Teachers at Charlotte Sharman school in south London’s Elephant and Castle areon strike this week, protesting against the fact that the primary school will be forced to close at the end of term. It is one of many inner London schools facing closure as a result of a 25% drop in under-fours in some boroughs, according to the most recent census. Charlotte Sharman is just around the corner from the site of the Heygate estate, which wasdemolished in 2014and replaced by Elephant Park, a development of thousands of luxury apartments, built by the Australian developer Lendlease. After the Heygate was knocked down, the school roll slumped.
Elephant Park, which has won manyawards for “placemaking excellence”, is seen as an exemplar of a new global regeneration industry. In place of lower- and middle-income family housing, the new neighbourhoods are typically created to include luxury apartments set in high-security privatised public space, global retail brands, pop-ups, expensive bars and restaurants, and often a university or art gallery to provide cultural capital.
Today, two-bedroom apartments in Elephant Park are on sale for between £900,000 and £1m, and of the 2,704 new homes, only 82 are for social housing. Twenty-five per cent of the new homes are designated “affordable”, but since the government changed the definition of affordable in 2010 to meanup to 80%of market rent or market value, that is financially far out of reach for the majority of Londoners and their families. Alex Mees, who works for the National Education Union and is on the picket line with the protesters, says: “They’ve got rid of family homes in the area and replaced them with one- or two-bedroom apartments – all the families are moving out, they should have seen this coming.”
The regeneration of so many new districts, from King’s Cross to the Olympic Park, is part of a larger story of the extreme gentrification of cities like London where soaring house prices are leading directly to a decline in birthrates. Astudy by the Affordable Housing Commissionfound that 13% of British adults under the age of 45 and in a couple delayed or chose not to start a family because of their housing situation – with nearly 2 million people potentially affected. But the decline is much starker in cities such as London, which are experiencing the most extreme gentrification: research showed that while the capital’s overall population is rising, the numbers between the age of 25–39, the typical age of housebuying and family formation, has recentlydropped by 4%, with London Councils, the body representing the city’s 32 boroughs, attributing it to the shortage of family housing.
The knock-on effects are that across the south-east, millennials are leaving London for Bristol, Brighton and seaside towns along the south coast, such as Hastings, Eastbourne or Deal. The trend for families to leave the capital is pushing up house prices in these areas and is often far from welcome, spawning the derogatory acronym DFL (Down from London), while Deal has been branded “Hackney on Sea”.
Fernanda, an architect and mother of two who lives in Hackney, described how it’s not just schools, but GP surgeries and small businesses – what she calls the “ecosystem of the city” – that are closing. “It is getting emptier and emptier and there is a clear change in demographics happening in front of our eyes,” she says, telling me that she has been invited to two farewell picnics in the next few weeks. “One family bought a house in Nottingham and another family are moving to Kent. It’s mostly people with younger kids because they’re all piled up in a small flat – my son’s class is not full.”
The positive rhetoric and branding of placemaking is that it transforms run-down areas into vibrant and economically successful parts of the city. The reality is that it creates sterile places, emptied of so many of the essential aspects of urban life, except the expensive activities. The city may be emptier than ever of children and families, but tables at sought-after restaurants are still booked up weeks in advance. Another category able to stay put are older people,with the census findingthat the proportion of the population in every age group over 50 (except for 80-84 year olds) increased, as many of these people bought property in another era, unwittingly benefiting from huge rises in property values of up to 700%. Today, London boroughs like Southwark and Hackney are a mix of new half-empty neighbourhoods of luxury apartments, round the corner from streets of multimillion pound Georgian and Victorian homes that have soared in value alongside cramped and unaffordable private rental accommodation and a fast declining amount of social housing.
The dictionary definition of sterile is “not able to produce children or young” and children are the canary in the coalmine for what is happening to our cities. When the city is no longer able to cater to children, or the range of other diverse uses that keep communities healthy and vibrant, places don’t die, but neither are they truly alive.
Anna Minton is the author of Big Capital: Who isLondonfor? Her new book on the sterile city will be published by Penguin next year