To hate what's happening to London?

[AWholeLottaNosy]

I moved to London in 1989, it was a great place, full of interesting, arty people, lots of cheap things to do, festivals, clubs, shops, museums. I loved the quirky nature of so many different areas, Camden market, Soho, Notting Hill market at the weekend, the urban grittiness of places like Brixton, Hackney etc. however I can't afford to live in London anymore and feel so sad that all these great places are slowly and surely just becoming one homogenised mass of chain stores, 'luxury flats', unaffordable to most Londoners and the things that made London a great place to live in, shops, markets, clubs, music venues, diversity etc are just vanishing. Boris Johnson obviously not only doesn't give a shit but is actively encouraging this, especially the building of flats just to be bought ( and not even lived in) by foreign investors.

I guess this can't be stopped but I do feel sad about it and wondered how other Londoners felt about it..?

the rich government with its social cleansing are fucking it up...

Not the QEH Katy1368 the site referring to (without giving away exactly where I live!) is more central. It was a council office and had a medical centre attached but a very large site. Now it will be private housing. The GP practice that was there has been moved to amazing new premises so I can't moan about that, but why not build more social housing? Especially as HS2 may be taking out vast swathes of it just give minutes walk away. And there is also a spectacular old dilapidated hospital just near Tottenham Court Rd that could, with some imagination, be turned into beautiful social housing. I don't understand why so much council housing has to be so grim, when beautiful buildings are left to waste. It would be so much nicer for residents and I'm convinced it would lead to less anti social behaviour issues. If you house people in places that look like prisons, why be surprised if some of them start behaving like inmates? I think I've made it pretty clear I'm all for gentrification with bells on, but for ALL. And preserve our architectural heritage at the same time.

I'd rather be nuts than stuck up.

Floppity I used to love Deptford when I lived near there in the 90s - the market was great & felt properly 'local'. Of course it was nice that Greenwich was in walking distance too and was a bit more swanky, but in those days Greenwich was a bit more independent too (second hand book shops and the market was properly interesting and a bit grungy rather than all touristy and sanitised like it is now).

The bit in between Deptford and Greenwich is the bit I cant stand now - loads of really identikit flats; I know lots of them are student flats and that's fair enough, probably a great place to live if you're a student, but none of them are very inspiring pieces of architecture.

Going right back to the OP, it gets on my tits when people say "urban grittiness". By which they generally seem to mean it's interesting to feel you live in a diverse city because you can go through places that are POOR but don't have to live there.
IME the people that get stuck living with "urban grittiness" every day aren't so keen.

Yy to that-having lived in plenty of Urban Grit in my time

But when places get swept through and spruced up and go all Naice, the rents go up and the shops get too expensive. Where does everyone go?

So gentrification benefits everyone, more social housing needs to be built. But this never happens because it's too expensive for local authorities to do-they can't afford the land and central govt aren't interested

We need regulated rents and social housing to provide some balance. People priced out, having to move out of areas they've lived for years-even generations- is very unfair

I think this is actually a common thing everywhere (or in a lot of places)

It's like Whitstable, it was always arty and actually pretty poor for many years and people went to live there who had no money but a nice ethic, you know, the sort of art student, maybe a bit alternative culture.

You could afford it whereas Canterbury was rather expensive. Then it got taken up by a lot of hipsters and became very trendy, and now, it's impossible to get into town on a summer weekend due to immense queues of cars, all the houses have been bought either as second homes or actual homes for people from London who can afford massive prices - so prices have leapt up - and the high street is full of shops that a lot of 'normal' people can't even begin to afford (French 'artisan' antiques, other overpriced 'designer' bolleaux) and the streets are all crammed with people in designer sunglasses and shorts, all a little bit lost,

it's shit. It's pretentious and shit. It's creeping into a lot of places. I guess in a way it makes it a better place as it feels safe and respectable, but it also makes it feel fake and artificially inflated.

Hipstable is what we call it now.

I grew up in South London. I used to walk to Greenwich and rummage about in second hand bookshops, eat pie, mash and green licker in Lewisham and was fascinated by the old seaman's church in Deptfird - the one with the skulls in the doorway, where Marlowe was buried (it's probably got a visitors centre now.)

When I go back to visit the parts of London I used to know are unrecognisable. But London has always been like that.

What I hate is Boris' pandering to the rich. The huge apartment blocks with their 'poor ' doors (New Yorker friends were horrified by this but say the same is happening in Harlem, Bronx, Queens)
The ridiculous cable car , the cleansing of council estates which means poorer people are pushed out yo the fringes, away from public transport and therefore jobs.

That said: New Cross has always been a dump.

What is 'the poor doors' on apartment blocks? - I'm guessing you don't mean delivery/trades entrances and lift

Laurie - there were some flats built in central London that were part private luxury flats and part housing association. The housing association flats had their own separate entrance at the back of the building in an alleyway without the posh concierge, etc.

I would be wanting that, the flats I really want are housing association - who wants to spunk 3grand a year on a concierge
As long as the space is the same, the fittings the same (bet they're not) I wouldn't be too bothered. I get that for social cohesion its not great, that it increases the gap between rich and poor.

The flat I liked the look of was £227 for a 25% share - I can see that someone else paying the million may want a bit more for their cash - whereas we as teachers wouldn't need concierge plus entrance plants

I'm a born and bred Londoner.

