Nicky Gavron: An appreciation

Last autumn, Nicky Gavron, less than a year before her peaceful death at her home last week, aged 82, received a little more of the recognition for her service to London she deserved. A Pink Plaque in her honour, celebrating her as a remarkable woman with close ties to Highgate, was unveiled at the Jackson’s Lane Arts Centre on Archway Road.

It was the perfect location for overdue credit to be given, the place where it all began. Gavron co-founded the arts centre in 1975. At the ceremony, she described having seen a group of teenage boys disrupting a playgroup for under-11s and being inspired to get together with a like-minded locals to provide facilities for older children.

This initiative, not her only community project as a young woman, took place at a time when radical plans for widening the A1 Archway Road were being developed. Gavron, born in 1941, was in her early-thirties at that time and had, since 1967, been married to Bob Gavron, barrister, widower and Labour-sympathising publishing tycoon. His second wife, born Felicia Nicolette Coates, was the daughter of a Jewish Berliner woman who had fled Nazi Germany in 1936, arriving in the safe haven of London aged 17.

The future Nicky Gavron grew up in Worcester, where her family took in lodgers from the local Metal Box factory. She had moved to London to study history of art and architecture at the Courtauld Institute and gone on to become a lecturer at Camberwell School of Art. Now, the erstwhile Ms Coates, already known as Nicky, became involved in political activity for the first time.

By then, she had four children in her care: two boys from Bob’s previous marriage, Simon and Jeremy, and the two daughters they had had together, Jessica and Sarah. The plans for Archway Road reached a point where a three-lane dual carriageway became a possibility, together with a flyover at Shepherd’s Hill, the demolition of more than 100 homes and the felling of part of Highgate Wood. “It was in the days when everyone thought road widening was the answer,” Gavron would remember. “But the penny dropped for me that it was part of the problem.”

After a long, gruelling and sometimes ugly war of attrition the “motorway” plan was dropped. The tide against it was strengthened from 1981, when Labour won control of the Greater London Council (GLC). Its leadership was assumed by Ken Livingstone following a controversial post-victory Labour group internal election. The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, not an admirer of “Red Ken”, completed the abolition of the GLC in 1986, an act Gavron had campaigned against and regarded as stupid and vindictive. “I set out in my mind to do everything to see London government restored,” she would later say.

That May, Gavron, got elected to Haringey Council, topping the poll in Archway ward where Conservatives had previously held all the seats. She repeated the feat four years later, she and Bob having divorced in the meantime, with Tories finishing second and third – a clear sign of a personal vote giving her an edge. She did it again in 1994, and was re-elected once more in 1998, by which time Labour was back in power nationally under Tony Blair and the restoration of a Londonwide tier of government was on its way in the form of the Greater London Authority (GLA).

During her time at Haringey Gavron chaired the planning committee, and became friends with Tony Cumberbirch, a former GLC planning officer who had moved on to the north London borough. It was the start of a long-term close collaboration in pursuit of common goals, including, from the start, maintaining and evolving a strategic planning approach for the capital and the wider south east.

Gavron became a member and, from 1994, chaired the London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC), a body created by Parliament that brought together borough representatives from different political parties and planning experts, with input from London business and links with authorities neighbouring Greater London.

Her friend Richard Derecki, a former Number 10 and GLA staff member with whom she had been sorting out her extensive archive in her later years, describes the LPAC as compiling “detailed action plans for how London could emerge from the deindustrialisation of the 1970s and 1980s to take its place on the global stage as the pre-eminent World City”. Gavron, he says, was particularly proud of its work on affordable housing, transport and the built environment. Already, she had a keen appreciation of how all these elements and more needed to complement each other and work together if a better city was to emerge on the ground. Some attribute the very term “joined-up thinking” to her.

In 2000, she became one of the first intake of members of the London Assembly (AMs), the elected body that scrutinises the London Mayor, winning the Enfield & Haringey constituency seat. Livingstone had been elected Mayor, once again securing the top job in London government by unorthodox means, running and winning as an Independent having been thwarted in his bid to become Labour’s candidate.

Required to appoint a statutory deputy from among the 25 AMs, he chose Gavron, who he had known since the Archway Road campaign. In his memoirs, Livingstone says she possessed “the enthusiasm and imagination” he was looking for and was “full of ideas” for London’s future.

The LPAC’s final report and its personnel formed the bedrock of planning policy at the nascent GLA, as the new institution found its feet. Derecki considering the LPAC to have “laid the groundwork” for much that happened under Livingstone, including his defining early innovation, the introduction of the Congestion Charge in 2003.

