (as fans of Horace Cutler and Ken Livingstone can explain) politically marginal - those votes in West and South-West London really matter - and it placed Heathrow Airport within the boundary. So long as the outcome of London's mayoral election was contested, making a decision in support of Heathrow was fudged. The same thing that made me unsure about whether I'm a Londoner or a Kentish Man has also meant three decades of dither over the development of airport capacity that's right for the World's greatest city.

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Garden Cities, new towns and the concreting of Kent

The shortlist for the Wolfson Economics Prize to build a new 'garden city' has been announced. There are five finalists some of whom have specified the location or possible location for the proposed new city. The most specific and, perhaps for this reason, the most prominent is that from housing charity, Shelter:

This entry proposes a new garden city on the Hoo Peninsula, Medway, Kent, starting with a settlement of up to 48,000 people - about the size of Welwyn Garden City at Stoke Harbour. This would be part of a larger cluster of settlements eventually totaling 150,000 people. The entry proposes a model designed to attract massive private investment into the provision of high quality homes, jobs, services and infrastructure. The delivery model prioritises speed and volume over profit margins, aims to acquire land at low cost and transfer valuable assets to a Community Trust for the long term. Local people would be offered shares in the city.

Now if you know the Hoo peninsula, you'll know that it has been the favoured location for every second mad-cap scheme - airports come especially to mind. Presumably - and this is the cynic in me speaking - this is because Hoo is far enough away from where all those bohemian fans of garden cities live but close enough to London to make building the 'garden city' viable. Indeed, the Shelter proposal includes a link to the High Speed railway (to a station that doesn't exist) so all those 150,000 people can be sped into the city for their day jobs.

And Shelter justifies this by being rude about Hoo:

 "A muddy, tidal estuary with poor transport links, a huge ugly power station dominating views, and few local facilities or job opportunities."

What Shelter doesn't mention is that the Hoo peninsula contains large tracts of protected salt marsh - some pretty special habitats in an important marine fringe corridor. Nor that the history of Hoo goes back to the 9th century and that the villages of the peninsula, far from being ugly or unpopular, are attractive and well-liked.

And all this would be on top of another enormous development at Ebbsfleet (between Dartford and Gravesend for those not so clear about North Kent geography). Along with other proposed developments in existing local plans, the south bank of the Thames estuary - from Dartford to Gillingham - would add perhaps 300,000 new residents all hugger-mugger to the HS1 route and living the sort of dormitory existence that is the antithesis of the 'garden city'. We get the suburbanisation of Kent rather than some rebirth of Ebenezer Howard's idea of Christaller-esque communal self-sufficiency.

It may well be that the idea of new towns - call them 'garden cities' if that yanks your chain - is the right way to respond to the continuing housing pressure in London (I still need to be convinced here - the experience of large cities is that people want to live near the centre is they can). But simply to point at one spot - declared 'ugly' and 'isolated' by the planners - is quite the wrong response albeit typical of Shelter.

Finally, we should remember that we cannot replicate Howard's vision because of the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. When Howard was creating Letchworth, he could buy agricultural land at agricultural land prices and build on that land unconstrained by 'local development frameworks', 'spatial plans' or an enthusiastic local council planning department. And because he could buy the land cheaply, Howard's model could capture land value increase for communal benefit. However much you think this a wonderful idea (and I'm all for it myself), so long as the value is value as housing land, which it will be under our planning system, then capturing the added value for communal purposes is at best marginal and more likely of no significance at all.

The Shelter proposals are predicated on land purchase at low cost - I cannot see how, given the manner in which the planning system works, they can achieve this. Unless they're expecting to pay Hoo landowners less than the immediate, post-purchase value of the land. What we are seeing with these proposals - both the specifically-located one from Shelter and also other finalists - are schemes that require a significant relaxation of planning system constraints so as to make them workable. It's not going to happen is it?

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Boris Island is a really stupid idea and would be an obscene waste of money

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OK so I’ve a little interest in the subject – my parents live on Sheppey and my sister lives in Rochester (or is it Strood – these places blend into one glorious Medway mush). Why on Earth are we even considering spending something like £50 billion on building an airport in the Thames estuary?

Apparently it’s because Brazilians would just love it!

