For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to north west London, where councillors are ganging up to keep the housing crisis going…
So, where we going this week? To Edgware, in the north west London suburbs.
Oh, where the trains go. What’s there now? The Broadwalk Centre, a rather grim low-rise shopping precinct next to the tube station, whose better days are a good 30 years behind it; plus a car park, a bus station, a bus garage and Dean’s Brook Nature Reserve, which I’m sure is lovely but which is so small I literally can’t find it on the map, and which has anyway not been open to the public for a century.
Who wants to build what? This one’s a biggie. Transport for London is working with developers Ballymore and Howells, plus landscape architects Gustafson Porter + Bowman, to completely replan and regenerate Edgware town centre. The plan includes 25 new buildings, 3,365 homes and 463 student flats; replacement shops for those being closed, a cinema and offices; new health centres and schools; plus a new town square, a new park, and other new green spaces. All that, and it would allow public access to Dean’s Brook Nature Reserve at last because it turns out they’re not building on that after all.
In all, the new development would mean homes for 7,000 people right next to a major transport hub, which is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing. Of those homes, 35% would be affordable, and half of those will be for social rent, knocking a big chunk off Barnet’s housing waiting list. Honestly, it looks great.
This all sounds very familiar. I mean, we haven’t done this one in particular but I’m sure certainly we’ve done other shopping centres or car parks right next to major stations. We have.
And I’m guessing this is proving just as popular with the locals? It is! The ‘Save Our Edgware’ campaign, which is premised upon the baffling idea that, housing crisis or no, the status quo with the crumbling half-empty shopping centre is in some way fine, lists 10 reasons they oppose it.
Ooh, let me guess. Towers too high? Yep. Some of them will be 29 storeys.
Pressure on local services? That’s in there, even though they’re building more services.
Reduction in car parking? That, too! Also, ‘10 years of construction misery’, which is commendably honest in the transparency of its selfishness, at least.
The only surprise here is the one about the risk that the proposed new underground electric bus depot, could, er, spontaneously go on fire, ‘like the one near Tashkent Airport in September 2023’. Apparently that produced ‘a mushroom cloud fireball hundreds of feet high and felt 20 miles away’.
I mean, that does sound terrifying. Yes, but at risk of offending our many Uzbek readers I don’t think you can necessarily read straight across from the regulatory regimes of Central Asia to those that apply in Middlesex, even in the UK’s current reduced state.
Anyway, the reason I wanted to write about this one is that it’s proved a particular cause célèbre for a group one might term ‘Councillors for Continuing Housing Crisis’. Lucy Wakeley, a councillor for Edware and deputy leader of Barnet’s Tories, has warned that the development could actually house as many as 12,500-15,000 people, which she seems to think is a bad thing, for some reason.
Her colleague Zak Wagman, meanwhile, Tory councillor for neighbouring Stanmore, tweeted that he’d submitted objections to ‘#EdgwareTowers’, and encouraged residents to do the same. ‘There is a real need for housing in our area,’ he added – can you guess what word is coming next? – ‘but this proposal will irreparably transform our suburb and add tremendous pressure to our local services’.
Hang on – Stanmore isn’t the same place as Edgware. Well observed.
It’s on the next tube line over. Yes.
Is it even in Barnet? No, it’s in Harrow.
So, a councillor for one borough is encouraging his voters to object to developments in a different borough entirely? He is!
Well, I suppose it’s just up the road. A mile and a half. But it does set a helpful precedent: if you no longer have to have anything to do with an area to object to housing there, perhaps those of us who support development should follow the same logic. Perhaps we should start filling in consultations outside our patches too. After all, it affects us all!
You know, the only time I ended up in Edgware was because I fell asleep on the Northern Line. If you lived there, you’d have been home by now.
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