A transcript of the conversation between Mark Panton (MP), Dave Morris (DM) and Martin Ball (MB) is below. The Q&A part of the event is on this link. The event was hosted at Housmans Bookshop in London on April 4 2018. A film of the Q&A is here and an audio recording of the whole event is here.
Click here for more information about "Tottenham's Trojan Horse?" including reviews, upcoming events and how to buy or borrow it.
TRANSCRIPT OF BOOK LAUNCH CONVERSATION 4/4/2018
Introductions by Wail Qasim, Housmans Bookshop.
MP Thanks very much for joining us this evening and thanks very much for Housmans hosting the event as was mentioned the idea really is to kick things off with a bit of a conversation between myself. The book is based on sort of four years of research in the Tottenham area that was one of the case studies. The other case study was in relation to regeneration in East Manchester. So thank you very much this evening to Dave Morris who's been involved with the Our Tottenham network for I think it's probably about five years it's been going. I certainly went along to a meeting in April 2013. It had been going for a few months before then. Dave’s been involved in various activities in the Tottenham area and also thank you to Martin Ball who is also involved with I think he is the chair of the Friends of Downlane Park in Tottenham. So again involved in lots of activities in the community. As Wale said we’ll probably do a conversation between ourselves for 20 to 30 minutes but you know the idea really is that we try and get as many comments in or questions from the floor as possible as well.
So we will start things off now. So perhaps first of all you can tell us a little bit about the formation of Our Tottenham and why it all started up in 2013 and perhaps any links with the stadium.
DM OK, so basically after the riots in 2011 which kind of kicked off in Tottenham and spread around the country there was a march organized by local anti-cuts campaigners and a Turkish organisation in Tottenham. We linked up with people in Hackney and within three days of decided to organise a march we had about 3,000 people at a march to Tottenham Town Hall from Hackney and one of our demands that night, it was called Give Our Kids A Future, one of their demands was apart from the obvious ones of trying to defend public services and facilities and particularly the youth facilities and so on, one of our demands was for community-led regeneration, but other people had other ideas. I think the Mayor of London commissioned a report called It Took Another Riot, which is mentioned in the book, in which a property developer basically recommended that the kind of overhaul of the social engineering throughout Tottenham and to basically gentrify Tottenham and increase land prices and all that kind of stuff. So we didn't know anything about that, but we saw the council come up with a so-called Plan for Tottenham. I don't know when it was, 2012 maybe, and it's a glossy pamphlet and people look at it and say wait a minute. And Spurs were kind of like highly promoted in this plan for Tottenham as a catalyst.
MB They hosted the launch event.
DM Okay. But there was a bit of it which I said that doesn’t look right. It looks like they are going to build a walkway from White Hart Lane station cutting through a council estate to the new Spurs ground. That can't be right that they're knocking down a whole estate and people saying oh it must be a mistake or you know it's just a sort of fantasy but it soon became clear that they really meant social engineering. They’d taken this property developers report and it's a long story I could go into it in great detail but once we realized the extent of the threat. Actually I was involved with a group called Haringey Solidarity Group, a radical activist group and we had a small discussion and said let's do some anti gentrification leaflets this and then I was saying wait a minute we need something on a much bigger scale than just a few people handing out a few leaflets. Why don’t we call a meeting of people in Tottenham, groups in Tottenham. We thought we might get 10 - 15 people; we got 40 people to a kind of an open meeting just to say what should we do about all these plans that the council and spurs have and other developers and it was agreed to organize a conference and that's where Our Tottenham was launched at this conference with about 30 or 40 different organizations participating. So I think we realized that we needed something on quite a substantial scale if we're going to challenge you know effectively the government the Mayor of London Tottenham, the local council and big property developers. So that's how it kicked off if you like.
MB I’d just like to say that I’m glad Our Tottenham has been founded, because it is a massive enemy that we are taking on. Hugely resourced people; the council, Spurs, all the property developers, super national, international entities or whatever nice way you want to describe them. Our Tottenham is not just that an anti-Spurs an anti-gentrification group, it’s positive about Tottenham, about the parks like I’m involved in. Bringing together people that provide luncheon clubs in functions, people supporting vulnerable, elderly people. Bringing together, welcoming migrant community within the Tottenham area. See when you think of Our Tottenham you might think of those angry voices of Dave Morris and Martin Ball stood somewhere on a cold Tottenham street complaining about something. Well actually remember there's a wider range of people involved in that and that's the great strength of the organisation and its survival because it is made up of many organizations across policy and across a lot of other issues, so it's a great thing that we have formed it.
MP OK, thank you for that Martin. moving on from that in terms of just not taking a negative view on things. Do you want to talk about one or two of the positive developments we've been involved with?