Last year, Mr Johnson published a report claiming that an airport in the Thames Estuary would lead to billions of pounds of investment from countries such as Brazil and China. It stated that the additional hub airport would radically increase foreign direct investment into Britain from fast – growing developing countries.

So let’s have a think about this then. London needs new airport capacity – I’m not one of the greeny-greeny, lentil-knitters who think air travel is an unalloyed evil. But why on earth don’t you put it at Heathrow? You know, where there’s already an airport, where the public transport and road networks exist and where the big airlines want to go?

Surely, if we want to increase capacity we should do so at the most economics rate – so here’s the comparison:

Building Boris Island:   £50 billion

Building a third runway at Heathrow:  £8 billion

The idea of a floating airport in the Thames estuary is beyond stupid, it would be (rather like High Speed 2) a scandalous waste of public money. And comparing the situation in London to massively land-poor places like Hong Kong or Singapore is utterly misleading.

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The bitter herb in the garden...

There they hang. A remembrance of Kent's heritage, symbolic of beer's favouring. Each flower now dry, delicate, poised almost on the cusp of dust. Just decoration maybe but a decoration redolent with those things now lost and forgotten.

Here on the island few hops are now grown but the memory of them remains - the sunny summers when East End families decamped to the Downs to harvest the female hops ready for their marriage to John Barleycorn. The oast houses - now fine homes for wealthy stockbrokers and successful businessmen - still exist making, with the rolling down and salt marsh, the uniqueness of Kent.

Today Kent feels less like a garden, the fast motorways, the high speed rail make it more an adjunct to London - the Patio of England rather than her garden. A nice patio for sure with block paving, elegantly planted pots and carefully trimmed trees but no longer an orto, no longer a place that feeds the cities.

That growing is still there if you look - at the right time of your there'll be a dozen or more apple varieties for sale in Brambledown Farm Shop plus local cherries, pears and even apricots. And people work hard to preserve the bits of garden that remain - to protect the rare varieties, to beat at the doors of the shopkeepers in the cities reminding them how these fruits are the best.

Things changes, some are lost but the spirit remains in those hops hanging from the pub beams, in the local cider and in the damson hedgerows. Kent may be an ordered, tidy, over-fussed garden but garden it is - the Garden of England.

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Crime falls again....

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Kent Police - surely to be followed by other forces - are crowing about the reduction in crime within the County:

The figures are for the rolling year October 2009 to September 2010, and  show that all crime in Kent has fallen by 3.9 per cent, compared to the same period in the previous year (08/09).

This means there were 4,389 fewer crimes in Kent and Medway.

Kent Deputy Chief Constable Alan Pughsley said: 'We are pleased these very serious offences have seen major reductions in Kent, where figures were low in the first instance.

"We aim to make Kent as safe a place as possible, and we are completely committed to tackling violent crime and to bringing those responsible for it to justice."

The 'very serious offences' refers to a nearly 7% drop in violent crime - a pattern being repeated across the country. However, I do wonder about some of these figures - almost all the drop in volume crime relates to a drop in criminal damage and vehicle crime. The other volume crimes - the things that really affect people have all increased:

• Burglary up by 2.3 per cent, or 286 crimes
• Robbery up by six per cent, or 53 crimes
• Theft up by 3.8 per cent, or 1,023 crimes

It seems to me that the drop in crime has little or nothing to do with policing - or else the drop would be in the main targets of police activity such as burglary and street crime. However, there is a clue to police activity in these increases:

• Drugs offences up by 8.5 per cent, or 338 crimes
• Sex offences up by 15.6 per cent, or 205 crimes.

The police spokesman claimed that these increases were entirely down to their efforts:

'The increase in the number of drugs offences recorded actually highlights our commitment to detecting and dismantling not only organised crime groups involved in the cultivation, production and trafficking of drugs, but also individuals who peddle drugs in our communities.'

The point here isn't to criticise the police but to observe that the drivers of crime are not the number of coppers, the strategies used or indeed policies on sentencing. The factors most influencing crime relate to its ease - hence the drop in car crime since it got harder to steal cars - and the dutch courage needed. It should be no surpirse to see that (since licensing liberalisation) reducing consumption of alcohol has led to reduced violent crime and less criminal damage.

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