Changing Faces of A City: How London Sold Its Soul to The Private Equity Devil.

On the 17th of May 1984, nearly 37 years ago, Prince Charles gave the most extraordinary speech, about the changing face of his beloved city, which interestingly, has aged spectacularly well.

He said:

" He would understand better this type of high-tech approach if you demolished the whole of Trafalgar square and started again with a single architect responsible for the entire layout, but what is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."

To put things into proper context, this speech was made before the term 'Private equity' became a thing, long before London became awash with money from foreign oligarchs, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, money launderers, oil traders from disparate parts of the globe, who were keen to leave their mark on the city's architectural and economic landscape.

This was also long before the Swiss Re building, famously known as the Gherkin, the shard, the revamped Tate gallery and a number of the glass facade buildings which pervade the financial district of the Nation's capital.

The supremely tragic irony here, is that it was under the leadership of the "extremely left wing" Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London that the city of my birth, really began to monetize all aspects of city, bringing in the congestion charge and embarked on the modernization of the London underground network through the public private partnership- an initiative which marked the genesis of venture capitalists getting their fingers on longstanding British institutions and the commencement of several building projects in and around the capital, which at the time,was euphemistically described as 'affordable housing'.

In our collective naivety, the term ' affordable housing' which seemed wholly innocuous at the time would have the profoundest consequences for the vulnerable, the poorest, the hourly paid members of the gig economy set-up and bringing about the greatest social cleansing that Charles Dickens would have been hard pressed to put into incisive and trenchant prose.

Using my neighborhood in North London as a microcosm of the wider city, Colindale has become a place that is barely recognizable from the area in which I grew up, lived and went to college and university.

Back in the early 1990s, as a young teenager desperately craving some sort of independence, I worked at the McDonald's restaurant in Neasden near Wembley, as a crew member earning £3.00 an hour, long before Tony Blair's Labour government came into power and introduced minimum wage. I was able to rent a room in a decent apartment at the graham park estate in Colindale for £50 per week. Despite my earnings on an average month coming to around £600 pounds, I could still afford to pay my rent without breaking into sweat and still shop at the Brent Cross mall, once or twice in a month- a throw back to the times when the St Michael's brand of Marks and Spencer's alongside C&A and Ciro Cittero ruled the London high streets.

But by the early to the late noughties, this old neighborhood of mine was caught up in the 'urban regeneration tsunami' of the time which meant that most of the famous landmarks that I had come to know and love were being demolished and sold off to property developers.

The buildings affected are listed below:

The British Newspaper Library, adjacently located from the Colindale underground tube station.

The Robert Peel Center: The metropolitan police training school.

The Hendon and Barnet college.

Huge Swathes of the Graham park estate.

Back in the 1980s, the late Margaret Thatcher instituted the right to buy policy, which enabled long term owners of council apartments, such as the graham park estate in Colindale. The asking price back then were usually 33–50% off the market value. There also was a government stipulation that councils could not the use the proceeds from the sales to reinvest in new homes. It must be pointed out, however, that the council's inability to reinvest the profits should be seen as the root cause of today's inordinately extortionate rent and property prices.

To the working class population in deprived areas in the capital city such as Hackney, Brixton, West Ham, Tottenham, Manor park, Manor House, Finsbury Park, Peckham, Wembley, Woolwich, Plumstead,Harlesden, Neasden, Burnt Oak and Dulwich, who were traditionally Labour party supporters, owning a home presented a once in a lifetime opportunity to pass on some form of wealth to the next generation, however unattractive these council apartments looked on the outside.

Once before,governments of the day were interested in regenerating the inner city and deprived areas by rebuilding and refitting decaying council apartments, these days councils have played a very active role in demolishing dilapidated social homes, such as the ones in graham park and elsewhere and had them replaced with luxury apartments, which the oligarchs and oil barons from distant shores have bought en masse to launder their ill gotten wealth and shunted out the working classes, the minimum wagers, the gig economy employees.

With these points in view, we fully come to appreciate the notion that the Grenfell tower fire, in which 72 people died and over 200 hundred people were injured, was not an isolated incident, but a symptom of a much wider malaise- of systemic neglect, profound contempt for the working classes and the sort of capitalism that Naomi Klein wrote about in her seminal work: The Shock Doctrine:The rise of disaster Capitalism.

These sorts of upheavals, so brilliantly described in Shock doctrine are heaven sent for the oligarchs and simply the best opportunity to apply the shock therapy( in this case, gentrification)which dispossesses the poorest and the most vulnerable among us.

As I pointed a few paragraphs ago, there are a profoundly corrupt councils - a great number of which are Labour led - are complicit in this problem; Indeed the very highest rates of gentrification over the last twenty years have taken place in Lambeth, Hackney, Brent, Tower Hamlet, Haringey, Greenwich, Newham, Ealing, Camden and Southwark.

The council house that was given to my parents, shortly after my birth in the late 1970s, situated at the Portland rise estate, a few yards away from the Manor house tube station, on the Piccadilly line today charges £1500 per month - a number much higher than a fair number of today's Londoners could possibly afford.

If I were a 16–18 year old starting out today in March 2021, earning the London minimum wage of £5.00 per hour working at a McJob, for ten hours a day, 6 days a week, exactly what hope I do have of paying the weekly rent? of feeding adequately? paying the telephone and electricity bills? or making the most of what the city has to offer, in its galleries, Libraries and public spaces?

In seeking to attract the plutocrats and the Oligarchs with the accompanying vast bank balance, London has entered into a Faustian pact with the super wealthy and in the process, this great city, home to descendants of the Polish Jews, fleeing the pogroms, the Huguenots, the Windrush generation and South Asian refugees fleeing Idi Amin's rule of terror, has sold its soul, distilled its essence and lost its identity altogether.

It suffices to say that it is a bit traumatic seeing this happen to my beloved city. Something has really got to give.