MB Well, one of the good things that we did in Down Lane Park is when the council came to take the children's playground. To take children playground, because that's the southern bit closest to Tottenham Hale station. You can imagine we said that no in rather stronger terms than I'm putting it now and we went around the community collecting about 600 signatures which is no mean feat as you know, because it’s actually hard to get those signatures out of people. So we actually put a stop to their plans to take the park because it was closest to Tottenham Hale in the epicentre of their Tottenham Hale war zone as the Director of Regeneration referred to Tottenham on the infamous bus tour for the new councillors elected after 2014, referred to Tottenham as looking like a war zone. They declared war on Tottenham, and they wanted demolished parts at Tottenham and Spurs have of course been buying up, as the book says, through their Bahamas registered complete lots of properties along the high road along White's Hart Lane and lots of properties that they are looking to develop now. And if you want to really go in to the detail there is a website called Private Eye, which details overseas property investments and if you obviously just type in N17 a lot of Spurs properties will come up, land that they are assembling and all the rest of it. So we've done some really good things in terms of saving the park. Getting some proper investments to the park pockets and building trust protection for the park. That's one way in which my own organisation that’s fought to protect green space and to get in some new investment. We've got in some new playgrounds equipment we’ve want. Before these playgrounds they wanted to build flats and this was the only way to cross subsidize and by the community making this stand, we actually said no we want to protect this park, we want this green space. Not just for us, but for the thousands of people you want to bring to the area as well. They will need green space and we’ve got a proper decent park there for them. So that is just one way, there are many other ways, but that is just one example.
DM Yeah we actually organized a whole range of conferences in the first couple of years of the Our Tottenham network and one of them was specifically on how to have our own plans for our neighbourhoods and what we want to see, what we want to see protected, what we want to see improved and we were able to draw on a whole wide range of fantastic examples. Friends of parks groups are particularly good examples of people mobilizing to protect and improve their local green spaces. Community centres, we helped to develop a community centres network to protect community centres, some of which are under threat in Tottenham. Wards Corner, there are people fighting to save certain facilities, but then they come up with their own plans and the Wards Corner Coalition at Seven Sisters have been campaigning for ten years to protect an indoor market a Latin American market and a historic building and they come up with their own community plan which has got planning permission. They just need 50 million pounds in order to buy up the site from a property developer who the council have been working with to demolish the site.
So whenever the council come up with something bad, so you know hopefully the local community can come up with something good and there's plenty of good examples. The most recent I think is Tottenham's only hospital site is St Anne’s Hospital in South Tottenham and it's quite run down and basically the owners of the site, which is the NHS, but it's the mental health section want to sell off two-thirds of the site for basically luxury housing. But now there's been a big effort to try and buy the site for the community, 100 percent affordable genuinely affordable housing and additional facilities, community facilities and alternative health facilities and green space. And so on and actually this is getting quite a lot of publicity beyond Tottenham, because it's a very great example it will be run cooperatively and they have set up a Land Trust. So a Land Trust is where people club to get them to say instead of selling that land to an individual or a speculator, sell it to the community and it remains community controlled forever.
So there's lots of positive examples and we all know them in this room. You know you may have your own examples of where communities have mobilised their own plans. And that it's true if you're just anti, anti, anti, it's kind of easy you know for the authorities to kind of marginalize you, because they're always pretending that what they're doing is positive. Yeah, so we have to say no, actually it's a load of crap, but if you keep saying that then the community kind of thinks well there's no alternative. So it's really important to have an alternative vision about what we want to see with our empowered communities.
MP OK thank you Dave. So moving more particularly on to the stadium development in Tottenham. When I started my research, I couldn't see any reason why sports led regeneration why there was any negatives in it really and this was originally to do with the development in East Manchester of the Commonwealth Stadium as it was and doing a little bit of research in relation to that, realized there were some issues that kind of local people
Had. In fact the developments were generally see to be quite positive for the local community but there were still quite a lot of issues there. In relation to the Spurs stadium, are you against the stadium development, per se?
MB Actually I can say I'm not, but if you go back to a cabinet council meeting in December 2015 you will find I am on the record stating my view that I'm glad Spurs stay in the borough. Although the consequence of Spurs staying in the borough has been massive demolitions already. Just on the site of where the new stadium is, before recent times there was a trading estate just up near where the stadium is, so there's lots of houses and a trading estate, several hundred businesses removed from there. So when we talk about protecting businesses at the Peacock Estate and businesses, shop traders along the High Road, we've already witnessed hundreds of businesses being moved out of the area and we can’t get down to the detail of what's been happening to people on the Love Lane estate or where other people are being moved out, but certainly the impact of Spurs already. And I’ve brought, just on the impact of Spurs, you may have gone down the Tottenham High Road, very slowly now, because Spurs have been granted a whole lame to themselves [sound of shaking something], because of the stadium being so close to the High Road. So this is some dust from the pavement, just there outside the Spurs shop, one of the many properties they bought with their Bahamas property company. So that's the sort of dirt and you could say it’s the Tottenham High Road, it’s the A10, it’s going to be a bit dirty Martin, you’re quite right, but not the sort of dirt that’s spread around over there [shows jar of dirt collected]. So we've got a very dirty place, a very bruised and battered community.
