Town & Country Planning, September 2011
I can look out of my bedroom window, across the allotments, and gaze whenever I want to at the forlorn towers of Croydon, the result of a couple of generations of yearning by the council to be regarded as London’s third ‘city’.
They are not a very pretty sight, and I have been gazing at them particularly recently because of the controversy about plans for the so-called Menta Tower, the 55-storey development of luxury flats which Croydon Borough Council has just given planning permission for, along with a hotel and offices at the entrance to East Croydon Station.
Developers Menta, and architects Make, trotted out the usual old stuff that is familiar to anyone following these issues: the phrase ‘vertical community’ smacks particularly of 1966. The other predictable but horribly familiar phrase was “internationally recognised landmark building”. Like all the other drab monuments to misplaced optimism.
So I do have to declare an interest here. I will have to look at this internationally recognised landmark building myself. But what I find really extraordinary about this is the continuing faith, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that building another landmark building and 6,000 square metres of extra office space, will jump-start East Croydon’s struggling economy.
Wander around the area near the station and it is hard to find any office block, however modern, that hasn’t got a To Let sign up. It isn’t just the recession – brought on, you may remember, by ridiculously inflated property lending – it is that people just don’t really need offices any more.
The days of those banks of desks that we remember from The Apartment, not to mention the ‘key to the executive washroom’, have now gone. People can work from home and often do.
Judging by the half-built skeletons of other luxury towers in the same area, they also don’t want luxury flats – at least not in East Croydon right now.
Of course, there are so many other local authorities which suffer from extreme versions of Concrete Croydon Disease (definition: the destructive commitment to local economic orthodoxy from some generations back), but Croydon is probably among the first.
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual
It was Croydon which first diverted their medieval high street along an urban motorway, with the Whitgift Centre (1968) on one side – the biggest covered shopping centre in London until Westfield arrived – and the blandest possible office developments clustered around it.
Croydon was in the forefront of the kind of retail-led regeneration that has sucked so many local economies dry. There should be a blue plaque marking the very first clone town in the UK.
Let’s give my borough the benefit of the doubt. They had the imagination to call in architect Will Alsop to advise them about how to revitalise the centre, starting with the dismal six-lane Wellesley Road.
Does all this imply that Croydon’s councillors should somehow be prevented from developing more empty office space around East Croydon Station? Not in a column dedicated to localism.
Because what upsets me about all this is that it is evidence of how little faith so many local authorities have in their own ability to regenerate their economies.
This is now critically important, because it coincides with a massive great hole where a local economic policy ought to be at the Treasury.
Central government regards economics as their remit, but they don’t have the levers that can make a difference locally. Local government has some of the levers available but still believe they are dependent on the centre to shift their economic fortunes.
There is also a continuing faith in big infrastructure investment, some of which will still be available, but not on the scale we have become used to, and there is anyway very little evidence of their impact on small enterprise and real regeneration.
Yet, without the will to revitalise local economies – and some kind of road map for doing so – localism is really meaningless. But there are signs that a new economic agenda is emerging, borrowed often from the most successful cities in Europe and North and South America, which can effectively allow cities to take back control of their economic destiny – largely about defending local diversity and distinctiveness as a way of keeping local money circulating locally, plugging the money leaks with new enterprises.
We have known for decades that reviving city neighbourhoods is about liveability rather than bland concrete. It means resisting the blandishments of “internationally recognised landmark buildings”. It is about culture, bustle, markets, green space, attention to detail.
Is Croydon aware of how money flows through they area? Are they planning new artists colonies as they have managed so successfully in Brooklyn? Are they prioritising the homegrown retailing base where the money stays put as they are in San Diego?
Almost certainly not, but let’s look on the bright side. Maybe Menta Tower is the last gasp of Croydon Disease, the darkest part of the night before the dawn.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His report Ten Steps to Save the Cities, on which this column is based, is available at www.neweconomics.org.