[various dates with additions through to 2022] On and off for 20 years I was involved in struggles at King’s Cross about the future use of the huge Railway Lands behind the King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. I wrote about it on and off but stopped being much involved after Camden Council granted planning permission in 2007 to Argent. By that time I was a co-chair, with Marian Larragy, of the King’s Cross Railway Lands Group KXRLG and in 200x the Group decided to disband, its paper archives mainly lodged at the London Metropolitan Archives and its web site archived by the BL.
I should, like a good academic, have written a book about all that. I haven’t, partly through laziness and partly because I’m daunted by the magnitude of what we tried to achieve over the years and the heavy weight of failure in our main objectives: to assert the rights and the emancipatory potential of citizens, especially local working class communities, to determine or shape what happened.
Thousands of people from around the world have been involved in these struggles or watched or studied them as part of the saga of urban activism and periodically they still ask me what has been going on. I try to respond, often by walking round the area with groups, sometimes by introducing enquirers to survivors of the KXRG, particularly Marian who remans living here and also is an invaluable community tutor to student projects in The Bartlett School where I work.
Now, amidst the strange lockdown of Covid-19, I have an email exchange with one of the many scholars who spent time here and wrote up the King’s Cross story back home in 2013:
dear Michael, I hope you are doing well, specially with this terrible situation. Here in spain it is even worse.
Marta Domínguez Pérez, Profesora, Departamento Sociología Aplicada, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
I would like to know how is going with KX. In all these years I have not followed the process but I am interested in recover it.
What happened with the change of the urban center in KX with the physical movement of the council to other part of KX? what happened with the neigbourhood? what about the gentrification process? what about the social housing in the area? what about the movilization of the population? is there something remarkable?
do you have any references that i can read about it? or where to look about?
could you help me?
best regards. Marta
which made me feel I should really write more about what has happened at King’s Cross after it gobbled so much of my life. Then 2 days later she wrote:
dear Michael, i have found a lot of things since then!!!! it is fantastic.
Marta, 15 September 2020
the book of bishop where you were interviewed, the document health inequalities in camden and islington from the council, knowing our communities from camden, a document from geographers A-Z 2015, your evaluation of the process 2003, overview about KX 2018, an article of the World Bank from Martha lawrence in spanish, the economic and social history of KX from regeneris 2017,. with all that material i think it is enough.
I am preparing …… and i have recovered the KX case and comparing with Alcobendas in the north of Madrid where the municipality is stronger than in UK case. But the results are the same: new centrality of the neoliberal city as in KX where the muncipality is weaker, i think. do you agree?
i know both cases are different in size, population, level of globalization, etc, but the move of the center in both cases from the municipality has been a new game in this terrible game.
i am interesting in comparing both cases and i have found a lot of material.
but if you have some more please tell me. specially the evolution to nowadays of the KXLRG. I am very intersted in.
best and hope you are fine.
So this is a collection of jottings at present and I’m not publicising it yet except to Marta (who approves) and other old friends. There is a bibliography page in parallel (which could be more widely circulated and useful).
I shall be delighted if anyone wants to comment, disagree or add links. Use the comment facility below or email me.
Later 24 June 2021.
I’ll continue as though it were a message to Marta again. I have just read the King’s Cross section of a book which reached me from Anna Gasco, one of the 3 editors, with Kees Christiaanse and Naomi Hanakata. It is The Grand Projet: understanding the making and impact of urban megaprojects, nai010 publishers ¿2021 and big and heavy. It compares 6 projects including King’s Cross, the 22@ development in Barcelona, Hamburg Hafencity, La Défense and projects in Tokyo, Shanghai, HK and Singapore. It seems to me to be a very odd assortment of projects and it’s approached from a rather architectural point of view with lots of elegant and not-very-communicative plans. Certainly not a political economy.