You may have read in the pamphlets about some of the historic buildings that have been demolished and this is a very short introduction to the two hundred photographs I took of those buildings being demolished over one weekend. This is the little bit that I saved of one of the buildings. I think that’s the red building as you might guess from the colour of the brick and this a little bit here is from I think it was the pub, Valentino's, if you went down there a boogie and a pint or a cocktail or something, if you go back as far as that. There's a third building and I haven’t got a bit of that, the Dispensary building, but actually thanks to Spurs’ foresight and their great concern for the heritage and future of Tottenham they knocked down, they saved a part of it. They’ve saved the front a name and it’s carefully packaged in a warehouse somewhere waiting to come back to the Tottenham Museum. They created their own Tottenham Elgin Marbels. They saved a bit of an historic building they knocked down and in the future you can pay good money to go and see what you could have seen on a perfectly good building at one time. So the impact of this stadium building already is destruction of historical buildings, four locally listed buildings. OK, they put a lot of money in to Grade 2 listed buildings further up, but I think even they thought Haringey Council couldn’t give them their wish, which they couldn’t. There's been demolition of existing building site and houses there's also the existing threat toward the existing houses from the noise, the dust, the pollution. From a quite serious factory that the people of Tottenham on the front line that Lyn Garner and xxxx are facing because tonight, I don't if you know, to help Spurs Haringey Council in the many ways that they have helped Spurs, granted them 24-hour working. They can work on that Stadium 24 hours a day, seven days a week so that they can build their stadium in time. That's what's happened.
DM Yes, a lot of local people are obviously Spurs supporters. I’ve been a Spurs supporter all my life, but you know you have to separate the team, which came from the community originally when these kinda clubs got set up they were clubs, I don’t know if they had a membership, but they were seen as part of the community and most of the footballers would have been from the community. So we have to separate that from the business which is a ruthless money-making concern, making as much money out of footballers as they can. So I mean a good example of this is when the Spurs were applying for you know permission to build a new stadium, planning permission, a lot of the local businesses that Martin referred to campaigned or lobbied or put up posters in their in their shop windows supporting Spurs, because it was seen as an integral part of the community and you know they little realised that you know that once they got planning permission Spurs would turn on them and say well actually all this area close by the stadium is going to be prime development land and that's why we've started buying up properties throughout the area so they felt very betrayed by five I suppose. We actually had a meeting with Spurs with the, I dunno if it's in the book?
MP Yes
DM Have you all got a copy of the book? A few people. Ok. It will save go through all the all good bits of the book, all the great bits of the book. But basically, we [Our Tottenham] got written to by one of the directors of Spurs saying why don't we have a meeting. Our Tottenham and Spurs have a joint meeting, so we met a couple of their board of Directors in their boardroom in the ground and we put our demands and we basically said you know you should be condemning the associated development outside of your ground. We made it clear we weren't against the actual Spurs improving their ground but we were against the associated threats to local council estates and local business. So we asked them to condemn any threats to those, but of course they were already buying up bits of those to make money out of the land and we also asked them to put a hundred million pounds into the local community. Arsenal had to put in sixty million pounds I think originally from planning gain. Spurs and the council agreed seventeen million pounds. We thought that was a very small amount considering this massive stadium development. But once they had all the permissions in place they had this Olympic Stadium threat to the council; that they were going to move to East London, shows how committed they are to the to the area. They used that as a bargaining point to scare the council into actually quashing that seventeen million pounds planning gain, section 106 monies, that was supposed to go into the local community to compensate for this new development and increase size and all that kind of stuff. So actually all their obligations got wiped out and they claimed, Tottenham, that they were too poor to put money in to the community. They are the 13th richest club in the world as far as we understand, football club. And I've just found out today, in the Evening Standard of all places. Daniel Levy who's his he, does he own Spurs?
MP He’s Chairman.
DM At the same time they were saying they were too poor to pay that seventeen million pounds community, his pay from Spurs jumped from two point eight four million a year. That’s pretty good going already in 2015-16, to six million pounds a year the following year so you can see where the money's going to in the club. It's not going into the community it's not even going into the fans pockets. The fans are fleeced and it’s exploitive just like everybody else when it comes to the business. So you have to separate the team and the enjoyment of football from the big business that's behind what's going on with these big clubs and you even have to separate the fans and the people that come to watch the matches. In fact we had a meeting with them as well, because the chair of the supporters club had expressed concerns about the effects of Spurs stadium development on the surrounding communities. So we had a joint meeting with them, but you know they were kind of trying to they'd been caught in between two stools really. They had to be you know, they felt they had to be loyal to the club and the business, whilst expressing concern about potential damage to the local communities.
MP OK, I think it was the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust that you had the meeting with, wasn’t it?
DM The Supporters Trust, yes.
MP And they obviously represent their members views I guess. Looking forwards, going forward, are there ways that you could see perhaps, set in terms of the council with the new council elections coming up, and perhaps even the football club, once it gets installed in the new stadium, which you know may or may not be at the start the season, more positive relations. Are there things that the council or the football could club could do, to make things work better with the community?
MB Well they can stop 24-hour working, they can stop polluting the atmosphere they could instead give some money. They can stop pretending they're doing great things for the community based on all of the public subsidies they've got. If they give back the money they've had to improve the pavements they’ve damaged. They could return the bit of the Tottenham High Road. They could possibly invest in some conservation projects in the area, not just showcasing their own projects. They could, heavens forbid, they could provide some council housing. The rest they could do a lot more. Now is there any likelihood of that happening? Well with this runaway beast having been fed all the millions of public money and we've got all of these privileges all of the planning permissions, I don't see it. I mean there will be changes in Haringey Council. They may not amount to as much as the Evening Standard might like to scare monger or portray it's happening.
