Saturday 13th May 2023
Even if you don't take a great deal of interest in local affairs you will have noticed the flurry of excavation and constructional activity behind the wooden screens on the town square. Work has started on the building of the two Monster Blocks, one of them the same height as Centre Point on New Oxford Street, the other only slightly lower, which in deference to the vertical slums of the 1960s will be built with only one staircase in each, ignoring everything that was learned from the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Please don't listen to any nonsense to the effect that this addresses the housing crisis, the only people who will be able to afford these "luxury flats" (not that I would want to live in one) will be the world's oil barons and money-launderers who can afford to buy them and use them to rent out to Britain's ordinary rich who can pay them half their annual salaries as tennants. The likes of us, well we can get the hell out of Walthamstow and live in an ordinary horizontal slum, maybe somewhere like Stoke on Trent or Wigan. It's called "gentrification", or if you are a little more cynical the "London Clearances". It's aim is to make London a city for the rich and get those smelly poor people as far away as possible, except the ones we might need to do the jobs that no member of the cappuccino classes would want. In this borough it's being organised by our own dear Labour Party, but don't be fooled by the name, any connection with socialism or principles of any kind is purely coincidental.
This meeting was organised by Save Our Square, a group that came together about eight years ago when the Monster Blocks were first proposed, urging the council to forget these ridiculous property speculation projects and house the people who had actually voted for them and needed somewhere decent and affordable to live, but SOS has included slots for other sympathetic groups and individuals such as Waltham Forest Civic Society and Action4Whipps, the group campaigning for a well-designed and properly funded replacement for Whipps Cross Hospital which is scheduled for urgent rebuilding and modernisation.
Please listen to what all these speakers have to say. Even if you think you have heard a lot of it before there are new developments that will take your breath away!