London’s riots, Tottenham and a lost decade

It started as a peaceful protest. Two hundred people, mourning the death of local man Mark Duggan, gathered in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm Estate on 6 August, 2011, before walking to the police station on the High Road. The 29-year-old Black man had been shot dead by police two days earlier. “Young people, especially young Black people, were devastated, more than frustrated,” recalls Haringey Council’s current leader, Peray Ahmet. “Someone they knew, their friend, had died. A young Black man had died.” But within hours, devastation had turned to anger at the police response, and the peaceful protest had turned into a riot. Soon the High Road and the Tottenham Hale retail park were in flames. By the next day riots had broken out across London and spread as far as Bristol and Manchester. Five people lost their lives. More than 3,000 were arrested. Nearly the same number of properties were attacked. The total damage to London property alone was estimated to be £370m. Some residents of Tottenham said they had been attacked twice – first by the shooting and then by the riots. “But the conversation stopped being about what had actually happened and was diverted to ‘why had these people nicked some trainers’,” Ahmet says. London’s then mayor, Boris Johnson, appointed veteran developer Sir Stuart Lipton as Tottenham’s champion and chair of the Independent Panel on Tottenham. Regeneration, he said, would provide the solution. Ten years later, Lipton is angry. In fact, in his quiet way, he is furious. “What has happened since? Nothing,” he says. “Nothing has been done.” Hope misplaced The report from Lipton’s panel, published in November 2012, pulled no punches. In 100pt bold type across its two opening pages, it declared: “Previous attempts to regenerate Tottenham have failed.” Its title, It Took Another Riot, was an intentional echo of Michael Heseltine’s It Took a Riot, a report written in the wake of the 1981 unrest in Toxteth, Liverpool. But it could equally have been a reference to the 1985 riots in Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm Estate. “We are convinced that this time things can be different,” Lipton wrote in 2012. A focus on improving the built environment could “reverse decades of decline”. Short-term investments would save as much as £850m annually long-term. “Being from Tottenham could really be an advantage in life, not a ticket to frustration and poverty,” the report said. “This should be our ambition for its regeneration.” But now, Lipton feels that hope was misplaced. The past 10 years, he says, have been a lost decade. Tottenham’s built environment has not been significantly improved, he says. Despite some flagship developments, the public and private sectors have failed to provide the leadership needed to transform communities and people’s lives. Tottenham is a legacy of 50 years of prioritising transport over people. It has all been about getting people out of central London through Tottenham – Tom Goodall, Argent Related “Tottenham should be a place of opportunity,” he adds. “It is 15 minutes to the West End and 15 minutes to the City. But instead, there is generational unemployment. It is shocking to have such deprivation in the middle of a thriving city. It’s a disgrace.” The scale of the problem is disguised to an extent by geography. Tottenham forms just part of the borough of Haringey, which is effectively divided in two by the railway line heading north from Finsbury Park station. To the west of the tracks lie the affluent areas of Crouch End and Muswell Hill. To the east is Tottenham. For Tom Goodall, who is leading Argent Related’s development at Tottenham Hale, the railway itself is a problem, as are the roads. “The challenge of Tottenham is a legacy of 50 years of prioritising transport over people,” he says. “It has all been about getting people out of central London, through Tottenham. But this is a place where thousands of people live. There are real communities here.” And those communities are still suffering. In 2011, Tottenham ranked among the poorest areas of Britain. In 2021 it still does. Crime continues to be a problem. “You can see that there have been big, big changes in the area,” says Ahmet. “But we’ve still got challenges.” “Why?” asks Lipton, rhetorically. “It’s very simple. If you have no fun, if you have no employment, what do you do? The reality is you have nothing to do, and so you go into crime.” Where the heart is Despite the disappointment, there are notable schemes happening in the area. Around £30m has been invested in Tottenham Hale Tube station. Tottenham Hotspur has won planning consent for nearly a thousand homes near its £850m new stadium. “That’s the most significant in terms of fame and popularity,” says Ahmet. “But there is development going on all over Tottenham.” And Ahmet should know, given that she was chair of planning for two years between 2016 and 2018. “And I was busy for two years, too. There is lots going on.” Argent Related’s £500m Tottenham Hale development, now renamed Heart of Hale, is intended to be exactly that, says Goodall. “It is the heart of something greater, the retail and leisure uses that support the community,” he adds. The scheme will also include 1,000 homes. For Goodall the key is to create space in which people want to live their lives. But he recognises that the pace of development has been too slow for some. “I share the frustration. These things aren’t easy, and there are always going to be bumps in the road,” he says. “But we have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this. Could more have been done? Yes. But we have to focus on what we can do, not what else hasn’t been done.” There are