The reality is from Our Tottenham and groups like that, we've got to make the best effort that we can. Long term? Well, Spurs don’t want to improve their relationship with the local community, because long term what is their agenda? It’s to clear that community out of the way. Those houses along Park Lane, currently living in the shadow of a wall, a bank of sea containers. Like sea containers outside the front house. Somebody said I didn’t know going down Tottenham, it was like the docks of old. There is this row sea containers, supposedly protecting people from the noise that goes across or the dust that doesn’t come around. And there may be better relationships between the community and Our Tottenham, between the council and Our Tottenham, because of course some of the people in the Our Tottenham movement and campaigns have gone on to be selected as Labour. I don't make any party political point on that, as you well know Haringey is a one party Labour state so that’s the attention there and the activists come and go. So there may be improvement in terms of there may be a better understanding. There may be less willingness to give in to contributions they've got to make it. There may be some row-back. There may be some scope to protect the local state, because of what has happened. But of course what has happened is that since the Spurs beast was unleashed, upon top of that Haringey invited in a new big beast, Lend Lease, who of course wanted to do the HDV, the Haringey Development Vehicle. I won't go through that titanic battle between a community, which is a great example of how organizations can defeat large organizations.
One of the interesting things is that in spurs buying up all of the land with the use of their Bahamas companies, keeping your eyes on that register, with use of the FOI, is that part of the land they bought off, and where they currently mixing cement and trucks going backwards and forwards and stuff, they now actually want to develop that themselves with their own scheme. Alas, that is what is called the High Road West, Q4, the Love Lane Estate is in that master plan. So Spurs want to go ahead and develop a plot in a section of the High Road West scheme which Lend Lease have been given permission to develop themselves. So we have obviously developers at war. Where a council has made one promise to one developer it's fed another developer and that other developer is now thinking actually I'm gonna slice up an even bigger section from Tottenham for my profit making. So surprise, surprise, the counsellor supporting them, Lend Lease. Well not officially supporting them of course, objecting to the Spurs development and of course the GLA who of course have plenty of public money to slush into their developer schemes, are also in opposition to that. So look out for less of the community versus Spurs and Lend Lease versus Spurs over a development just north of White Hart Lane railway station and it’s still called White Hart Lane station at the moment. As you might know, as part of the great walkway scheme in between Spurs on the High Road a new station is being built, which may eventually be bought, the naming rights might be bought off by a well-known large property owner and well known sports club in the area. So you've got two developers at war so that's the real war to look out for. Our relationships, as I once said with Haringey council, can't but fail to improve and even the conflict between us and hopefully the community will get a better deal from the council than it has so far.
MP OK, one last plug for the book and lots of students who I think have been involved in Our Tottenham over that period of time, from UCL, from Birkbeck and other academic institutions. Has that involvement, having those academic institutions, people involved, academics and students how has that assisted the Our Tottenham network? A difficult one maybe?
DM It was great when Mark took the minutes of meeting, so that was really helpful. Yeah I dunno, it’s a difficult question. You know we when we started there was a great deal of enthusiasm, lots of groups involved we having big meetings and then you kind of after two or three years because we're fighting such a you know big enemy that you know kind of trying to ignore any kind of opposition and pretend there isn't any. You know it gets quite a bit of a long slog, so you know the meetings are not as strong as they were before, but at the same time different campaigns and initiatives are still coming up in different parts of Tottenham and they link through throughout Tottenham But one of the things that we did do is, because of our contacts with a couple of universities were in planning departments, student started to come to the meetings and offer their skills when we were kind of crafting policy challenges to the borough-wide planning you know documents and so on so that that was very helpful because obviously academics have skills that not everybody has and they may have time if they're on a course to contribute in that way so that's useful. And certainly this this book has been very well received in Tottenham, but obviously we need a lot more copies. We've only got you know fifty copies in circulation at the moment I think in Tottenham. So it’s definitely worth reprinting. Yeah.
MB Can I just say something? Absolutely, of course it's been hugely beneficial to have academics involved, because of the wider understanding, greater knowledge, the wider knowledge, the connections with sports-led development schemes in America, community campaigning elsewhere across the world. So it's actually vital, particularly as the council wheels out its experts all the time and in the planning, the local planning thing. I have no idea about planning regulations and stuff, but if somebody tells me I can certainly go and put on a good show as to pretend I know about it, so it’s enormously beneficial in that respect. One of the key things as well has been we’ve educated ourselves. We’ve upskilled ourselves in terms of our campaigning tactics in our knowledge. We’ve shown a willingness, a willingness people would say was rather strange to go through these thousands of pages a council reports looking for the detail. Looking on the website for property being bought through Bahamas. Using Freedom of Information requests, challenging the council and others further away and actually ensuring that all the bits of information we've got, we've got out to journalists, to academics, people that can carry our message from a small business corner of north Tottenham that we are in to a wider audience and events like tonight with other people from around London, more receptors, not obsessed about Tottenham. I mean I'm doubly obsessed here. I’m not sure if Mark knows this, the area in Manchester where the new stadium is, I used to play on as a kid, before I got socially cleansed out of Manchester, so they’re following me around. It’s obviously a bad sign when I arrive. [Inaudible]
We are determined to stay in our community and that's why we've taught ourselves all of these things that enable us to try to take on an organization that's resourced by our money, a council and that actually supposedly acts in our name and yet rarely does and the involvement of academics, of students within enthusiasm, fresh eyes and new perspectives and actually ourselves looking to use all of the things we’ve become quite good at like media interviews, doing public meetings, putting together petitions and practice we've had putting together protests outside Haringey council and we must be the textbook case.
