Silwood Community Forum – Wednesday 5th May – NEW SPEAKER

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John Lumley, the Development Manager for the Silwood project, has agreed to attend next week’s Residents’ Community Forum and will be available to answer any questions. The meeting will take place at 6:30pm at the Lewington Centre.

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See our Silwood Video Group project pages for more information and videos.

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The Good. The Bad. And Section 106.

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Spectacle, having established the Silwood Video Group, have been an active presence on the Silwood Estate since 2001, and in nearly 10 years of voluntary film-workshops and attendance at Residents’ Meetings, we have seen the landscape of this slice of South-East London change, and change as a result of regeneration.

Since 2005 at the Residents’ Forum Meetings, which are now held quarterly, the residents have asked to see the business plans for development and to have access to details of Section 106, which was declared a ‘non-public document’ by the London & Quadrant NIT Manager on the Silwood. The statement was later retracted, but the Section 106 document, to date, has not been made available to residents.

Tower Homes, the commercial wing of London & Quadrant, won the planning permission rights to the land in the Silwood area, on which they intended to build luxury apartments. By law, this makes them accountable to Section 106 Agreement of the Town and Country Planning Act (1990), which states that if development is agreed upon, for example, Lewisham Council awarding planning permission to Tower Homes, then the new landowners must provide resources that are of benefit to the community that will be affected by the development. In the case of the Silwood, London & Quadrant was entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the re-provision of community facilities, play areas/ parks, and youth centres on the Estate, which were demolished as a result of the regeneration process. The Lewington Centre was then built as a replacement for the former community centre and the Cyber Centre under Section 106.

Residents are currently being asked to pay relatively steep rates in order to use their new Centre, but the bone of contention lies in the fact that, according to the ‘Regeneration Project Initiation Document’, freely available from Lewisham Council, London & Quadrant allocated a fund of £2 million in order to meet their Section 106 obligations. On top of this, despite the claim of London & Quadrant representatives at Residents’ Meetings on the Silwood that these rates are essential to their business plan and the long-term running of the Lewington Centre, their business plan for 2009 shows that they have made a profit in the region of £120, 000. So why do they seem so unwilling to invest in fully rebuilding the local infrastructure?

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Silwood Land for Silwood Residents?

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As part of the continued regeneration of the Silwood Estate, an application has been submitted by London & Quadrant Housing Association for planning permission on vacant land that residents wanted to be used to provide play areas for their children. After a series of quarterly meetings in which residents were unable to obtain information from L & Q representatives as to status of the Lewisham Council-owned land, it has become apparent that the housing trust themselves have made a bid for it. According to Planning Application DC/09/73169/X , L & Q are seeking permission to build tower blocks ‘ranging from 2 storeys… to 6 storeys’ in the area north of Silwood Street. Residents have requested that this issue be raised at the next Silwood Community Meeting.

Click Silwood Video Group for more blogs
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See our Silwood Video Group project pages for more information and videos.

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Silwood Community Forum – Wednesday 5th May

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There will be a comunity meeting at the Lewington Centre on the Silwood Estate next Wednesday, 5th May, at 6.30pm. On the agenda is: 1) Introductions & Apologies; 2) Minutes of Last Meeting; 3) Lewington Centre – Steering Group; 4) Project Updates on: Housing, Police, Catch 22, Community Development, Funding Opportunities; and 5) Any Other Business.

For more information on the Silwood and our on-going involvement, check out our Silwood blog

REFUSING TO ACCEPT ONE’S PLACE, Tate Britain, May 7th

‘Refusing to Accept One’s Place’ is a discussion event held by This Is Not a Gateway exploring urban poverty and social exclusion.

Among the speakers will be Mark Saunders who will be talking on Poverty as a Media Event and Olympic Social Cleansing, based on Spectacle’s ongoing Poverty and the Media and London Olympics 2012 projects.

RESISTANCE & SPATIAL REFORMERS:

REFUSING TO ACCEPT ONE’S PLACE

FRIDAY 07 MAY 2010, 6:30PM

TATE BRITAIN {Turner’s Italian Odyessy T7}

* The salon is free but registration is necessary: salonsATthisisnotagateway.net *

As part of European Alternative’s Transeuropa Festival and Tate Britain’s Late at Tate event East is East, This Is Not A Gateway are organising a salon ‘Resistance and Spatial Reformers: Refusing To Accept One’s Place’.

The EA Festival is tackling the European Commission‘s 2010 theme ‘Poverty & Social Exclusion’- their specific interest is exploring the return of slums to European cities. Tate Britain‘s Cross Cultural Contemporary Art Team are looking at contested spaces and notions of London’s East End for their event ‘East is East’. TINAG’s interest in both these areas is the potential to explore the psycho/social idea of ‘refusing to accept one’s place’.

