The Battle for Tolmers Square (Routledge Revivals) by Wates Nick;

Author:Wates, Nick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1114677
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Cover of Tolmers Village Association constitution.

-7.

Don’t let them do it to us

Student intervention

At the same time as the Claudius attack on the Levy Deal, another movement of protest was growing, which was also to become of key importance to the area. This movement was initiated by students from University College London (UCL), part of London University situated a few hundred yards south of Tolmers across the Euston Road.

In May 1973, while Booker and Gray were preparing the Claudius proposal, five undergraduates embarked on a five-week planning project. Disenchanted with the remoteness of much theoretical academic work these students wanted to be involved in ‘reality’. They wanted to break down the gulf that exists between the universities training professionals, and the people whose lives those professionals would be affecting. Their tutor had read about the conflict over Tolmers Square, and it being only a few hundred yards from the University it seemed a suitable place for a project on the operation of the planning system.

It did not take the students long to discover that although everyone in the Tolmers area knew that some kind of redevelopment was going to take place, no one seemed to know what, when or where. Even more extraordinary, few people considered that it was their right to know, or felt that they could or should do anything about it.

It has to be realised that although the Council and the developers had been discussing the redevelopment of the area for over twelve years, very little information had been available to the public. There had been no participation of any kind, the only source of information for inhabitants being Council Minutes, and the occasional report in a local newspaper. For many people their first news of the development was receiving notification of a CPO or Clearance Order.

This in itself, although depressing, was not unusual. But what was surprising was that the Council appeared to know little about the area, or the people who lived and worked in it. They had no survey information at all, and no studies to suggest what would happen to these people following redevelopment. For them Tolmers was merely a site of a certain acreage with a certain value; the people who lived and worked there were not even statistics.

Horrified by this inhumanity, the students carried out a survey to find out what the area was really like: who lived there, what they thought, and what would happen to them if it was redeveloped. They then produced a report criticising the Council: ‘The decision-makers fail to understand the nature of the area as it is at present, and are unwilling to recognise its value in today’s urban complex. The [comprehensive] redevelopment of Tolmers Square would replace exciting variety with a drab uniformity’ (UCL Survey). They also condemned the Council for failing to find out what the people who lived and worked in the area wanted, and for not encouraging local people to participate in making decisions about the future of the area.

Instead of comprehensive

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.