MP OK, thank you very much. So enough conversation between ourselves, any questions on some fairly perhaps provocative things.
Click here for a transcript of the Q&A.
Click here for more information about "Tottenham's Trojan Horse?" including reviews, upcoming events and how to buy or borrow it.
TRANSCRIPT OF BOOK LAUNCH CONVERSATION 4/4/2018
Introductions by Wail Qasim, Housmans Bookshop.
MP Thanks very much for joining us this evening and thanks very much for Housmans hosting the event as was mentioned the idea really is to kick things off with a bit of a conversation between myself. The book is based on sort of four years of research in the Tottenham area that was one of the case studies. The other case study was in relation to regeneration in East Manchester. So thank you very much this evening to Dave Morris who's been involved with the Our Tottenham network for I think it's probably about five years it's been going. I certainly went along to a meeting in April 2013. It had been going for a few months before then. Dave’s been involved in various activities in the Tottenham area and also thank you to Martin Ball who is also involved with I think he is the chair of the Friends of Downlane Park in Tottenham. So again involved in lots of activities in the community. As Wale said we’ll probably do a conversation between ourselves for 20 to 30 minutes but you know the idea really is that we try and get as many comments in or questions from the floor as possible as well.
So we will start things off now. So perhaps first of all you can tell us a little bit about the formation of Our Tottenham and why it all started up in 2013 and perhaps any links with the stadium.
DM OK, so basically after the riots in 2011 which kind of kicked off in Tottenham and spread around the country there was a march organized by local anti-cuts campaigners and a Turkish organisation in Tottenham. We linked up with people in Hackney and within three days of decided to organise a march we had about 3,000 people at a march to Tottenham Town Hall from Hackney and one of our demands that night, it was called Give Our Kids A Future, one of their demands was apart from the obvious ones of trying to defend public services and facilities and particularly the youth facilities and so on, one of our demands was for community-led regeneration, but other people had other ideas. I think the Mayor of London commissioned a report called It Took Another Riot, which is mentioned in the book, in which a property developer basically recommended that the kind of overhaul of the social engineering throughout Tottenham and to basically gentrify Tottenham and increase land prices and all that kind of stuff. So we didn't know anything about that, but we saw the council come up with a so-called Plan for Tottenham. I don't know when it was, 2012 maybe, and it's a glossy pamphlet and people look at it and say wait a minute. And Spurs were kind of like highly promoted in this plan for Tottenham as a catalyst.
MB They hosted the launch event.
DM Okay. But there was a bit of it which I said that doesn’t look right. It looks like they are going to build a walkway from White Hart Lane station cutting through a council estate to the new Spurs ground. That can't be right that they're knocking down a whole estate and people saying oh it must be a mistake or you know it's just a sort of fantasy but it soon became clear that they really meant social engineering. They’d taken this property developers report and it's a long story I could go into it in great detail but once we realized the extent of the threat. Actually I was involved with a group called Haringey Solidarity Group, a radical activist group and we had a small discussion and said let's do some anti gentrification leaflets this and then I was saying wait a minute we need something on a much bigger scale than just a few people handing out a few leaflets. Why don’t we call a meeting of people in Tottenham, groups in Tottenham. We thought we might get 10 - 15 people; we got 40 people to a kind of an open meeting just to say what should we do about all these plans that the council and spurs have and other developers and it was agreed to organize a conference and that's where Our Tottenham was launched at this conference with about 30 or 40 different organizations participating. So I think we realized that we needed something on quite a substantial scale if we're going to challenge you know effectively the government the Mayor of London Tottenham, the local council and big property developers. So that's how it kicked off if you like.
MB I’d just like to say that I’m glad Our Tottenham has been founded, because it is a massive enemy that we are taking on. Hugely resourced people; the council, Spurs, all the property developers, super national, international entities or whatever nice way you want to describe them. Our Tottenham is not just that an anti-Spurs an anti-gentrification group, it’s positive about Tottenham, about the parks like I’m involved in. Bringing together people that provide luncheon clubs in functions, people supporting vulnerable, elderly people. Bringing together, welcoming migrant community within the Tottenham area. See when you think of Our Tottenham you might think of those angry voices of Dave Morris and Martin Ball stood somewhere on a cold Tottenham street complaining about something. Well actually remember there's a wider range of people involved in that and that's the great strength of the organisation and its survival because it is made up of many organizations across policy and across a lot of other issues, so it's a great thing that we have formed it.
MP OK, thank you for that Martin. moving on from that in terms of just not taking a negative view on things. Do you want to talk about one or two of the positive developments we've been involved with?
