If I were them, I too would strike an optimistic note. Representatives of the Wards Corner community benefit society (CBS), the latest entity bearing hopes that a strengthened Seven Sisters indoor market can emerge from the remnants of the old have made public their hopes of progress.
Their cautiously upbeat tone is logical for two reasons: one, because earlier this month Places for London, the property subsidiary of Transport for London, told Wards Corner CBS that no one else had taken the chance to express an interest in developing its site next to Seven Sisters station; two, because accentuating the positive is usually a better option than sounding down in the mouth when you need to attract other people’s money.
The story so far has been one of high ideals falling flat and being dressed up as a triumph. The original indoor market was formed within the former Ward furniture store at the junction of Seven Sisters Road and Tottenham High Road. It took on a Latin American character as Londoners with roots in that part of the world set up there. To visit what some called the Latin Village to was enter a tiny corner of the capital that had evolved almost literally out of public view, a micro eco-system with potential to grow.
The trouble was, the old Wards store was a dump. In 2004, Haringey Council, which owned a redundant building, Apex House, on the other side of Seven Sisters Road, struck a deal with developer Grainger to redevelop both sites for mixed but largely residential use, and re-provide space for the market traders on the same spot.
The goal was to revitalise a shabby South Tottenham junction. But the Wards store half of the project never happened. Campaigners determined to preserve the old structure and the market as it was devoted themselves to obstructing the plan, mobilising herds of biddable journalists with tales of a plucky ethnic minority fighting back against “gentrification” and “social cleansing”. Legal challenges, underwritten by good-hearted but gullible members of the public, brought delay. The final one was dismissed in October 2019 as “inherently incredible”. Even the then Momentumite council was hacked off.
Then came the pandemic, disrupting everything. Work was underway at the Apex House site, with a plan to accommodate the market traders there until the replacement for the Wards building, complete with a new permanent home for the market, was ready.
But the development sector was hurting and retail habits were changing. In August 2021, Grainger bailed out. The usual idiots proclaimed a “community victory”, as if Covid had been some kind of guerrilla liberation ailment. The reality was that local people were left with an even uglier eyesore than before and, as the full extent of the building’s dangerous decrepitude was uncovered by Transport for London, freeholder of the site, the traders were left with nowhere to trade.
It’s worth imagining what Ward’s Corner might have been like by now had Protest Left conservationism not intervened: the replacement building, designed by top architects Pollard Thomas Edwards, would have been constructed; the Latin Village could have been reborn on exactly the same spot with vastly better facilities, helped by initially discounted rents to help the traders find their feet; mainstream retailers might have moved in alongside them, increasing footfall with the help of abundant public transport; young renters in the flats above could have dropped into the village for morning coffee or evening drinks and meals; a new culture-and-cuisine quarter, comparable to Chinatown, the kosher hub or the curry capital, might now be growing from humble roots.
Instead, we have the same old mess. Visiting earlier to today, there was no less sign of the area’s potential than when I first went there in 2009. A café still does business at the front of the Wards pile, as do money exchange and phone services and vendors of clothing, flooring and fruit and veg, but the interior is sealed off and the wide pavement, with its station entrance, still contains one of the most antisocial cycle lanes in town. Further up the High Road, stretching all the way to Tottenham Green, are more explicitly Latin American enterprises: Martinez butcher’s, the Colombian Café and Pan bakery, and more. The makings of a classic urban cluster are still there. But what are the chances of it buzzing?
The adapted-by-journalists version of the Latin Village story, endlessly re-churned, leaves out the inconvenient bits: the Apex House affordable homes built into the original agreement between Grainger and Haringey; the discounted trader rents, indeed the whole of the effort to accommodate the village, which the council had no legal obligation to make; the appalling condition of the Wards building, which TfL has spent millions making safe; the ill-feeling among the traders themselves and their varied motivations.
And then there is the matter of money. A community benefit society is a form of co-operative which seeks to raise investment from local people, giving them a financial stake in the project it hopes to complete. But transforming the Ward’s building from a salvaged Edwardian wreck into a commercially viable base for an array of activities is going to cost, in the assessment of a TfL source, “tens of millions”. That’s tens of times more than even the most optimistic account of what could be raised from a CBS community share issue. And that was three years ago.
The grounds for greater optimism are that Places for London, TfL’s property subsidiary, has proposed forming a partnership with the Wards Corner CBS and the council to, according to its letter sent earlier this month, look at how the site can be developed “while considering the needs of the local community, the Mayor’s priorities and Transport for London’s requirements”.
This shows why the optimism should be cautious. Places for London exists to help fund TfL, and TfL is not a charity. Places for London would surely think twice before handing out a lease to an enterprise, however virtuous and community-led, that cannot pay its rent. Any fresh scheme for housing on the site would need to keep in mind that Sadiq Khan wants 50 per cent of new homes built on TfL-owned land to meet his definition of “affordable”, which means the rest would have to be expensive enough to subsidise it. How would that be received by scourges of gentrification?
Looked at cynically, Places for London has, for the moment, nowhere else to go if its Seven Sisters asset is ever to generate revenue. It therefore makes sense to co-operate with the CBS and Haringey, which is, of course, the planning authority and backs the CBS model, because at least it means – and demonstrates to the outside world – that the key players are all in the same room.
What it doesn’t do is magic up a fountain of finance. And the Places for London letter is firm on that point. “We are not in a position to commit any specific financial resources to the partnership’s work, though I would expect the partnership to identify where Places for London could helpfully contribute to the future development of the site,” it says.
It is a complicated puzzle made more problematic by years of ideologue opposition. One good sign is that the CBS board, only quite recently formed, contains some practical development experience and is looking to add more. Meanwhile, a long-promised temporary site for the market is still under construction next to the Wards building. It is taking longer than intended to complete, but it is to be hoped that when at last it opens it does well, just as it is to be hoped that the whole of Wards Corner recovers and revives, making the best of its local distinctiveness. It could be, however, that the temporary market will be there for quite some time.
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