European Court to consider UK's failure to provide environmental justice

The European Commission has asked the European Court of Justice to consider whether there are adequate legal remedies available to UK citizens challenging environmental injustice.

The European Court of Justice

Since 2005 the UK has been a signatory to the 1998 Aarhus Convention which recognises that protection of the environment is essential to the health and well being of present and future generations. Aarhus requires the UK to ensure that the public have access to information about development proposals which could adversely affect our environment, including cultural sites and buildings, and that the public can participate effectively in decision making and have affordable and fair access to the Courts to obtain adequate and timely remedies.

The huge cost, and the financial risks to individuals, of Court action is one of the main barriers to citizens challenging environmental injustice. As a result wealthy developers are free to adopt hazardous procedures and transform areas of the UK into monocultural natural and built environments so that local character and bio-diversity is lost.

Earthworks, containing radioactive thorium & other toxic waste, in progress on the 2012 Olympic site. An individual was refused legal aid to challenge the authorities methods despite the wider public interests involved.

By adopting a company format OPEN has been able to protect its individual members from the risk of personal liability but, despite several legal challenges on behalf of local communities, the Courts have always refused to place a cap on the legal costs which a developer could claim against OPEN if a legal challenge were to be lost.

In a report about environmental justice in May 2008 Lord Justice Sullivan said "Unless more is done, and the Courts' approach to costs is altered so as to recognise that there is a public interest in securing compliance with environmental law, it is only a matter of time before the UK is taken to task for failing to live up to its obligations under Aarhus".

Happily, with the UK's referral to the European Court of Justice, that time may now have come.

PS Last week the UN ruled that the European Court must stop barring citizens from challenging European Union decisions that affect the environment. The European Union itself, as well as its member states, is subject to the Aarhus Convention.

Under the Cranes

Don't miss this new film shot in Hackney and directed by Emma-Louise Williams. ‘Under the Cranes’ is showing at the Rio on Saturday 30 April at 1.30pm.

The film is a meditation on place as central to our experience of history. Using the script of poet Michael Rosen’s documentary play, the film is intercut with rarely seen archive footage, much of which shows the locality’s commitment to social housing. As we hear from the famous – Shakespeare in Shoreditch, Anna Sewell, Anna Barbauld – alongside a Jamaican builder, a Bangladeshi restaurant owner or the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, we see past and present streets, parks, cemeteries and markets.

‘If you let it, a street will grow,’ says a voice as the film shows ‘layers of lives’, offering a lyrical, painterly defence of the everyday even as it raises questions about the process of ‘regeneration’

While David Cameron claims that ‘multiculturalism has failed’, this film celebrates how ‘the world comes to Hackney’.


In terms of both the visual and the aural, the film heightens the real: the soundscape mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings, while the picture juxtaposes slow, still shots with paintings by East London artists, Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon. Breaking with the linear narrative convention, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and multi-layered. – “past in the present; present in the past.

The films Director, Dalston resident Emma-Louise Williams, had produced and directed numerous radio and television programmes. One theme running throughout her work is how we experience the metropolis. Emma has sought to counter the prevailing attitude to the inner city as a site of failure, ugliness and misdeed, through what she terms a‘socio-poetic of everyday life’.

Planners get hyped in Dalston

You can visit this exhibition City Visions 1910/2010 in Dalston Square from 9th April until 14th May (including Sundays but not Mondays) . It's about 100 years of great planning projects. Apparently Dalston Square is rated as an exciting example of 'regeneration' (Regeneration? Don't they mean replacement? Ed).

Here's a take on another development that's worth a look.


THE DUBAI IN ME - Christian Von Borries
Uploaded by reseaumarseillais. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Let us know what you think - leave a comment.

Shoreditch needs your help to Ditch the Block

OPEN Shoreditch member Jago Action Group is taking up arms against the gross over development of the Huntingdon Estate, the light industrial estate bordered by Bethnal Green Road and Redchurch Street. Developers Londonnewcastle are so passionate about the neighbourhood that they want to bless this low-rise mixed residential quarter with a 25-storey tower block

( Err...surely "to dig themselves out of the large hole in their balance sheet, as a result of taking an option on the site at the height of the property boom." )

ACT NOW - the planners have asked for any objections by 19th April.

You'll find all the key information here .

Click on image to enlarge

Budget bail out for Barratt

George Osborne's budget has provided a boost to property developers who have been struggling to sell because banks have been demanding 25% deposits from homebuyers since the 2008 credit freeze. Under the budgets new FirstBuy scheme first time buyers can pay just 5% deposit and the government, in partnership with developers, lend them the remaining 20%. The FirstBuy scheme is similar to the HomeBuy Direct scheme offered a year ago when Dalston Square Phase 1 was being marketed.

This photo is of Dalston Square Phase 2 - the wraps and scaffolding came off the Dalston Lane end this week

Dalston Square developer, Barratt's Chief Executive Mark Clare, described the Chancellor's budget as "exactly the tonic the housing market needed" . No doubt Barratt's shareholders agreed with him when they saw their share values surge as news of the public subsidy leaked out.

