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Camden New Journal - by PAUL KEILTHY
Published: 20 September 2007

Ken Livingstone

Lobby groups unite to save British Library land

Mayor Ken rules out intervention on sale of Brill Place property

A COALITION of citizens and community groups formed this week to fight the government’s sale of publicly-owned land behind the British Library in Somers Town and demand social housing.
Somers Town People’s Forum founder Dave Hoefling called on “everybody from any political party or none to pull together to campaign for the land to be used for local people” in the face of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s policy of selling the site to the highest bidder at open market.
He said: “The sale of the library land is going to take another part of Somers Town away – another case of us being promised everything and ending up with nothing.
“Over many years things have been built in Somers Town that have been no help to the local community, and this will become another lump of land like the railway lands, where there were almost no houses built.”
Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson, Somers Town councillor Roger Robinson and local tenants’ association leaders, Town Hall union Unison, Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell and the Camden Labour Party have all called for the government to either halt the sale or to sell only to a developer which would guarantee social housing and community facilities on the site.
However, London Mayor Ken Livingstone ruled out intervening in the sale of the 3.6 acre plot on Tuesday despite the launch of his new housing strategy for London demanding 50,000 new homes on brownfield sites.
Speaking alongside Housing Minister Yvette Cooper at the City Hall launch of his scheme to see 30,500 new homes built every year – half of which would be ‘affordable’ – until 2016, Mr Livingstone said: “This strategy is a blueprint for tackling London’s unique housing challenges. We will build more affordable homes because that is what London is crying out for.”
The draft strategy includes a mayoral pledge to ‘intervene to make more effective use of land already in public ownership’.
But when the New Journal asked whether he would lobby government for the ability to build houses on the vacant brownfield land behind the British Library, Mr Livingstone said that it should be developed as a mixed commercial site and not dedicated to housing.
He said: “I need to immediately confess that I did look at that site as a potential convention centre for London – and not every site is going to be housing.
“Part of the problem in the past was that often, vast swathes of London were fairly mono-tenure housing. We want mix, we want diversity.
“We’ve got to have work for people to go to, commercial, and everything else so that that area comes alive. I very much hope that the bulk of what goes on that site will be housing but you wouldn’t want it solely to be housing.”
Ms Cooper – who like Mr Livingstone has refused previous written New Journal requests for interviews on the subject of the British Library land, known locally as Brill Place – did not comment.
The campaign to ensure that community facilities and housing are built on Brill Place began when the New Journal revealed the DCMS’s plans to sell the land in April.
The DCMS has pressed ahead with the sale, which is expected to net around £45m.

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