[Ben Reeve Lewis is an anarchist…...]
I was treated this week to an insight into two ends of the London property spectrum.
The sublime to the ridiculous
First off was the news that the former home of Tom Cruise and Rihanna is on sale for £35 million.
A gobsmacking affair of a rooftop apartment with its own gym and medical treatment room.
I quite fancy the latter, given that I can’t seem to get an appointment with my GP inside of 3 weeks, unless my leg is hanging off, in which case the receptionists advise me to go to the local walk-in clinic, or in my case ‘drag yourself in clinic’.
Then my New Yorker mate Ruby Soho sent me a link to a property advertised on Rightmove where £700 a month will get you a mattress And a set of walls but with no room for anything else, including walking around said mattress.
The accompanying article accurately pointing out that where the agents list its location as being at the increasingly aspirational Elephant & Castle, the postcode is in fact SE5, which is Camberwell.
Two miles away from the Elephant, down the bottom of the Walworth Rd and worryingly close to Del Boy’s beloved Peckham, a town that rhymes ironically with Smith & Wesson.
Isnt there a law on the ways that estate agents describe a property?
London problems
Regular readers will know that I am becoming increasingly tired of London. All I see in my day job is overcrowding, properties being rented out that you wouldn’t expect a cockroach to live in with any dignity, a growth in crime, cannabis farms, brothels and dangerously hotwired electricity.
To add more straws to my camel’s back I read this week that Andrew Boff is to run as Conservative London mayoral candidate, a man with all the charm of an SS Obergruppenfuhrer and a single reason all of its own to relocate if he actually gets in.
A couple of years back I was invited to take part in an ‘Expert’s panel’ at City Hall, when the London Assembly were putting together their plans for a London rental sector report.
Lettings Focus’s David Lawrenson was also on the panel. After 3 hours of grilling by the entire London Assembly we retired to the pub for mutual support and a couple of Paracetamol.
Boff gave me a particularly hard time I recall and I responded in my typical reactionary fashion when someone reminds me of a humourless headmaster, by becoming a naughty school child and winding him up with childish sarcastic comments.
If I’d had the opportunity I would have drawn a knob on the blackboard when his back was turned.
Boff for London Mayor?
Obergruppenfuhrer Boff’s stated election plan is to actually extend London’s borders to make it an even bigger place to be a mayor of. He says:
“London’s current borders were drawn over 60 years ago and are clearly no longer fit for purpose, – As Mayor, I would call for an immediate review of the boundary of the Greater London so that the capital has complete control over its own destiny”.
Going on to say:
“Then we will annexe the Sudetenland and invade Poland”
Sorry that was someone else, I’m getting carried away, as is Andrew.
However, over on Red Brick, Steve Hilditch has been producing a handy guide to the various mayoral candidates and their housing policies most of whom I’m ashamed to say I haven’t heard of.
Lammy for London Mayor?
Of Tottenham MP David Lammy Steve says:
“Lammy has encouraged a focus on housing policy which is to be welcomed.”
Fair enough but he also acknowledges:
“Like all the candidates, in spelling out his views Lammy does not say much about which ideas can be delivered within the mayor’s current powers and what would require new legislation or additional devolved powers”
Back last winter at a Generation Rent event I was treated to a presentation from Lammy and I was struck by his tendency to grandstand, huff n puff, but then I think that of all politicians who I have ever seen in the flesh. I suppose you have to be a self important twonk to do the job.
Part of the JD as it were.
Diane Abbott for London Mayor?
I stopped reading Red Brick setting out of stalls for Dianne Abbot when I got to the line:
“She risks following Tony Benn into the limited ranks of left-wing national treasures”
Are we talking about the same Dianne Abbot??????
A woman who in 2003 described colleagues sending their children to selective schools as “Indefensible and intellectually incoherent” but who was happy to send her kid to one shortly afterwards.
A woman who a year later was found by the Committee on Standards and Privileges to have failed to declare £17,300 earnings.
Hardly a paragon of left wing virtue and if anything with even less charm than Andrew Boff……and that’s going some.
Gareth Thomas for London Mayor?
Gareth Thomas appeals to me on the housing policy front for a couple of reasons.
He is also chair of the Cooperative Party (promising between 20,000 and 200,000 new homes to be built in cooperatives) and makes a case for the specific problems of London (chronic shortage of affordable housing) to have a specific set of London solutions.
I spent 5 of the happiest years of my life living in Sanford Housing Coop in Deptford where I was the membership officer and retain a great fondness for the self governing cooperative ethos.
Control of people’s housing by the people themselves.
Ben comes out of the cupboard – to reveal …
Which finally reveals my politics on housing which I’m sure many readers will have always suspected were in the Socialist camp but which in actual fact are further off the left wing scale and into the Anarchist movement as espoused by a man who in my book was a real natural treasure unlike Diane Abbot, Mr Colin Ward ladies and gentlemen who once said:
“The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.”
And that’s me folks.
You all thought I was Loony Left but I’m further out than that, particularly when it comes to housing and in an interesting piece of serendipity in 1973 Colin Ward wrote “Streetwork – the exploding school” a treatise about the environment as a source of non school room based learning, with co-author Anthony Fyson.
The producer on the Channel 5 series I’m currently featuring in ‘Nightmare tenants, slum landlords’ is Lucy Fyson, Anthony’s niece and now a good mate of mine with similar political views.
Small world huh?
What made me smile this week
I woke up early on Sunday morning and clicked on a link my mate Phil had sent me to a website that had me choking to death on my tea.
I laughed so loud I woke Frazzy up. A collection of the worst examples of crap taxidermy you will ever see.
Just looked at it again and started laughing anew.
We decided if we ever win the lottery we will buy them all up and create a museum where they can all be in the one place.
See ya next week.