ABSTRACT
The swimming pool scheme is nothing more than the application of this principle. This is an interesting inversion of the politics that built Coin Street. The aim of the original GLC policy was to take a very expensive piece of real estate and to destroy its market value, thus creating the conditions under which it could be developed by local people for social housing, workspace and a park. The modern-day Coin Street, by contrast, is exploiting the market value of the site to act as Robin Hood. What would the original Coin Street Community Builders have thought of this? Well it is easy enough to ask them because many are still involved. Their philosophy, as Iain Tuckett explains above, is to play the system to the benefit of local people. Which brings us back to the parts of that early history that do not tend to form part of the good practice case studies. Back in 1981 there was a stormy meeting of the Bermondsey Labour Party at which the long-term Labour council leader John O’Grady was deselected as a candidate for his own seat. He complained of a takeover by the ‘far left’ at a time when nationally there was concern about the Militant Tendency’s entryist tactics in the Labour Party. The local GLC councillor, George Nicholson, countered that the local party had become moribund and all they had done was to introduce new members, who were more radical in their outlook (this all sounds very familiar in 2015 with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader). In May that year the Labour Party won the GLC elections and within 24 hours the moderate Labour leader Andrew McIntosh was replaced by Ken Livingstone in what parts of the press called a ‘Marxist takeover of London’. By 1983 George Nicholson had risen to become chair of the planning committee that would designate Coin Street as a Community Area and agree the deal to sell the land to the group. He was also a founder director of the Coin Street Community Builders and remains on the board today. This, of course, is democracy at work: a local community faced with the prospect of being pushed out of its own neighbourhood by commercial developers, using the democratic process to put its own people in positions of power and thereby securing the decision that it wanted. Today it would be called ‘localism’. It is, however, impossible to imagine any community doing today what Coin Street did in the early 1980s. There are many inspiring community-led developments across the UK but none that have carved out a territory in the face of such commercial pressures. Today these commercial pressures have swept over Coin Street and have it surrounded. But the Coin Street Community Builders have created a structure that cannot be undermined or taken over and hace thereby secured their community in perpetuity.