The salon will explore how notions of poverty are constructed, the return of slums in Europe, understandings of democracy, the links between land ownership and social exclusion and the psycho/social condition of Refusing To Accept One’s Place that may have motivated social and spatial reformers – past & present.

Speakers:

.       Ruhana Ali, Community Organising Foundation

.       David Rosenberg, teacher and guide of radical history walks in East London

.       Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Lasse Johansson, Fugitive Images

.       Kevin Cahill, investigative journalist and author of ‘Who Own’s Britain’

.       Oliver Ressler, artist and filmmaker

.       Andrea Gibbons, Right to the City, JustSpace and PM Press.

.       Mark Saunders, Spectacle Documentaries

.       Paul Trevor, photographer ‘Eastender Archive’

* Salons are free and there are always beer and bagels *

Information on previous salons (press releases and post-salon essays) can be found here.

This Is Not A Gateway hold a year long series of salon discussions focused on urban citizenship and cross-cultural exchanges with speakers from a range of fields and backgrounds. The salons are integral to developing a participant-led programme – a testing ground to see what questions and work are being produced in and on cities, and what formats might be possible.

Cameron Braves ‘Dangerous’ Battersea Power Station for Manifesto Launch

David Cameron’s decision to invite little old you and me to run the country at the big boys’ table at Battersea Power Station was no accident, because you see, he wants to FIRE UP the nation. Y’know, like the station. Because it’s stopped working. FIRE UP the power because the country is derelict and…ok he wants to REGENERATE the station, no wait, I got that wrong, regenerate the NATION, because England is like a dilapidated…oh I don’t know why I bother.

Anyway, if he was going to recklessly bounce loaded metaphors around the inside of the power station he should have been wearing a hard hat – that structure is dangerously unsafe according to REO. At least that’s what was told to Battersea Power Station Community Group, unless they were to have the required clout which presumably comes with a ‘no topple’ guarantee.

The key point of all this is that Cameron’s ability to bypass this regulation demonstrates that REO’s persistent claims that the chimneys must be pulled down due to their perceived danger is most definitely a falsehood, and it highlights the superficiality of their concerns over safety at the station which very clearly are being raised as an excuse for their desired re-development. Once the chimneys are down they will never be put back. You can read more about it here in Spectacle’s Battersea Power Station blog.

Luton focus of ‘Changing Britain’, Channel 4 News

Luton was the focus of the Channel 4 News piece ‘Changing Britain‘ aired on Tuesday 23rd March.

On the streets of Luton and in the context of it’s pronounced industrial and migrant history, Jon Snow’s report examined crime, unemployment and the benefit’s trap, and inviting local perspectives on the upcoming elections.

The Snowblog ‘Hats off for Luton’, published prior to the broadcast, recognises Luton as “merely the tip of a very British reality, a snapshot of a country with vast social challenges extending far beyond what we mainly talk about – fixing the deficit.”

Glenn Jenkins (who extends the discussion in A view from the Marsh Farm estate) and other Marsh Farm Outreach members also feature in the programme. Spectacle have been working with the group for over 15 years, most recently on our Poverty and Participation in the Media project for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, but also during the early community activism and outreach principles of the Exodus Collective (now Leviticus and MFO), about whom Spectacle produced two films Exodus Movement of Jah People and Exodus from Babylon.

The Olympic Fun and Games Article

The current financial climate and the aftermath of the recession has resulted in an increase in job losses throughout the country but despite this many of the major companies experiencing a financial dip are sponsoring the Olympic games. The extensive work being undertaken to get London ready for the games is being justified because of the influx of tourism and the opening of jobs for UK residents but is the UK likely to make a long term profit or will it sink us further into debt? As the initial budget of the games is expected to have increased tenfold, will the British taxpayer be left footing the bill?

This article by Tom Morgan on the website Money.co.uk explores the long term financial effects of hosting the Olympics based on previous countries profits and losses and also looks at the companies set to sponsor the games.

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‘Play Boy’ Owner Spending Spree Scandal

An article in the Evening Standard today reveals the huge spending sprees of one of the ‘play boy’ owners of the Power Station, while the building itself is lacking funding to keep it standing.  Article features interview with Battersea Power Station Community Group member Brian Barnes.

England, N. Ireland, Scotland, Wales – Devolution and Disadvantage

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Joseph Rowntree Foundation
have released a series of reports to mark 10 years of devolution. The reports look at the impact of devolved policies and recognise a need for the Westminster to continue to reserve certain powers in order to improve conditions across the board but picks up on a failure to communicate feedback and learning between central and devolved government policies.

While concluding that much of the improvement in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales stems from UK policy, the reports acknowledge promising results from devolved policies, especially in the areas of social housing and elderly care. Athough their impact so far has been limited in size these results should improve as the administrations stabilise and imbed.

A less positive equalising factor was raised by report author Jim McCormick, who warns –

“The scale of the projected cuts in public spending will cause some of the gains seen in the last 10 years to unravel.”