The budget also offers Buy to Let landlords a saving on stamp duty if they buy in bulk - so Barratt's Far East marketing of Dalston Square will get a boost from that too.


A broker, from market analysts Liberum Capital, said it should be helpful. "This is probably not the best way to help the housing market, but it does help to protect jobs among the housebuilders". Yes....and bonuses. Mark Clare earned £5680,000 bonus last year but thousands of Barratt's construction workers were laid off during the credit crunch.

Why the government is offering further public subsidy to property developers and private buyers is a mystery - despite massive public subsidy there is to be no social housing in Dalston Square Phase 2 which is all for private sale.

And we are seeing property developers queuing up to cash in on the budget's "buy now pay later" scheme for disposal of "surplus" publically owned land.

Dalston Square Phase 1 on the left and Phase 2, on the Slab above the station, on the right.

Other concessions to property developers offered in the budget include "streamlining" the planning system. How will this sit with the government's " localism" agenda which it says will give local people more say in the way our environments are developed? We continue to see open and green space, and historic architecture, redeveloped despite local people's campaigns against the loss of bio-diversity and local character. Here's one example and here's another and there are more battles are in the pipeline.

Oi! Over 'ear.

Those wonderful people who produce the sonic experience of Hackney Podcast have now got even more inspired. They are working on using a GPS triggered app for smartphones so that as you wander around Hackney the app triggers an oral and musical soundscape which relates to wherever you happen to be at the time. So how cool is that! It's called Hackney Hear. Watch this to find more about it:

About Hackney Hear from Hackney Hear on Vimeo.

Francesca Panetta, executive producer and editor, has received numerous awards for Hackney Podcast's work including Golds at New York Festivals Radio Program and Promotion Awards and Sony Radio Academy Awards last year. She said of the new project "One of the things that really appeals to me is the democracy of it - the famous will juxtapose with the locals aurally as you walk the streets. It will sound sonically beautiful. There will also be archive so you feel the layers of Hackney as well as drawing on the variety of artists in the borough."

If you know people who can help, with funding or creative contributions, then ask them to email Hackney Podcast [hackneypodcast@googlemail.com]

Get the Dalston to Dalston line to get to the 2012 Olympics

The final stage of the East London Overground Line northern extension, from Dalston Junction to Highbury & Islington, is to open on Monday.

We now have two Dalston stations with lines going to Highbury - the North London (Orbital) Line from Dalston Kingsland station and the East London Line overground extension from Dalston Junction station. So why the luxury of two?

Readers will recall the Secretary of State saying that the new Dalston Transport Interchange (the rail/bus interchange built over Dalston Junction railway cutting) "will be a major transport interchange between the East London Line northern extension, the North London line and London buses, as essential part of transport improvements required for the London Olympics 2012".

But the East London line at Dalston Junction doesn't go to the 2012 Olympic site at Stratford. Nor does it interchange with the North London line, at Dalston Kingsland station, which does. And the one bus which will use The Slab above the Dalston Junction station doesn't go to the Olympic site either - despite the £63million spent on it.

The bus stop on The Slab at Dalston Square which is to be used by just one bus - not the 60 per hour which we were told it was built for.

When we met the London Development Agency (LDA), with OPEN's patron Lord Low, we pointed all this out. We were told by the LDA that it would not be the first Transport Interchange to have been built in the wrong place... but the problem was not insurmountable.

Now those clever people at TfL have solved the problem. People using the East London line can now get the train from Dalston Junction to Highbury, change onto the North London line, and travel back via Dalston Kingsland to get to the 2012 Olympic site at Stratford. Hurrah!

Still, mustn't grumble - the £63million spent on The Slab is only TfL's money wasted, not ours. Isn't it?

Yes - if you believed TfL's Head of Communications. He wrote a letter to the Hackney Gazette, when TfL was promoting the Transport Interchange back in 2006 -"It is currently proposed that TfL will meet the cost of the rail station and the potential bus station".

But sadly it didn't turn out like that.


Massive demolitions took place in Dalston between 2007 and 2010 so that "high revenue generating" developments (private flats and retail) could be built to help fund the £63million cost of The Slab

Hackney paid millions by selling their site to Barratt for a peppercorn to cross-subsidise TfL's Slab, our historic buildings were demolished, and Dalston's environment has been blighted by overbearing towers blocking out the light.


The old 1886 Dalston Circus and 1898 Variety Theatre were demolished to create the development site for Barratt's blocks of private flats.

Further demolitions, of some 20 buildings, were then required to renew the tunnel to extend the East London line to Highbury and Islington

The demolitions have left Dalston, as someone said, looking like an old friend who has had her teeth knocked out. Hit by a runaway train more like.


This is the view north from Dalston Lane showing the demolition sites on Kingsland Road above the renewed tunnel to Highbury.

(PS - When will Tfl announce that 60 hopper buses an hour will be ferrying people from The Slab to Stratford for the three week 2012 Olympic event? And that's why the £63millon Slab was built. And why old Dalston was demolished and replaced with tower blocks to help pay for it. Ed.).