Soon, Gavron, was taking the lead with drawing up City Hall’s first ever spatial development strategy document, better known as The London Plan, a clear, self-descriptive title Cumberbirch says he and Gavron persuaded Livingstone to adopt. The finished document was both practical, conforming, as it had to, with national planning policy, yet also bold in its breadth and depth of vision. In Labour terms, Gavron was a moderate with radical ideas.

She was often a staunch ally of the Independent Mayor, praising his “good sense and steadiness of purpose” in an article for Labour journal Tribune in May 2002. There were, though, ups and downs. Like Livingstone, Gavron was clever, determined and extremely hard-working, and although, unlike him, never abrasive, she was not afraid to argue with him. “They worked well together, but she often infuriated Ken,” says Cumberbirch. The feeling could be mutual. For example, Gavron disagreed with the Mayor’s doomed attempt to use the courts to block the Blair government’s public-private partnership approach to funding London Underground upgrades.

There were other relationship complications. Later in 2002, with Livingstone still serving a five-year ban from Labour, Gavron was selected as her party’s candidate for the May 2004 City Hall race, becoming her boss’s rival for his job. According to Livingstone’s memoirs, she had been encouraged to seek the nomination by another senior member of his team in the hope that she would defeat another contender to be Labour’s candidate, the London MP Tony Banks, who was thought to pose a bigger threat.

Then, in June 2003, Livingstone replaced Gavron as his statutory deputy. He had originally intended to rotate the role between the different party groups on a yearly basis, but that hadn’t worked out. And when after three years he gave her job to the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, Gavron publicly accused him of doing so only to court the second preferences votes of Green supporters (note that the Evening Standard article reporting this has been archived with the wrong date).

Whatever the background machinations, it seems that Gavron concluded that the all-round best outcome would be Livingstone, not her, running for Labour in 2004, clearing the path for him to clinch a second term. Quoted in Andrew Hosken’s fine 2008 biography of Livingstone, she revealed that in November 2003 she had, unknown to the Mayor, been to see Blair to argue that Livingstone should be readmitted to Labour. Livingstone, by then working with the Blair government to bid for the 2012 Olympics – something Gavron, unlike the Greens, supported – was let back into the fold soon afterwards. With Gavron as his running mate, he went on to win the mayoralty again and gave Gavron, re-elected to the Assembly as a Londonwide AM, her old job back.

Livingstone’s second term brought further tricky situations for Gavron. His difficult relationship with Jewish London, ranging from avoidably fractious to recklessly offensive, placed her in unenviable positions. Among the flood of tributes paid to her since her death, that of Andrew Gilbert, a stalwart of the Jewish Labour Movement and the London Jewish Forum, stands out. “During the Ken years, she was often the one to whom we turned,” he wrote.

In 2008, Livingstone was deprived of a third mayoral term by Boris Johnson, but Gavron, although defeated in the Barnet & Camden constituency, retained a Londonwide seat on the Assembly, as she did in 2012, when Johnson won again, and in 2016, when Sadiq Khan claimed his first mayoral triumph. After learning of her death, the current Mayor described her as “not just a kind and generous friend, but also a teacher and a mentor,” praised her commitment to tackling climate change, and rightly credited her with having “pioneered many of the policies that have led London to be the world leader it is today”.

Nicky Gavron was exceptional in many ways – a mould-breaker, a bridge-builder, a forward-thinker and, in Cumberbirch’s words, “much more interested in influence than power”. She was a woman in a working environment where men predominated. Her wide range of interests included psychotherapy, which she had trained in and, for a while, considered pursuing as a career. This helped to make her a good listener and skilled at bringing different interest groups together – a valuable asset when the power to convene is among the greatest a Mayor of London. She introduced Livingstone to Richards Rogers, who became effectively his city architect.

Cumberbirch recalls her chairing a meeting at which public and private sector interests were represented, a gathering she introduced as one of “the great and good”. Cheekily invited to define which of those categories she belonging in, she replied: “I am the ‘and’.” She was a natural unifier, her voice kind and feathery, her style in argument, gently insistent. Her manner was light, but she was never to be taken lightly.

She had tremendous energy. Even before she became Livingstone’s deputy she seemed to be involved in everything, from the Commission for Integrated Transport to the London Arts Board, once attracting the snarky attention of the Guardian, which dubbed her the Quango Queen and had a dig about her personal wealth. Her second term accomplishments as deputy Mayor included helping to set up the C-40 Cities group, the global network of nearly 100 city Mayors that works to address the climate crisis and which Khan currently chairs.