MB Well, one of the good things that we did in Down Lane Park is when the council came to take the children's playground. To take children playground, because that's the southern bit closest to Tottenham Hale station. You can imagine we said that no in rather stronger terms than I'm putting it now and we went around the community collecting about 600 signatures which is no mean feat as you know, because it’s actually hard to get those signatures out of people. So we actually put a stop to their plans to take the park because it was closest to Tottenham Hale in the epicentre of their Tottenham Hale war zone as the Director of Regeneration referred to Tottenham on the infamous bus tour for the new councillors elected after 2014, referred to Tottenham as looking like a war zone. They declared war on Tottenham, and they wanted demolished parts at Tottenham and Spurs have of course been buying up, as the book says, through their Bahamas registered complete lots of properties along the high road along White's Hart Lane and lots of properties that they are looking to develop now. And if you want to really go in to the detail there is a website called Private Eye, which details overseas property investments and if you obviously just type in N17 a lot of Spurs properties will come up, land that they are assembling and all the rest of it. So we've done some really good things in terms of saving the park. Getting some proper investments to the park pockets and building trust protection for the park. That's one way in which my own organisation that’s fought to protect green space and to get in some new investment. We've got in some new playgrounds equipment we’ve want. Before these playgrounds they wanted to build flats and this was the only way to cross subsidize and by the community making this stand, we actually said no we want to protect this park, we want this green space. Not just for us, but for the thousands of people you want to bring to the area as well. They will need green space and we’ve got a proper decent park there for them. So that is just one way, there are many other ways, but that is just one example.
DM Yeah we actually organized a whole range of conferences in the first couple of years of the Our Tottenham network and one of them was specifically on how to have our own plans for our neighbourhoods and what we want to see, what we want to see protected, what we want to see improved and we were able to draw on a whole wide range of fantastic examples. Friends of parks groups are particularly good examples of people mobilizing to protect and improve their local green spaces. Community centres, we helped to develop a community centres network to protect community centres, some of which are under threat in Tottenham. Wards Corner, there are people fighting to save certain facilities, but then they come up with their own plans and the Wards Corner Coalition at Seven Sisters have been campaigning for ten years to protect an indoor market a Latin American market and a historic building and they come up with their own community plan which has got planning permission. They just need 50 million pounds in order to buy up the site from a property developer who the council have been working with to demolish the site.
So whenever the council come up with something bad, so you know hopefully the local community can come up with something good and there's plenty of good examples. The most recent I think is Tottenham's only hospital site is St Anne’s Hospital in South Tottenham and it's quite run down and basically the owners of the site, which is the NHS, but it's the mental health section want to sell off two-thirds of the site for basically luxury housing. But now there's been a big effort to try and buy the site for the community, 100 percent affordable genuinely affordable housing and additional facilities, community facilities and alternative health facilities and green space. And so on and actually this is getting quite a lot of publicity beyond Tottenham, because it's a very great example it will be run cooperatively and they have set up a Land Trust. So a Land Trust is where people club to get them to say instead of selling that land to an individual or a speculator, sell it to the community and it remains community controlled forever.
So there's lots of positive examples and we all know them in this room. You know you may have your own examples of where communities have mobilised their own plans. And that it's true if you're just anti, anti, anti, it's kind of easy you know for the authorities to kind of marginalize you, because they're always pretending that what they're doing is positive. Yeah, so we have to say no, actually it's a load of crap, but if you keep saying that then the community kind of thinks well there's no alternative. So it's really important to have an alternative vision about what we want to see with our empowered communities.
MP OK thank you Dave. So moving more particularly on to the stadium development in Tottenham. When I started my research, I couldn't see any reason why sports led regeneration why there was any negatives in it really and this was originally to do with the development in East Manchester of the Commonwealth Stadium as it was and doing a little bit of research in relation to that, realized there were some issues that kind of local people
Had. In fact the developments were generally see to be quite positive for the local community but there were still quite a lot of issues there. In relation to the Spurs stadium, are you against the stadium development, per se?
MB Actually I can say I'm not, but if you go back to a cabinet council meeting in December 2015 you will find I am on the record stating my view that I'm glad Spurs stay in the borough. Although the consequence of Spurs staying in the borough has been massive demolitions already. Just on the site of where the new stadium is, before recent times there was a trading estate just up near where the stadium is, so there's lots of houses and a trading estate, several hundred businesses removed from there. So when we talk about protecting businesses at the Peacock Estate and businesses, shop traders along the High Road, we've already witnessed hundreds of businesses being moved out of the area and we can’t get down to the detail of what's been happening to people on the Love Lane estate or where other people are being moved out, but certainly the impact of Spurs already. And I’ve brought, just on the impact of Spurs, you may have gone down the Tottenham High Road, very slowly now, because Spurs have been granted a whole lame to themselves [sound of shaking something], because of the stadium being so close to the High Road. So this is some dust from the pavement, just there outside the Spurs shop, one of the many properties they bought with their Bahamas property company. So that's the sort of dirt and you could say it’s the Tottenham High Road, it’s the A10, it’s going to be a bit dirty Martin, you’re quite right, but not the sort of dirt that’s spread around over there [shows jar of dirt collected]. So we've got a very dirty place, a very bruised and battered community.
You may have read in the pamphlets about some of the historic buildings that have been demolished and this is a very short introduction to the two hundred photographs I took of those buildings being demolished over one weekend. This is the little bit that I saved of one of the buildings. I think that’s the red building as you might guess from the colour of the brick and this a little bit here is from I think it was the pub, Valentino's, if you went down there a boogie and a pint or a cocktail or something, if you go back as far as that. There's a third building and I haven’t got a bit of that, the Dispensary building, but actually thanks to Spurs’ foresight and their great concern for the heritage and future of Tottenham they knocked down, they saved a part of it. They’ve saved the front a name and it’s carefully packaged in a warehouse somewhere waiting to come back to the Tottenham Museum. They created their own Tottenham Elgin Marbels. They saved a bit of an historic building they knocked down and in the future you can pay good money to go and see what you could have seen on a perfectly good building at one time. So the impact of this stadium building already is destruction of historical buildings, four locally listed buildings. OK, they put a lot of money in to Grade 2 listed buildings further up, but I think even they thought Haringey Council couldn’t give them their wish, which they couldn’t. There's been demolition of existing building site and houses there's also the existing threat toward the existing houses from the noise, the dust, the pollution. From a quite serious factory that the people of Tottenham on the front line that Lyn Garner and xxxx are facing because tonight, I don't if you know, to help Spurs Haringey Council in the many ways that they have helped Spurs, granted them 24-hour working. They can work on that Stadium 24 hours a day, seven days a week so that they can build their stadium in time. That's what's happened.
