“It’s our duty to be nimbys”

I have long been fascinated by London’s history and by its local government. In 1995 I chaired the Commission for Local Democracy, in which we studied what we found to be clearly more democratic local regimes in America and Germany and France. We eventually favoured elected mayors. We found they raised the temperature of local politics. They identified with their towns, not with political parties. They got things done because they were personally blamed if they were not done. They were properly accountable. 

It was we who persuaded Tony Blair to introduce elected mayors after 1997, though he did so only timidly – and impotently. Today’s regional metro-mayors do not even run their cities or their regions. They just chair meetings. But that experience bred in me a fascination with the lowest tiers of democracy. I became a junkie for the parish, the community council, the neighbourhood, the residents association, the conservation society. I am now trying to write a book about the so-called urban village.

Streets can create cohesion, but rarely large tower blocks

The key to such villages is their streets. Not every city has urban villages. Towers and blocks of flats rarely generate a village cohesion. The great American sociologist Jane Jacobs declared it is streets above all that determine our relations with our neighbours. We all have friends and acquaintances, but we do not all have neighbours. Where we do, we guard our privacy but we share a special intimacy: that of being next door, that of proximity. We bond as a neighbourhood when it matters, as it did during covid with its whatsapp groups. Neighbours matter in monitoring local crime, in parking, rubbish and nuisances. Above all they matter when someone wants to alter the neighbourhood’s appearance. Then they can suddenly matter very much.

I have always hankered after being a neighbourhood mayor – a village mayor. I toyed with being mayor of Primrose Hill. That didn’t get very far. I must admit I’d love to be mayor of Kensington High Street. I long to clear up the messy junction of the High Street and Church Street. I’d remove the railings that make St Mary Abbots look like a zoo deserted by its animals. I’d convert its churchyard into a pocket park, as the last surviving complete vestry enclave in London. Yet we tell no one of the fact. It could be a living museum of London local government.

Kensington is London’s most beautiful and best conserved borough

Above all, I would join with others in a concern for Kensington’s future appearance. This is not just another London borough. It is London’s most beautiful, its best conserved and also incidentally its most densely populated. The key to this is its past, Kensington’s building over the course of the 19^th century. That development was of, I believe, the world’s finest urban form, the high-density street terrace and villa.

Guarding these terraces I regard as the inherited duty of every citizen of this borough. Postwar London planning did everything it could to destroy them. Across east and south, London streets have been demolished in their hundreds. For half a century, redevelopment has been handled by the cultists of Corbusier and his towers, slabs and estates set in vacant lots. His motto was, We must kill the streets. And no one has pursued that motto more assiduously than Britain’s city  planners since the war.

Kensington itself was largely saved by the introduction since the 1970s of conservation areas. I believe it has more such areas than any other borough. That did not save it from the grotesque intrusion of tower block, notoriously toxic to their surroundings. Blocks have done their best to kill Notting Hill Gate and make Cromwell Road a grim entrance to central London. I know of no other city in Europe that would permit the isolated blocks that now deface the borough’s skyline.

A tower is not a matter of opinion. The question is whether its sheer obtrusiveness should allow one developer’s opinion – or his greed – to intrude on everyone else’s, or overrule ‘public’ opinion in general.

Change must be proportionate and conditional

Today we have a government that apparently wants more people crammed into the capital, denying any concern for levelling up the provinces. No living city is immune to change, but change must be proportionate and conditional. In the case of a great city with a great heritage it must respect that heritage.

The present prime minister clearly does not share that respect, he despises conservation. He calls it nimbyism, or blocking. I call sensitivity to scenery and to beauty. Above all, I call nimbyism essential if we are not to see the sort of ruination inflicted on London over the past 50 years. If we do not guard our back yards, for sure this government will not do so. It’s our duty to be nimbys.

Kensington’s proposed tower clusters at Earls Court and Kensal Canalside are its back yards. They will be as gross as those at Vauxhall/Nine Elms and west at Acton. The tops of the towers cannot even fit into their artists’ impressions. They appear to embrace no streets. Open spaces will be without such reference points as pubs, shops and cafes. These are luxury flats, many doubtless to be left empty, like thousands of others in a borough already cursed with emptiness.

Residential towers are unpopular with families and as social housing. In London they cater primarily for young singles, second-homers and overseas investors. Kensington’s new towers are clearly not designed to form communities. The give-away is that the new Earls Court residents will not even qualify for residents parking. Ghosts don’t need to park.

Earls Court and Kensal would be ideal sites for gentle density

These are vacant sites at present and of course Kensington can take more houses. But of all boroughs, it should surely be in the vanguard of modern town planning, not a throwback to the 1970s. Earls Court and Kensal would be ideal sites for new high-density, low-rise development, that of so-called gentle density. This means tight residential neighbourhoods of mixed uses and active ground floors, fashioned into streets rather than set as blocks in open spaces. I was at a conference on this subject only last week. I realised that the urban format being discussed was precisely that of Kensington’s Victorian streets.

We currently have a government that blatantly wants to curb local power over these decisions. It wants developers to be in the lead, with planners following obediently behind. Yet what impressed me at the conference last week was the number of local councillors determined to do what it was clear local people wanted, expressed in polls and surveys. And I repeat, the outcome was high-density housing, but low rise.

Kensington could act as the vanguard of a new London planning

The borough I have come to love clearly faces a challenge, whether to put the clock back or forward. It could act as the vanguard of a new London planning. Kensington is surely strong enough not to be taking orders from a private developer or, in Kensal, from a retail corporation.

The borough’s democracy is not confined to an elected planning committee. It is accountable to its citizens and to their active associations and village institutions. They include your society, acting as an alliance of dozens of volunteers giving their time to guard their local communities. You simply cannot be brushed aside as nimbys. You are the foot-soldiers of London democracy. All strength to your arms.

Simon Jenkins