1 Oliver Wainwright, ‘Walkie-Talkie tower: stark reminder of forces that rule the City’, Guardian (27 July 2017)
2 James Warrington, ‘Landsec profits rise despite retail’s property slump’, City A.M. (13 November 2018)
3 From the Yara Capital website: https://yaracapital.com/#About; prices taken from the Yara Students website: https://yarastudents.com/yara-central-holland-park/
4 This line and subsequent quotes from Hassan Awadh Hassan are taken from his testimony to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry at Holborn Bars, London (29 May 2018)
5 ‘KCTMO – Playing with fire!’, Grenfell Action Group (20 November 2016); Adam Lusher, ‘Grenfell Tower residents complained two years ago of “cheap materials and corner cutting” in block’s refurbishment’, Independent (16 June 2017); Konstantinos Daniel Tsavdaridis, ‘What caused the Grenfell fire? Here’s what we know’, CityMetric (14 June 2018)
6 ‘CLADDING APPROVALS’, a report commissioned by the Association of British Insurers and carried out by the Fire Protection Association (22 February 2018); Andrew O’Hagan, ‘The Tower’, London Review of Books (7 June 2018)
7 ‘Mayor Boris Johnson tells opponent to “get stuffed”’, BBC (11 September 2013)
8 Dominic Gilbert, ‘Legal aid advice network “decimated” by funding cuts’, BBC (10 December 2018)
9 Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain, ‘On the blacklist: how did the UK’s top building firms get secret information on their workers?’, Guardian (27 February 2015)
10 Lisa Mckenzie, ‘People shouldn’t have to feel grateful for social housing – it’s a basic human right’, Guardian (11 August 2017)
11 Rowan Moore, ‘Council houses were once a glory of the public realm. Let’s return to those days’, Guardian (20 January 2019)
12 ‘Income and repairs expenditure for Grenfell tower’, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, (June 2017). RBKC released these figures under a Freedom of Information request (FOI2017-0777) made by Tom Keene. In addition to rental income, RBKC also received an additional £1.2 million in service charges, but some of this latter figure will have been paid by private leaseholders. Repair costs here do not include the contentious one-off refurbishment project that has been implicated in the fire, as RBKC itself categorises that separately.
13 David Cameron, ‘Estate regeneration’, UK Government (10 January 2016)
14 ‘Selling Heygate flats to overseas buyers “is insult”’, Evening Standard (22 April 2013)
15 ‘The Heygate Diaspora’, 35% Campaign (8 June 2013)
16 Andy Jones, ‘Every Flat in a New South London Development Has Been Sold to Foreign Investors’, VICE (13 April 2017)
17 Tweet by David Madden, a sociologist at the London School of Economics (@davidjmadden) on 17 November 2017: https://twitter.com/davidjmadden/status/931477559002484736
18 Robert Booth, ‘Grenfell Tower borough “behaved like a property developer”’, Guardian (20 June 2018)
19 Rajeev Syal and Harrison Jones, ‘Kensington and Chelsea council has £274m in reserves’, Guardian (19 June 2017)
20 Amelia Gentleman, ‘Grenfell campaigner calls for return of local assets as reparation’, Guardian (13 September 2017)
21 Paul Waugh, ‘Tories Under Attack Over “Crass” Survey Asking Residents To Rate Grenfell Fire With Marks Out Of Ten’, HuffPost (13 November 2017)
22 Farzana Khan, ‘“We are with you”: 22 East London housing estates stand in solidarity with Grenfell’, New Internationalist (29 June 2017)
23 Nick Hopkins, ‘“Huge concentrations” of toxins found in Grenfell soil, study finds’, Guardian (12 October 2018)
24 Michael Savage, ‘Millennial housing crisis engulfs Britain’, Guardian (28 April 2018)
25 Larry Elliott, ‘The UK housing market’s perfect storm, and five steps to avoid it’, Guardian (8 October 2017); Isabelle Fraser, ‘London house prices now a record 14.5x average earnings, as Barclays reveals the fastest-growing areas’, Telegraph (28 November 2017); Rupert Jones, ‘Home ownership in England at a 30-year low, official figures show’, Guardian (2 March 2017)
