For a Better Archway

Kate Calvert of the Better Archway Forum explains what they are doing to improve their community.

The Better Archway Forum is a community group started in 2006 in response to a plan to rebuild Archway, funded by a large supermarket.

The masterplanners on the job were definitely not the A team, and they came from a company where at best serried ranks of clerk-style architects produce off the shelf big bang plans to please developers and planning officers.

Developers involved in this kind of project want to go big to maximise profit. Officers who facilitate them revel in the power to make or break a scheme. In practice, the big boys play them (and some elected representatives) like a bunch of violins. The resulting plans for Archway were predictably dreadful.

The impact of leaving planning to people like this is all too evident in Archway. Rows of sound and attractive Victorian housing were demolished to make way for badly planned housing estates. Almshouses and their gardens were flattened to make way for a tiddly bit of dual carriageway. And Transport for London built Archway Tower and promptly handed the lease to private owners who rent it back to government departments. The public loses out every possible way.

Meanwhile, round the back a couple of ‘60s office blocks fulfilled the ambitions of some other architect to feel clever, with obscure entrances and a shopping precinct that was derelict before it needed a new coat of paint.

So, back in the present and faced with the danger of a supermarket we got active and ran seven community planning events. A member with professional experience in them organised focus groups, including with the hard to reach, and we sought expert help from local architects via RIBA. We got people’s email addresses and started telling them what was going on.

After a while the consultants realised that Archway was not the pushover they had expected given its trashed appearance. Some residents might have been bought off with promises of a new leisure centre, but we were able to keep them better informed. We had a meeting with Tesco and they were admirably straight, saying a new leisure centre costs £7m and the most they would contribute would be £1.5m. They’d love to get rid of the existing one though, and build on the site.

At a public meeting the then head of planning at Islington claimed that at 30,000sq feet the planned new supermarket would be no larger than the existing Co-op. The following morning we rang the Co-op to check. The manager laughed. His shop is 3,000sq feet, 7,000 including all back room space. We pointed out to the councillors that their lead officer seemed to have made a curious error.

And we revealed that despite promises from both officers and masterplanners to remove the Archway Tower, there was absolutely no intention for this to happen because it would be too expensive (£10m to buy, £10m to demolish, and what do you build on the site to cover those costs and still turn a profit?)

We pointed out that the biggest damage to Archway is not the buildings, it’s the wrecked public space. The road layout is like a giant delta which has to be negotiated by anyone on foot. And the flow of traffic, like water in a river, erodes everything around it. We need to force the traffic back into a single, traditional two-way channel, and improve life in the rest of the open space.

As of January 2012 plans are taking shape for doing that, recreating the public space in the centre of Archway.

And we have at least technically won the argument about avoiding big bang development and facilitating ‘organic and incremental’ improvement. There is grant funding for improving the shops in the town centre, and making a more humanscale place to live.

It took a long time, but eventually the plan for Archway stated that no one retail unit could dominate, so ruling out a supermarket. However, a ‘Retail Study’ for Islington, produced at the cost of thousands by estate agents specialising in selling space to chain stores, and coming up with the most ridiculous set of ‘results’. They claim for example that the residents of Crouch End don’t shop in their own M&S or even the large one on Holloway Road but travel all the way to the Angel branch. And the residents of trendy Hoxton travel all the way to Archway for clothes shopping – outlets one secondhand shop and one selling workwear and school outfits. They ignored the 50% of the borough’s shops which are independently owned, skewed the calculations on demand by minimising are defined as ‘retail’ and concluded that there is ‘demand’ for several large supermarkets. This document is still attached to the Islington Core Strategy.

And of course, the vultures still circle. Tesco made it clear at our meeting that need is not a criterion for them when seeking sites for new supermarkets. They just want to take market share from other operators and are willing to operate at a loss until they have got that. (Of course, given this approach, it’s more than likely that one of the big supermarkets is going to go bust pretty soon, but that’s another story.)

The major landholder behind the tube station at the latest planning hearing was making a bid to be permitted to build pretty much anything on their site – supermarket, hotel, housing – anything but the office block which it seems they have deliberately emptied in order to claim after 2 years that there was no demand for it.

And the latest draft policy documents from Islington suggest that the Archway university campus should be designated as secondary retail frontage (?!) The only explanation is that someone somewhere is planning to put a supermarket  there instead of on the central site – actively damaging the existing retail.

Meanwhile, although some officers are expressing their doubts, there is of course the Neighbourhood Plan scheme which offers some very interesting opportunities for shaping Archway in a more positive way – protecting greenery such as the fine row of trees in Macdonald Road, ensuring that community centres are not sold off, that housing is well designed and so on.

To adapt the old phrase, the price of a decent place to live is eternal checking of planning applications.