Total: 8 posts
Posts in: Housing
The impact of the housing crisis in Southall and Ealing.
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Housing
Ethics
Exposes
The Man in the Middle
Yes, yes, yes, he’s on the right in this picture!
On 6 November 2023, Berkeley Group’s Southall development — The Green Quarter, rising on the site of the former Southall gasworks — handed a £2,500 cheque to the Western Road Urban Garden Project.
The cheque was branded with Berkeley’s logo and The Green Quarter’s name.
It was presented in the garden and photographed for Berkeley’s website, where the story was published on 23 January 2024.
The image is striking …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
"You Never Forget the Smell of Damp": Peter Mason's Housing Record in His Own Words
Peter Mason has spoken often and publicly about his childhood. Growing up in a pre-fabricated concrete panel council house. The smell of damp. Picking mould from window caulking. His family spending three months in temporary accommodation.
These are not details dragged out of private correspondence — they are things he chose to put on the public record, repeatedly, over several years, as the basis for his claim to understand what bad housing does to people.
They are also, now, the most direct …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Housing
Section 106 money: where did Southall’s “developer tax” go?
With council elections less than three months away, Ealing Council is busy using “Ealing Council’s magazine for residents” to promote news of Ealing Labour’s local “achievements” in an effort to persuade voters that, despite national Labour’s dismal regurgitation of failed and cruel Tory government austerity policies and shameless political scandals going right to the heart of the UK establishment, Peter Mason’s Ealing Labour are still “on your …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Housing
Demolition Man: Peter Mason's Legacy of Half-Built Homes and Hollow Promises
This is the story about how a council leader failed to deliver the new homes he promised to build, and how he wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money in doing so.
It’s also about how he ended up demolishing half-built homes and with them the hopes of homeless families on the housing waiting list.
Building Bingo
Five years ago I began documenting Ealing Labour council chief Peter Mason’s construction counting conjuring tricks and bungled building bingo under …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Features
Housing
Health
Developers, if you Really Want to Help
This was survey feedback given to developers proposing to build a massive data centre on the site of the industrial estate down the road from me, but it applies more broadly to all big developers, especially those with annual profits of half a billion pounds.
I’m concerned about noise from the site causing a nuisance and health problems in an area that is already susceptible to multiple environmental health stressors, and exacerbated by deep-rooted poverty, deprivation, low pay and …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Housing
Corruption
The Property Lobby: the Hidden Reality behind the Housing Crisis in Ealing
There will be 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years. 14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars)!
One third of the total new developments in the whole of Ealing borough (only Acton is getting it worse).
So not happening so much in the ‘white’ or richer areas of the borough, for some reason.
None of these homes will be genuinely affordable to most people currently living in overcrowded …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
Health
Corruption
Pollution
From the Southall Big Plan AGM in 2017
Some perennial problems that our elected representatives seem to be unable - or unwilling - to do anything about.
Some things never change!
Priority from nine years ago - clean streets! 
Julian Bell's Ten Year Plan. 
40% 'affordable homes' then. 30% 'genuinely affordable homes 'now.
Toilets?! 
'We care about Southall', they say.
That must be why they handed it over to the developers, and turned into a concrete jungle. 
Encouraging people to take more exercise by …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
Look at these Bricks!
Imported from the original Twitter thread (via Thread Reader App), where you will find a better and complete viewing experience.
Look at these bricks!
Is 2500:
A) The year the new cinema in Ealing will finally be opened to the public?
B) The price of a return flight to Nice airport and five nights in Cannes?
C) The number of genuinely affordable homes to be built by Ealing Council in the four years 2018-22?
GAH! 
898: October 2019: (ealing.gov.uk/news/article/1…)
1355: May 2020: ( …