BRIAN
DEER: NOTTING HELL Page 1
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) June 17 2001
- The
Westway Development Trust scandal
- INVESTIGATION:
BRIAN DEER
No
knives are pulled or guns discharged, but at the
Subterania nightclub, up a west London back street,
all is not well tonight. The DJ scratches on with
Outkast's Ms Jackson, and two bikini-clad go-gos
don't skip one wriggle under a light show of video
clips. But there's no crush around the bar. Empty
space has opened up. The punters are starting to
leave.
It's
1.24 on a Sunday morning, and at a time like this the
place should be heaving. Annie Lennox. Paul Weller,
Ice-T and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among the
club's past attractions. Although the immediate
vicinity - Acklam Road, near Ladbroke Grove - is at
the heart of one of Britain's most socially-deprived
neighbourhoods, it's inside the Royal Borough of
Kensington & Chelsea, and if you walk half a mile
you're in Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts country:
Portobello Market, Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park.
But
things have looked grim lately, and in 36 minutes the
DJ and go-gos will stop. After a string of bitter
conflicts with the surrounding community - which in
the past 18 months has seen eight police officers
injured in a riot, two shootings outside, and what a
west London magistrate called "unimagined, very
real and human problems caused to the residents"
- the 600 capacity venue has had its licence cut from
3 to 2am, and neighbours are pushing for it to close.
It's
hardly surprising that the club has opponents. Taking
an estimated £1m a year in an otherwise quiet
residential neighbourhood, it's bound to attract
social problems. What's amazing, however, is that the
complainants rarely see their grievance as being with
the club's commercial management - Vince Power's Mean
Fiddler group - but rather with the premises'
landlord and licensee, which is a registered charity,
headed by a judge and championed by the Prince of
Wales.
Locals
are mystified. Can a charity be behind a nightclub?
And this is just the start of the problems. For this
charity is at the centre of a them-and-us war -
ironically, battling with the very community is was
set up in the first place to help. Swallowing vast
public resources, but yielding little by comparison,
it's the hidden, ugly face of the "good
cause" industry. Acklam Road is a lesson for us
all.
*****
The
area around Subterania - the less fashionable part of
Notting Hill - has been a flashpoint for trouble for
as long as anybody can remember. It first caught
attention in 1958 when, as a densely-packed, mostly
immigrant community, it erupted with Britain's first
race riots. In the 1960s it snatched headlines again
when it was stalked by the notorious slumlord Peter
Rachman, echoed to the sounds of tenants being
evicted and was peppered with "No
coloureds" signs.
Violence
was common, as Kathleen Kelly, 80, remembered as we
sat sipping tea in her council flat before Christmas,
less than 10 yards from the problem club. She was
lured from Jamaica in 1950 to work in the National
Health Service. "There was some very bad
landlords up at Talbot Square and the rioting came
all the way down," she said.
In
those days the district was also a cauldron of social
innovation. Hippies, anarchists and every species of
idealist joined the immigrants in cheap, insecure
housing, and pioneered projects often borrowed from
the American counterculture. They started Britain's
first neighbourhood law centre, the first drug advice
agency, Release, a "free university", and
supported black residents in an annual Caribbean
street festival - now the world-famous Notting Hill
Carnival.
But
conflict was never too far from the surface, and at
the end of the 1960s came the mother of all battles -
this time over the construction of a road. To relieve
congestion in leafy Holland Park and to speed traffic
from central London towards Oxford and beyond, a
2.5-mile elevated motorway - the A40(M) Westway - was
driven through North Kensington, in the face of
bitter banner-waving protests. Acklam Road was
flattened, with one side replaced by a yellow-brick
council estate.
And
then, to complete the history, the idealists had an
idea to rescue something worthwhile from the jaws of
defeat. They said "Let's start a charity"
and in February 1971 they launched the North
Kensington Amenity Trust [renamed Westway
Development Trust after this
report]. It was to
reclaim something from the moonscape of
post-construction wasteland, in an effort to
"give something back". Cynics argued that
it would prove a distraction - the kind of thing
developers promise to buy off opposition. Little did
they know that, in the name of charity, it would
spawn yet more bitter wars.
*****
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