Going back, a friend remembers her championing a transport concept she dubbed “orbirail” and persisting in promoting it, even to the point where some rolled their eyes. But when the London Overground took shape from 2007, providing high quality rail travel between suburban stations, thereby helping the city become more “polycentric” – another Gavron goal – the idea didn’t seem marginal any more.

While Johnson was Mayor, Gavron remained influential, bringing her interlocking knowledge and experience of housing, regeneration, planning and the environment to Assembly committee work. As recently as last year she was vice-chair of the London Rewilding Taskforce. Yet for all her huge contribution to London government, she was never included on a UK honours list – perhaps because, by all accounts, such things never much interested her.

Recognition has come instead from colleagues and peers. Prior to the Pink Plaque, in November 2022, she received an award from New London Architecture, which named her its New Londoner of the Year – not because she was new to London, but because of the part she had played in renewing it.

In her acceptance speech, Gavron said that her mother had been chosen to dance as part of a troupe of girls in front of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. That was before it was discovered that she was Jewish, after which “her whole life changed”, causing her to seek refuge in the capital. Gavron added that her mother had instilled in her that London had been her place of escape, and she described how, after moving to the city herself, she never wanted to leave. Harking back to London 2012, she praised the capital as “the world in one city” but warned that, although “we are still open” we would have to fight to keep it so.

Tributes to her have been generous and have come from many quarters. Conservative AM Andrew Boff, who currently also chairs the Assembly, was full of admiration, describing her as “strong enough to fight for what she believed in and brave enough to change her mind when the evidence demanded it”.

Liberal Democrat Caroline Pidgeon, another long-time fellow Assembly member, recalled “a wonderful chat” with her only a month before her death, “reminiscing about City Hall and our work together”. Sian Berry, an MP since 4 July, but previously a prominent Green Party AM, said “she knew more than anyone about planning and was always so kind to everyone,” adding that she was also “a titan of Highgate community action”.

Labour colleague Anne Clarke, AM for Barnet & Camden, described her as “an excellent friend, storyteller and passionate campaigner”. Assembly Labour group leader Len Duvall said she had “devoted her life to public service in London”. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and a former AM, praised her as “a stalwart of London and Haringey politics” and as “a life force at City Hall”. And another former London AM colleague, Tom Copley, now Mayor Khan’s Deputy Mayor for Housing, has provided these thoughts:

“Nicky is someone who has helped shape the London we know today, not least as one of the architects of the first London Plan. Why, for example, must new housing developments in London include children’s play space? That’s Nicky.

While many politicians yearn to make the leap into national politics, Nicky understood very clearly the value and power of devolved pan-London government, and because of this she always wanted to be at the heart of City Hall. But she also had global reach and influence, respected around the world for her work on urban planning, climate change and environmental policy.

Nicky had a formidable combination of qualities, starting with the values that drove her which were shaped by her own experiences. When she wanted to change something, she’d throw everything at it, and she always had a forensic command of the policy detail. She was charming, kind, thoughtful and took a keen interest in other people. Her legacy can be seen throughout our capital city, in our policies and in our built environment. But above all, Nicky was a friend and a mentor and I will miss her terribly.”

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After she left the London Assembly, I asked Nicky if she would like to do an in-depth interview with me about her time at City Hall. I told her, partly inspired by Tom Copley’s admiration for her good works, that all her knowledge and experience ought to be more widely shared. She didn’t turn me down, but explained that she was very, very busy with all sorts of other things, including writing a book with Richard Derecki about the LPAC years, and could I ask her again in a few months’ time?

I never managed to make that date. But I continued to bump into her at conferences and events. Her eyesight had been failing for some years, and its deterioration had reached a stage where it was difficult for her to read emails or engage through virtual forums. Nothing, though, stopped her from taking part. Last December, by then quite unable to see, she attended the On London Christmas Party and End of Year Review, making her way to and from the venue on the Olympic Park all on her own.

I last saw her on 1 August at a social gathering in Soho, attended by an array of luminaries from the world of London politics, planning and development. When she arrived with her daughter Sarah she looked terribly frail, and when we sat side-by-side to talk her voice was faint. But having mentioned, almost in passing, one or two new recent ailments, she went on to convey, with characteristic confiding earnestness, her considered views about Angela Rayner’s planning reform proposals and a particular dimension she feared they lacked.

Later, as I left, I found her sitting in a chair next to the restaurant entrance, waiting while Sarah located a black cab. She couldn’t see London life passing by outside, but she could hear and no doubt feel it. It is easy and rather nice to imagine that she filled in the time thinking about how the pavements might be made more hospitable, or the streetscape greened, or the road management improved. What I now know for sure is that it was our last goodbye. A lot of people are going to miss her.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. This piece was updated with a few extra facts and links on 4 September 2024.