also missed opportunities. Last month, Grainger walked away from the 200-home redevelopment of Wards Corner, despite planning being granted in 2012. The scheme was brought down by a failure to reach an accommodation with the existing traders at the Latin American market. And then there is the Haringey Development Vehicle. The 50:50 partnership between the council and Lendlease was agreed in 2017 but scrapped a year later. The partnership would have delivered 6,400 homes on council-owned land but was ended by a change in leadership at the council, with Labour’s Momentum faction referring to the plans as “social cleansing”. “I’m not going to blame Momentum,” says Lipton. “But nothing in their period helped. The bad news is that since Lendlease was removed, nothing has happened on public housing.” Ahmet does not blame her predecessor, Joseph Ejiofor, whom she ousted in a leadership contest just three months ago. “The HDV didn’t happen and that does then leave a gap.” But, she points out, alternative plans were put in place. “We’ve got an extended housebuilding programme of 3,000 council homes, directly built on council land. I get the frustration, but it’s happening.” A housing delivery plan will be published next month. But Lipton would rather it had already happened. There has been too much stopping and starting, too much “bickering over who is in power”, too much “bickering over detail”, he says. Leadership and direction was needed, says Tottenham’s champion. Perhaps Haringey lost its best chance to make radical improvements when former council chief executive Nick Walkley left in 2016. Perhaps council leader Claire Kober could have been the driving force for change, but she resigned in 2018 following the collapse of the HDV and is now managing director for homes at Pinnacle Group. Instead, there has been no consensus about the way forward since Lipton’s report. In 2012, Haringey published a 13-year regeneration plan, which Lipton advised on, asking JLL and Arup to work up proposals for 100 acres of council land. By 2014 that had been replaced by the 20-year Plan for Tottenham, promising 1m sq ft of employment space and 10,000 homes by 2025. That was meant to be updated annually, but there has been no update since 2017. “Just go down to Broadwater Farm and build two model units and ask them if this is what they want,” Lipton says, impatience rising. “If people like it, they will tell you. If they don’t, change the plans. They are being treated like they are stupid, and they are not stupid.” Lipton argues that “it doesn’t matter how things get done, as long as they get done”. But Ahmet disagrees. The reason for the demise of the HDV and the collapse of the previous masterplan was because of how they were being done, she says. “This is the whole point. We need to be doing things with people, not to them.” A top-down, heavy-handed approach is not acceptable. That is the attitude that led to the riots. “There has to be a balance with development. It can’t be about Tottenham saying ‘please come, we’re desperate, we’re on our knees’,” Ahmet says. “But it’s also not about saying ‘we hate development, we hate private investment’. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. We want to attract investment. But we want the correct type of investment.” Better housing leads to improved health, which leads to jobs, which leads to crime reduction – Sir Stuart Lipton More than development The work cannot focus only on development, Ahmet adds. “Tottenham is my home,” she adds. “It’s a bit more than just a project to me, or something to be spoken about now in terms of development.” Somehow, after the riots, the focus stopped being the man who was shot dead and turned to the panacea of regeneration. The attitude became “‘let’s just build and get developers to invest and that’s it, problem solved’”, Ahmet says with a sigh. “But that’s a bit hollow,” she adds. “This is about much more than bricks and mortar. It’s about opportunities. It’s about social regeneration.” Lipton agrees. But he believes that if you can fix Tottenham’s housing then you can fix the root causes that led to the riots. And it won’t just save another £300m. “You provide better-quality housing and you save £50bn,” he says. “That isn’t a cost, it’s a saving. Better housing leads to improved health, which leads to jobs, which leads to crime reduction.” The 2011 riots happened when austerity was in full force and budgets were being “slashed to the bone”. The same is true of the 1985 riots. Ahmet has written to the prime minister about the matter. It isn’t just the north of England that needs levelling up, she told him, it’s north London, too. She did not receive a reply. Meetings have been held and discussions had at the highest levels about what should be done to fix the problems still so apparent, 10 years after Mark Duggan’s death. The problem is that nothing has been announced. No action has been taken. For Lipton this isn’t simply an oversight. “No one wants to do anything because it is all potentially failure.” Tottenham’s champion sounds crushed. “Tottenham is very close to me. If anyone was really interested, something would have happened by now. It’s been 10 years.” Last month, Tottenham’s MP, David Lammy, wrote: “By failing to implement the measures designed to tackle society’s dissatisfaction, alienation and fragmentation, Johnson risks letting a spark set fire to the fuel all over again.” Hopefully, regeneration projects can help to heal the heart of Tottenham. But what will it take for real action to be taken? To quote Lipton’s 2012 report: “It took another riot. It shouldn’t take a third.” To send feedback, e-mail piers.wehner@eg.co.uk or tweet @PiersWehner or @EGPropertyNews Photo: Steve Burton/Shutterstock