You should certainly read the KX segment which will add some new knowledge for you, as it does for me (despite some inaccuracies). Why didn’t they compare it with Seine Rive Gauche if a Paris case is useful? One of my students did that in the early 90s which was great because he showed how the office market crash led to the (Rosehaugh-Stanhope-Foster) scheme collapsing in England while in France the State kept going, spent zillions of francs on decking over the railways, building a non-functioning Biblioteque Nationale and had no commercial tenants —just debt. Such an interesting comparison of state form as well as urban projects. You might also find the Barcelona case in this book interesting: I don’t know 22@ well enough to evaluate. It always seemed a neo-liberal mess to me and absolutely NOT what was progressive or interesting about Barcelona.
Otherwise I haven’t seen any new publications. Some of my colleagues here are doing an international comparative project which includes KX, with a focus on governance of investment. Sonia Freire Trigo, Iqbal Hamiduddin, Danielle Sanderson and Mike Raco. I can put you in touch if you want. I walked round King’s Cross yesterday with them and some of their students and it all looked fabulous in the sunshine. I’m so pleased that other people are picking up the research threads on the KX project. But I must write more on KX.
Added July 2022:
I’ve been interrogated a lot recently about KX and what happened, mainly by Urban studies student Jason Katz who is from USA and now, today, Glyn Robbins, English housing academic at LSE, asks
Was thinking about you @michaellondonsf while pondering these places. For all the frustrations, do you think the presence of a decent tenant/community counter-mobilisation at Kings X contributed to its design quality?
Glyn Robbins on Twitter
The question is often posed as “KX wins so many prizes so why do you dislike it so much?” My answer to this one is fairly straightforward. The changes which have been forced on London in recent decades are fundamentally very damaging — a key part of the class struggle in which capital has, once again, subordinated labour and reversed many of the gains in education, housing, cultural policy and welfare of the 20th century. A key part of that has been the appropriation of the central and inner parts of London to meet the business and recreational/cultural needs of richer people and for speculative property development aimed at harvesting all that as rent, capital value, developers profits and the professional fees of an army of ‘professionals’. Many of us – certainly I – had been complacent about how far all this would go because of the way in which working class (including middle-income) residents were embedded in inner London as a result of the council house building of the mid 20th century. We had under-estimated the impact of Right to Buy and, more recently of the ‘social cleansing’ mechanism of council estate ‘regeneration’ (which is usually also ethnic cleansing) in shrinking the social housing sector. And, as more people were unable to enter social housing or afford to buy housing, the private rental sector (into which both groups were herded) steadily priced out lower income residents from central districts towards the suburbs.
This process of turning London socially inside-out had a long history in the later 20th century & was reinforced by the Urban Task Force of Richard Rogers in 1999. The effects were strongly evident in the 2011 Census (mapped tellingly by Neal Hudson) and (more needed…)
This whole process, seen from the corporate end, was characterised as the triumphant success of central London as a cultural and business centre, a world city, the engine of the nation. Conceptually it was presented as the triumph of agglomeration economies as financial, property and related clusters of activity boomed, stoking the wealth of owners of central London office property and later of residential property. To enable all that growth, major state investments in transport infrastructure took place, valorising not only the workplaces of the centre but the owner-occupied and rental housing in suburbs and ex-urban towns 100km away. This was the wealth machine at work, enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor and middle-income workers.
This provided the structural context in which the decisions about King’s Cross took form – decisions by national government, local councils (mainly Camden), successive developers and, in the background, investors. These structures constrain the agency of the various participants. In particular the local authority, Camden, [ oh dear, this is becoming an essay ]
[more to come for this to be better rounded]
So my dislike of the King’s Cross redevelopment is my resistance to the process of class transformation of London, the trampling on the needs of low- and middle-income people to produce a zone of luxury, style and a new generation of business agglomeration.
King’s Cross is an integral part of that process and the key period in which decisions about it were being made was from about 1999 when the CTRL deal was being fixed by Mr Prescott and about 2005/6 when the chosen developer, Argent, had more or less hammered out its scheme with Camden. The context was Blair’s New Labour government which was very pro-business but did make capital grants for social housing. In London we had the beginning of the GLA, locked from the outset into a faustian pact with property development interests to ensure that social housing would form part of private housing schemes and to support Livingstone’s progressive transport plans.