DM Yes, a lot of local people are obviously Spurs supporters. I’ve been a Spurs supporter all my life, but you know you have to separate the team, which came from the community originally when these kinda clubs got set up they were clubs, I don’t know if they had a membership, but they were seen as part of the community and most of the footballers would have been from the community. So we have to separate that from the business which is a ruthless money-making concern, making as much money out of footballers as they can. So I mean a good example of this is when the Spurs were applying for you know permission to build a new stadium, planning permission, a lot of the local businesses that Martin referred to campaigned or lobbied or put up posters in their in their shop windows supporting Spurs, because it was seen as an integral part of the community and you know they little realised that you know that once they got planning permission Spurs would turn on them and say well actually all this area close by the stadium is going to be prime development land and that's why we've started buying up properties throughout the area so they felt very betrayed by five I suppose. We actually had a meeting with Spurs with the, I dunno if it's in the book?
MP Yes
DM Have you all got a copy of the book? A few people. Ok. It will save go through all the all good bits of the book, all the great bits of the book. But basically, we [Our Tottenham] got written to by one of the directors of Spurs saying why don't we have a meeting. Our Tottenham and Spurs have a joint meeting, so we met a couple of their board of Directors in their boardroom in the ground and we put our demands and we basically said you know you should be condemning the associated development outside of your ground. We made it clear we weren't against the actual Spurs improving their ground but we were against the associated threats to local council estates and local business. So we asked them to condemn any threats to those, but of course they were already buying up bits of those to make money out of the land and we also asked them to put a hundred million pounds into the local community. Arsenal had to put in sixty million pounds I think originally from planning gain. Spurs and the council agreed seventeen million pounds. We thought that was a very small amount considering this massive stadium development. But once they had all the permissions in place they had this Olympic Stadium threat to the council; that they were going to move to East London, shows how committed they are to the to the area. They used that as a bargaining point to scare the council into actually quashing that seventeen million pounds planning gain, section 106 monies, that was supposed to go into the local community to compensate for this new development and increase size and all that kind of stuff. So actually all their obligations got wiped out and they claimed, Tottenham, that they were too poor to put money in to the community. They are the 13th richest club in the world as far as we understand, football club. And I've just found out today, in the Evening Standard of all places. Daniel Levy who's his he, does he own Spurs?
MP He’s Chairman.
DM At the same time they were saying they were too poor to pay that seventeen million pounds community, his pay from Spurs jumped from two point eight four million a year. That’s pretty good going already in 2015-16, to six million pounds a year the following year so you can see where the money's going to in the club. It's not going into the community it's not even going into the fans pockets. The fans are fleeced and it’s exploitive just like everybody else when it comes to the business. So you have to separate the team and the enjoyment of football from the big business that's behind what's going on with these big clubs and you even have to separate the fans and the people that come to watch the matches. In fact we had a meeting with them as well, because the chair of the supporters club had expressed concerns about the effects of Spurs stadium development on the surrounding communities. So we had a joint meeting with them, but you know they were kind of trying to they'd been caught in between two stools really. They had to be you know, they felt they had to be loyal to the club and the business, whilst expressing concern about potential damage to the local communities.
MP OK, I think it was the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust that you had the meeting with, wasn’t it?
DM The Supporters Trust, yes.
MP And they obviously represent their members views I guess. Looking forwards, going forward, are there ways that you could see perhaps, set in terms of the council with the new council elections coming up, and perhaps even the football club, once it gets installed in the new stadium, which you know may or may not be at the start the season, more positive relations. Are there things that the council or the football could club could do, to make things work better with the community?
MB Well they can stop 24-hour working, they can stop polluting the atmosphere they could instead give some money. They can stop pretending they're doing great things for the community based on all of the public subsidies they've got. If they give back the money they've had to improve the pavements they’ve damaged. They could return the bit of the Tottenham High Road. They could possibly invest in some conservation projects in the area, not just showcasing their own projects. They could, heavens forbid, they could provide some council housing. The rest they could do a lot more. Now is there any likelihood of that happening? Well with this runaway beast having been fed all the millions of public money and we've got all of these privileges all of the planning permissions, I don't see it. I mean there will be changes in Haringey Council. They may not amount to as much as the Evening Standard might like to scare monger or portray it's happening.