Fortunately we bought our place when housing wasn't through the roof, and have now cleared the mortgage, so we're OK. However the soaring cost of housing, together with the right to buy policy meaning a serious lack of council housing, and the HB cap, does worry me.

I have colleagues who are health professionals not able to afford housing in London-so people with a reasonable income. If they can't do it how can anyone else with a lower standard of pay?

London needs a diverse workforce, ergo it needs a diverse housing stock. How the hell is London going to cope without lower paid workers eg cleaners, dustmen, drivers, care assistants, sales assistants etc etc if these people can't afford to live close to their jobs? It's OK saying they can live further out, but I can't imagine someone travelling from Dagenham to Westminster to work as a cleaner!

It's funny how expectations change though. My family have lived on London's fir hundreds of years mainly in service to the big houses in Mayfair - ladies maids and butlers etc
They lived in Georgian houses in Camberwell. These are the sAme houses now occupied by multi millionaires. Fifty years ago it was perfectly normal fir families to live in Central London, attend school , live near relatives. Not any more.

To add, when I was a kid these people were able to afford property. The road where I grew up in (zone 3) was decent housing with a range of employees living there.

The thing is social housing in expensive areas is irrelevant if all the shops and food places are 'upmarket'. And if the business rents and rates are expensive the shops will have to be too...
If you are struggling for cash you don't want to have to travel miles and miles to buy 'cheap' food and household goods and services...
No point having a posh deli and cafe on your road if you can only afford a cheap sliced white and a tin of beans - maybe a greasy spoon under the arches when you fancy a treat and can't be bothered to cook...even a local pub for a bit of a social life where the beer doesn't cost £10 a pint, visitors can park outside for less than £4 for 15 mins...

Indeed there were milkmen, secretaries, bus drivers and builders in my street. Many of them are still there! Not their children though - they don't live in London. (Neither do I)

Social housing in expensive areas: it depends how big the 'expensive' area is!

And many business owners managed to run cafés and hardware shops in these 'expensive' areas - catering to early morning tradesmen and night economy.

The really scary thing was reading about paramedics needing to have more on-site accommodation at hospitals for when they're on call, because so few can afford to live within the requisite travelling distance of inner London hospitals. Similar issues for other emergency workers if there was ever a major incident in central London - doesn't bear thinking about.

I lived 15 years in the "dickensian squalor" of the "shithole" of King's cross. And I am really finding the comments pretty offensive. The clubs that some of you loved were a bloody nightmare if you were a resident. Perhaps if you visited it seemed squalid, and I agree the drugs and prostitution were hard to take, but it had an absolute industrial beauty, the twins of railway and canal history combining. Beautiful Stanley and Culross buildings, the stunning gasholders. I was part of a close knit community and there was a strong residential spirit of co-operation. We were forced to move by the development and having given a lot to the King's Cross community over many years it was a very painful time. You may now all have your shiney clean bars and restaurants and lovely gated flats but many real people who had lived through all the difficulties and the building works for a love of the area have now been forced out. Never mind the wildlife which was astonishing. Or the historic buildings destroyed because no-one cared much about King's cross as it was "squalid".

Yes there is no respect for community when it comes to economically deprived areas. Money nuts you respect.

DH and I bought our first place in London last year and decided to buy in Woolwich, which seems to have been given as an example of what shitty London was like in times gone by. I have to heartily disagree.

We have a fab market on the main square (not a poncy farmers market but a place where we can actually do our fruit and vege shopping for the week on the cheap). We have a nice community, the new local library is massive and fab, the leisure centre is clean, huge open spaces for weekend romps. Over the summer the main square is full of families having picnics while the kids run around in the fountains and Wimbledon is played on the main big screen, so everyone brings a picnic blanket to watch the final rounds. It's wonderfully multicultural and all our friends who have eventually made the trek to come for dinner have said they didn't think 'that' type of London still existed anymore. I miss the location of my old flat in Sloane Square, but that's about it. I don't miss the pretension and homogenous culture of central west and SW London (I do miss the cheap black cab fares home!)

Having said that, property prices have shot up in the year since we bought, and it feels like this is one of the last 'affordable' pockets that is disappearing quickly (in large part thanks to Crossrail plans).

The government needs to close the loopholes for foreign investment, build more council and (truly) affordable housing and bring in stricter laws around flat sizes. The amount of '2 bedroom' flats we saw when we were looking that were only 550-600sqft was astounding.

Smell- you're proving the point though! Woolrich has redeveloped centre, old barracks, hospital, much much better transport links now. Sure its lovely now but was gritty without the character back in the 90s!

I'm all for gentrification. Being able to walk down the southern portion of Caledonian Road without fearing being mugged is quite a nice perk.

Right to buy has really screwed London though. I saw a stat that Islington Council sold off 65 council properties between April and June 2014 for an average of £157,000 per property. Last year the average sold price for a flat was £523,000 in the borough. These sale prices don't cover the cost of replacing these dwellings with new ones; more to the point, public assets are being transferred into private ownership through the lottery of qualifying for social housing. I have no idea why right to buy is such a popular scheme when it effectively depletes secure, affordable housing provision for future generations.

When I first moved to London, I lived in Shadwell. Super "gritty", sort of area that people set cars on fire in but I loved it. It was a 20 minute walk to the office and I could get to Oxford Street on the DLR.

I still own my flat (I let it when I moved in with DH) but it's quite a different area now.