26 Patrick Collinson, ‘One in three UK millennials will never own a home – report’, Guardian (17 April 2018)
27 Ibid.
28 Patrick Collinson, ‘Nearly half of tenants who make complaint face “revenge eviction”’, Guardian (24 August 2018); Simon Goodley, ‘Tenants in England not being protected from revenge evictions, study finds’, Guardian (18 March 2019)
29 Joel Golby, ‘London Rental Opportunity Of The Week’, VICE (2015–19)
30 Savage, ‘Millennial housing crisis engulfs Britain’; Simon Usbourne, ‘Shoebox Britain: how shrinking homes are affecting our health and happiness’, Guardian (10 October 2018); Robert Booth, ‘Bottom of the housing ladder: “I feel like a squatter in my home”’, Guardian (28 January 2018)
31 Anna Tims, ‘The lettings club where tenants are fined £90 for leaving dirty dishes’, Guardian (14 May 2018)
32 The PAH Green Book
33 Anna Minton, Big Capital: Who Is London For? (Penguin, 2017), p. 111
34 For more on the Wards Corner redevelopment controversy, see Anoosh Chakelian, ‘How a Latin American market became the battleground for Corbynism’s soul’, New Statesman (20 February 2019) and a series of excellent articles on the subject available at the Novara Media website. Details of the campaign against Grainger PLC’s proposals can be found at: http://savelatinvillage.org.uk/
35 Robert Booth, ‘Bloated London property prices fuelling exodus from capital’, Guardian (24 July 2017)
36 Kate Hardy and Tom Gillespie, ‘London’s exodus offers a stark warning to other UK cities: your culture is at risk’, Guardian (4 August 2017); Saskia Sassen, ‘Who owns our cities – and why this urban takeover should concern us all’, Guardian (24 November 2015)
37 Jack Shenker, ‘Revealed: the insidious creep of pseudo-public space in London’, Guardian (24 July 2017)
38 Aamna Mohdin and Harriet Grant, ‘“Why can’t they come and play?”: housing segregation in London’, Guardian (26 March 2019)
39 Oliver Wainwright, ‘The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities’, Guardian (17 September 2014)
40 Jonathan Prynn, ‘Revealed: Britain’s most expensive street … but prices have slumped to a mere £35m’, Evening Standard (27 September 2018)
41 Rupert Neate, ‘Anger over glut of “posh ghost towers” planned for London’, Guardian (4 February 2018)
42 William Eichler, ‘London council budgets slashed 17% over last decade’, Transport Network (13 May 2019); ‘Have the poorest councils had the biggest cuts?’, BBC (23 April 2019)
43 Martin Williams, ‘Almost one in five MPs are landlords’, Channel 4 News (21 July 2017); Robert Booth and Frankie Crossley, ‘Nearly 100 London councillors have links to property industry’, Guardian (29 April 2018)
44 Jonathan Prynn, ‘Council may “land-grab” in row with company behind £12bn Earls Court scheme’, Evening Standard (20 February 2019); Dave Hill, ‘Earls Court: Sadiq Khan “patience is wearing thin” with Capco over stalled scheme’, On London (20 February 2019)
45 A photo of this can be found on p. 10 of Against the Odds: Walterton and Elgin from Campaign to Control (Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, 1998), which also contains many more details about the community’s long struggle with Westminster Council.
46 ‘Senior Management Restructure Update Report’, Lambeth Council (21 March 2019), referenced in a tweet by People’s Audit (@PeoplesAudit) on 13 March 2019: https://twitter.com/PeoplesAudit/status/1105912859480023041
47 In an irony lost on no one except perhaps the developers, the gallery on Lower Marsh is now being demolished to make way for a new sixty-six-room hotel; other businesses that have been shut down to clear the site for construction include an independent bookstore, a knitting club, a branch of the gay sauna Chariots, and an independent fashion boutique named What the Butler Wore whose owners left behind a handwritten sign in the window reading: ‘Enjoy dunking your gourmet sausages in your flat white.’ At the time of writing, two other large hotels were also under construction on the same street. For more details see James Hatt, ‘Another hotel for Lower Marsh gets Lambeth approval’, London SE1 (5 April 2017)
48 Jasper Delamothe, Hell’s Waiting Room: Aylesbury Estate (artwork displayed as part of the ‘A Rock and a Hard Place’ exhibition at the V3 Gallery in 2017)