The reality is from Our Tottenham and groups like that, we've got to make the best effort that we can. Long term? Well, Spurs don’t want to improve their relationship with the local community, because long term what is their agenda? It’s to clear that community out of the way. Those houses along Park Lane, currently living in the shadow of a wall, a bank of sea containers. Like sea containers outside the front house. Somebody said I didn’t know going down Tottenham, it was like the docks of old. There is this row sea containers, supposedly protecting people from the noise that goes across or the dust that doesn’t come around. And there may be better relationships between the community and Our Tottenham, between the council and Our Tottenham, because of course some of the people in the Our Tottenham movement and campaigns have gone on to be selected as Labour. I don't make any party political point on that, as you well know Haringey is a one party Labour state so that’s the attention there and the activists come and go. So there may be improvement in terms of there may be a better understanding. There may be less willingness to give in to contributions they've got to make it. There may be some row-back. There may be some scope to protect the local state, because of what has happened. But of course what has happened is that since the Spurs beast was unleashed, upon top of that Haringey invited in a new big beast, Lend Lease, who of course wanted to do the HDV, the Haringey Development Vehicle. I won't go through that titanic battle between a community, which is a great example of how organizations can defeat large organizations.
One of the interesting things is that in spurs buying up all of the land with the use of their Bahamas companies, keeping your eyes on that register, with use of the FOI, is that part of the land they bought off, and where they currently mixing cement and trucks going backwards and forwards and stuff, they now actually want to develop that themselves with their own scheme. Alas, that is what is called the High Road West, Q4, the Love Lane Estate is in that master plan. So Spurs want to go ahead and develop a plot in a section of the High Road West scheme which Lend Lease have been given permission to develop themselves. So we have obviously developers at war. Where a council has made one promise to one developer it's fed another developer and that other developer is now thinking actually I'm gonna slice up an even bigger section from Tottenham for my profit making. So surprise, surprise, the counsellor supporting them, Lend Lease. Well not officially supporting them of course, objecting to the Spurs development and of course the GLA who of course have plenty of public money to slush into their developer schemes, are also in opposition to that. So look out for less of the community versus Spurs and Lend Lease versus Spurs over a development just north of White Hart Lane railway station and it’s still called White Hart Lane station at the moment. As you might know, as part of the great walkway scheme in between Spurs on the High Road a new station is being built, which may eventually be bought, the naming rights might be bought off by a well-known large property owner and well known sports club in the area. So you've got two developers at war so that's the real war to look out for. Our relationships, as I once said with Haringey council, can't but fail to improve and even the conflict between us and hopefully the community will get a better deal from the council than it has so far.
MP OK, one last plug for the book and lots of students who I think have been involved in Our Tottenham over that period of time, from UCL, from Birkbeck and other academic institutions. Has that involvement, having those academic institutions, people involved, academics and students how has that assisted the Our Tottenham network? A difficult one maybe?
DM It was great when Mark took the minutes of meeting, so that was really helpful. Yeah I dunno, it’s a difficult question. You know we when we started there was a great deal of enthusiasm, lots of groups involved we having big meetings and then you kind of after two or three years because we're fighting such a you know big enemy that you know kind of trying to ignore any kind of opposition and pretend there isn't any. You know it gets quite a bit of a long slog, so you know the meetings are not as strong as they were before, but at the same time different campaigns and initiatives are still coming up in different parts of Tottenham and they link through throughout Tottenham But one of the things that we did do is, because of our contacts with a couple of universities were in planning departments, student started to come to the meetings and offer their skills when we were kind of crafting policy challenges to the borough-wide planning you know documents and so on so that that was very helpful because obviously academics have skills that not everybody has and they may have time if they're on a course to contribute in that way so that's useful. And certainly this this book has been very well received in Tottenham, but obviously we need a lot more copies. We've only got you know fifty copies in circulation at the moment I think in Tottenham. So it’s definitely worth reprinting. Yeah.
MB Can I just say something? Absolutely, of course it's been hugely beneficial to have academics involved, because of the wider understanding, greater knowledge, the wider knowledge, the connections with sports-led development schemes in America, community campaigning elsewhere across the world. So it's actually vital, particularly as the council wheels out its experts all the time and in the planning, the local planning thing. I have no idea about planning regulations and stuff, but if somebody tells me I can certainly go and put on a good show as to pretend I know about it, so it’s enormously beneficial in that respect. One of the key things as well has been we’ve educated ourselves. We’ve upskilled ourselves in terms of our campaigning tactics in our knowledge. We’ve shown a willingness, a willingness people would say was rather strange to go through these thousands of pages a council reports looking for the detail. Looking on the website for property being bought through Bahamas. Using Freedom of Information requests, challenging the council and others further away and actually ensuring that all the bits of information we've got, we've got out to journalists, to academics, people that can carry our message from a small business corner of north Tottenham that we are in to a wider audience and events like tonight with other people from around London, more receptors, not obsessed about Tottenham. I mean I'm doubly obsessed here. I’m not sure if Mark knows this, the area in Manchester where the new stadium is, I used to play on as a kid, before I got socially cleansed out of Manchester, so they’re following me around. It’s obviously a bad sign when I arrive. [Inaudible]
We are determined to stay in our community and that's why we've taught ourselves all of these things that enable us to try to take on an organization that's resourced by our money, a council and that actually supposedly acts in our name and yet rarely does and the involvement of academics, of students within enthusiasm, fresh eyes and new perspectives and actually ourselves looking to use all of the things we’ve become quite good at like media interviews, doing public meetings, putting together petitions and practice we've had putting together protests outside Haringey council and we must be the textbook case.
MP OK, thank you very much. So enough conversation between ourselves, any questions on some fairly perhaps provocative things.
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