The King’s Cross Railway Lands Group comprised tenants associations from the numerous surrounding council estates, other residents groups, conservation of historic buildings people from wider Camden and Islington, transport and radical housing campaigns. It had cut its teeth and achieved success in 1988-93 in kicking an earlier office-based scheme into the long grass of council deliberations where it died from the collapse of the London office market and demise of its developers. My impression and memory is that it rather put the fear of god into the developer fraternity in London. By the time the new developer, Argent (then in partnership with St George, a Berkeley Group firm) came on the scene in about 2000 Camden was still inclined to take community organisations seriously and the KXRLG still had allies among the elected councillors. It’s clear that the professional officers at Camden considered themselves to be steering the scheme in such a way as to get the planning application through committee and that reinforces my view that a well-organised tenants and residents campaign breathing down their necks did have a substantial impact.
Primarily this impact was on securing a 42% (from memory) proportion of housing as affordable housing. We felt that as a defeat at the time but it was a pretty good result in retrospect (though undermined by a clever provision in the S106 small print enabling Argent to reduce the % if government grant regimes changed. They did and they did). Another victory was securing an agreement that the streets would become public streets under police/council jurisdiction, not private space. This was a rather empty victory since the right to take over the streets was one which Camden later chose not to exercise. Compromises were reached on schools, health and sporting facilities but there was complete failure on the community objectives of having space for pre-existing cultural organisations, land and buildings under full community ownership and control.
It must be said that London and Continental Railways selected a lead developer, Argent, who turned out to be good at design, or perhaps good at selecting and briefing designers. I can’t recall community groups ever being consulted about the choice of developers or designers/planners. There was consultation managed by Camden on a draft Development Brief for the site, itself a joint product of the Council and the developer’s consultants. That relationship was described by Camden staff as a ‘partnership’ and by us activists as seriously improper. To detect whether and how community pressures influenced the design would require at least one forensic PhD and a lot of oral history to establish. John Mason, a historian in the community network was the expert on this process and on Camden’s manipulation /management of the consultation.
There was, of course, endless community consultation on the ‘details’, what planning calls ‘reserved matters’, of each individual block within the framework of the outline permission given for the scheme as a whole in 2006. At this stage the developer or his architects would make detailed presentations to the Development Forum and we might secure changes to the brick colours. Not, however, to the fact that mere tenants would have no access to the rooftop gardens of a mixed-tenure block.
King’s Cross is, in some ways, pretty good. It’s a pleasure to take people round it. To some extent it could not have been otherwise, given the historical accumulation of canal and railway history, forcing itself into the planning of most of the scheme. Sitting by the Canal or splashing around in Granary Square are both good new London experiences. The serendipitous deal with Central St Martins school of art to occupy the Granary was very positive, both as a way of widening the ‘publics’ served and as a flavouring for Argent’s marketing of its creative quarter. Much of the northern hinterland is (to me) pleasantly dull ordinary streets, becoming ludicrous only where the triplet gas holders were relocated by the canal. As for Mr Heatherwick’s flying roofs above the coal drops, I despair. But I do see that something unusual was needed to rescue the Coal Drops from being a failing retail cul-de-sac like Tobacco Dock.
But I think the main thing which makes me say positive things about King’s Cross is how much worse the more recent big developments are: Nine Elms, Vauxhall, North Acton and Old Oak, and the emerging Olympic Park. The governing structures have been reproduced in ways which make them less and less civilised, and those with some agency to act within these structures (councils, professionals) have internalised neo-liberal values to a terrible extent.
Final (for the moment) comment: It is regularly shocking to see photographs of the new King’s Cross used to illustrate and, by implication, support the latest nostrums of the neo-liberal mainstream. The strongest example was the (UK) government’s White Paper on English Planning, Planning for the future, which has 3 photos of King’s Cross. This is ignorant or crass, given that a main thrust of the white paper was to speed up plan-making and concentrate public participation at that stage so that individual schemes could go through to approval without further challenge. In the King’s Cross case every step of the plan making and approval of the outline permission were hard-fought over 6 years, with a long pre-history before that, as were all the subsequent detailed applications and changes to the initial scheme. If it has good qualities they certainly don’t flow from a streamlined, speedy, planning process.
(all for later revision)
michael edwards 