Upmarket homes will attract movers and shakers we need

Published: 15 October, 2010

• HATS off to historian David Starkey for his short piece filmed in Islington and broadcast on BBC’s This Week last Thursday evening, albeit at such a late hour that only the most obsessive politicos would view.

BBC iPlayer anyone? Essentially the message from the provocative Dr Starkey – himself brought up in council housing but having made himself into a wealthy broadcaster – was that the welfare state freezes people where they were born, entrenching the poor in areas where there are no longer suitable jobs, leaving them to become unwilling parasites who undeservedly benefit from living in salubrious environments supported by the taxes collected from the hard-working and successful.

While his message was in support of the government’s hopeful and long-overdue changes in housing benefit, the choice of Barnsbury Square as the backdrop was symbolic for the national viewership but particularly poignant for Islington’s socialist councils – be they Labour or Lib Dem.

For it was at that very square that 20 years ago entrepreneur Robin Hodges and his wife Sue single-handedly started the gentrification by purchasing derelict factory buildings that would never again hear the whirl of industrial-age machinery.

They converted 1930s Mica House into iconic flats, including the most valuable penthouse in Islington, complete with its own glass swimming pool.

And it is here, where the remaining factory building blights the beautiful square, that three years ago the Hodges continued their virtual campaign of modernisation against the Islington hammer-and-sickle flag-wavers.

The Hodges fought indefatigably and at a cost, investing in award-winning architects and hiring the top guns from the same planners and legal team used by Arsenal in its planning battles.

After a weeks-long planning inquiry and then a High Court challenge, the Hodges prevailed with their vision of not being forced to include social housing in the proposed Hodges House, a development of 10 very large private-market flats for the families of those who are sufficiently hard-working and successful to deserve such surroundings.

Hodges House cannot be built and occupied soon enough.

If Islington is to prosper, such successful people are the type of residents it needs to attract with suitable housing.

Visionaries such as Dr Starkey and Mr Hodges are in short supply in Islington.

The world has changed, and now at last so has the country.

Will Islington move with the times, or be left behind to decay under the outdated social infrastructure, much like these outdated factory buildings?

MJ
N1