If you don’t live around North London you may have escaped the mounting furore that has erupted over the the City of London Corporation’s management of Hampstead Heath. Competent and caring custodians of the heath, they would have us believe – yet they are currently behaving more like corrupt corporate monsters.
As if the desecration of the heath by fleets of bulldozers and diggers (see below) was not already enough, they are now handing over three popular family run cafés – Parliament Hill, Golders Hill Park and Highgate Woods – to the Benugo chain. The Parliament Hill and Golders Hill park cafés have been run by the D’Auria and the Pazienti families for 33 and 43 years respectively and, although neither may merit a Michelin star, they are good, child and pensioner friendly, reasonably priced ‘local’ cafés and much valued by their many customers. A chain, no matter how good, creates a totally different and, frankly, undesirable atmosphere.
But, of course, a chain can pay more rent…. The D’Aurias at Parliament Hill offered the Corporation an extra £10,000 a year in rent (up from £80,000 to £90,000 ‘plus commission’) but that was not enough. History does not relate the figures in Golders Hill. ‘All 28 bids were evaluated against set criteria,’ said a City of London Corporation spokesman by email to the Guardian. ‘They were subject to detailed evaluation by the Hampstead Heath Management Committee and an independent catering specialist.’ The spokesman did not reveal what the ‘set criteria’ were, nor what the ‘detailed evaluation’ consisted of but you can be sure that rental was high up on the list. However, the Caterer did reveal the the Corporation had been warned that there would be a huge backlash from the local community – and that the decision to go with Benugo only got through on a single vote.
Whoever warned the Corp. about the backlash was right. The good burghers of Hampstead do not take kindly to having the City of London or anyone else behaving so high handedly and are up in arms. Two petitions on Change.org are gaining signatories by the minute – here for the Golders Hill Park petition – now up to 11,118 signatories and go here for the Parliament Hill one – now up to 13,430 supporters. Please add your names!!
And there will be a public meeting tonight, Wednesday 6th April at Highgate Civic Centre at 7:45pm. I will report….
The café situation is symptomatic of a general concern about the very unaccountable way in which the City of London currently runs Hampstead Heath, and it could get worse. According to the Guardian, there is a private members bill now making its way through parliament which will change the way that the Corporation governs the heath and which may include letting out parts for private functions. Meanwhile, the there have been cuts and redundancies, not to mention the desecration caused to the heath by the highly controversial Hampstead Ponds Project – currently estimated to cost around £25 million and rising.
I first wrote about it last August when I explained that to protect the good people further down the hill, who last got flooded in a relatively small way in 1975, the City of London were proposing to spend untold millions building barriers round the southern ends of all of Hampstead’s 12 ponds. The City of London no doubt claim that they were legally obliged to undertake this work under the Flood and Water Management Act of 2010, and the rules laid down in the 1975 Reservoirs Act (see here for a very interesting background to all this). Whether they really were is arguable but what is certainly not arguable is that the works themselves appear to have been mired in confusion and inefficiency.
When I last blogged the contractors did not seem to be able to make up their minds whether or not they actually wanted to drain the lower half of the boating pond. Now, nearly nine months later there has been no progress on the boating pond beyond, as far as one can see, a massive flattening out the bottom of it – so that they can plant potatoes? Why would you need to flatten the bottom of a pond that you were going to refill with water?….
Elsewhere around the heath huge lorries trundle back and forth delivering who knows what to who knows where.
Yesterday we met the fellow to this massive truck stuck up one of the smaller pathways. Apparently they wanted to turn it round (it certainly could not go much further up) but there was no space. So they built a turning space for it (you can see it on the left). But… They built the turning space too small, so the truck still can’t turn round and now they have to bring back yet more heavy machinery to increase the turning space.
We did not see it but we were told that earlier they had attempted to take a crane down in to the valley on the right of the trees in the picture – but they had not planned that one properly either and the crane sank in the mud!
Elsewhere the removal of topsoil to allow them to get at the clay subsoils with which, apparently, they are going to re-line the ponds not only goes on apace but now covers double the area (a good 20% of the heath) originally planned. Fleets of diggers and JCBs have spent months moving mountains of clay from one side to the other of the sites that they have dug – and then, it appears, back again.
What until last year was one of the favourite spots on the heath for impromptu games of football, cricket, volley ball and any other ball you can think of (you can still just see the little cricket pavilion all but hidden behind the hoarding) has now been turned into yet another dumping ground for uplifted topsoil.
Meanwhile, massive pipes snake their way across miles of heath apparently drawing water from the existing ponds so that it can be cleaned and de-silted in a huge bright blue de-silting machine which moves backwards and forward from one pond edge to another.
Of course, all this heavy earth moving equipment has played havoc with all of the paths which are now pitted with potholes and puddles or are dangerously un-even thanks to the stones dropped hastily to fill the puddles and potholes. And of course should you be unwise enough to go for a walk during the day during the week, your ears are bombarded by the constant sound of heavy machinery labouring while most of your walk is spent moving off the path to allow and endless stream of vehicles to pass…..
At the bottom of the lowest two ponds are further massive works. Across this idyllic evening view of the pond you can just see the diggers still at work of the far side…
And at the very lowest pond we are getting a culvert system…. As far as one can see, this is to cope with the excess water should all the other dams further up the system be overwhelmed…. We certainly very much hope that they won’t be as this culvert faces directly down into South End Green. So should Armageddon occur, it will not be the good people of Gospel Oak who will get their feet wet but the good people of South End Green who will be swept away!!
The chances of all of this being finished by October this year as promised are, of course, non existent – even if they started now they could not get the poor heath back to its original state in six months. Indeed, even the Ponds Project website seems to have given up – its latest post in its ‘latest news’ being December 2015…..
This all goes back to 1986 when, as a result of a spat between Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, the Greater London Council (GLC) was abolished by the then Conservative government. Hampstead Heath was managed by the GLC and – after several years of bad tempered negotiation – responsibility for Hampstead Heath was passed to the City of London Corporation (CLC). Why this happened is a matter of some dispute, but as many denizens of the City live in Hampstead it was not entirely illogical.
The issue is that the CLC is mediaeval, undemocratic and ultimately self serving. To quote George Monbiot in the Guardian: “The Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The Mayor of London’s mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile.”
Basically, the CLC’s remit is to look after its own. Benugo belongs to the WSH Group. WSH is the largest independent contract catering firm in the UK. It owns – inter alia – Searcys and BaxterStorey, has sales in excess of £500 million and employs over 13,000 staff across its various brands. WSH and its subsidiaries recently undertook a refinance and restructure, resulting in Boxford Investments Ltd, a newly incorporated company, being made the ultimate parent business. Boxford Investments is incorporated in St Helier, Jersey. A perfect fit for the City’s unaccountable mandarins.