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BRIAN
DEER: NOTTING HELL Page 2
Politically,
the idea of the North Kensington Amenity Trust
was so beguilingly simple that it has since
become a template for similar ventures around the
country. With a staff of 60, a salaried director
on more than £60,000 a year and a turnover of
£2.8m, it was the founding inspiration for the
Development Trusts Association, with 200 members
from Devon to Northumberland and assets of more
than £100m. It is a celebrated example,
moreover, of a £30 billion "grey
economy", embracing more than 180,000
registered charities and an estimated million
trustees.
As
charities do, it started well, with ideals that
were hard to fault. In building the Westway, the
Department of Transport left 23 redundant acres
around Ladbroke Grove tube station, some
ready-roofed, like railway arches, others open
spaces. "What we wanted was facilities aimed
at the poor community, especially children,"
John O'Malley, the secretary of the action group
that founded the charity, told me. "What
really grew out of it was playgroups."
In
February 1971, the management committee of 15
trustees adopted legal objectives that are still
in force today: "(1) the advancement of
education; (2) the provision of facilities for
recreation or other leisure-time occupation in
the interests of social welfare, with the object
of improving the conditions of life of the said
inhabitants; (3) assisting charitable
institutions established for the benefit of the
said inhabitants; (4) in the advancement of
education, but not further or otherwise, the
trust may provide assistance to children and
young persons."
Progress
was slow, but by 1976 the trust had built a
community centre - the Acklam Hall - in the
premises that are now Subterania. There was a
nursery, stables, an administration building,
offices and space for stallholders and small
businesses. The idea was to create a mix of
public services and private enterprise - the
rental from which could be garnered by the
charity to help address the neighbourhood's
needs.
Those
needs were many - then as now - with Golborne
ward, in which the nightclub sits, still one of
the most challenged in Britain. For all the
popular image fostered by the movie Notting Hill,
hidden up backstreets such as Acklam Road is
deprivation rarely dwelt on in films.
Unemployment last year hovered around 13%, and
twice as many people live in public-sector
housing as own or privately rent their homes.
For
a while there was progress, but then renewed
conflict erupted as all eyes turned to the land.
Although North Kensington is a solidly Labour
area, seven or eight of the management committee
were nominees of the Tory-dominated borough
council, controlled from wealthy South
Kensington, Chelsea and Knightsbridge. And in
1976 they appointed as trust director Roger
Matland, then a 31-year-old charity worker with a
degree in psychology and a new agenda for the
trust's development.
Gradually,
under Matland, the charity sidelined its founding
ideals and switched from serving the likes of Mrs
Kelly to creating a luxury leisure empire. In
1988, Subterania (£8 admission) was rented to
the Mean Fiddler group (Vince Power says:
"You could say they gave it to me for
nothing"), followed by ambitious expansion,
using public grants and loans, to build an indoor
tennis club (adults £15 an hour), a members-only
fitness club (£100 joining fee, plus £45 a
month), and an upscale cocktail lounge (seared
wild salmon and roasted red pepper brochette on
kizami and black pasta mesh with herb tahini,
£11.50). In short, the new plan was to develop
the property for the affluent, like a modern-day
enclosure of common land.
The
justification was to generate income for
charitable purposes, and day-trip visitors were
dazzled. In 1991, the trust's 20th anniversary
year, the Prince of Wales, who would later become
a hands-on supporter, declared that it had
"forged ahead with a wide-ranging programme
for the economic and social benefit of local
people."
But
even amidst such courtly praise, around the
motorway - which surges across the roof of
Subterania - the neighbour's unrest was
festering. "It's disgusting," Mrs
Kelly, who was president of the local Swinbrook
tenants' association, told me. "As far as
the community around here, we don't get any
benefit from the amenity trust, and nobody can
tell you any different."
*****
There
were no celebrations in February this year for
the trust's 30th anniversary. When I called the
urbane, Gitane-smoking Matland, now 56, he told
me he was "busy" and I would get
"a better story" if I contacted him
again in a year. And after a series of complaints
to my editor, we ended up in a protracted written
duel between the charity's lawyers and ours.
I
didn't at the time reveal the trigger for my
interest: a memo I saw from Matland to the
trust's solicitors, the firm of Sinclair Taylor
& Martin. It read like something from a John
le Carre novel, and when I checked it out it made
me wonder if anybody policed charities at all.
Without sharp-eyed shareholders, or the political
accountability of public authorities, it seemed
that the world of trustees and professional staff
could let the weirdest situations arise.
"At
about 10.45 on Monday 9 November 1998,"
Matland wrote. "I was driving down Golborne
Road when I saw Lyn Hardy-Smith transferring
goods from a red VW saloon across into his cafe
called Havana. I parked at a discreet distance
away, walked back and wrote down the registration
number, which is E513 PBP. I have asked Janice to
obtain the usual from Swansea."
When
I found him, it turned out that Hardy-Smith was a
local activist, and former bicycle-shopkeeper,
who had been priced off his stall by the trust's
leisure plans, and who in 1987 had accused
Matland of dishonestly influencing a £180
Bloomsbury Court case brought against him. In
response, the charity had sued him for libel and,
14 years later at central London County Court, is
attempting to seize his family house to recover
its legal costs. In an action "that the
property be sold notwithstanding that the
respondents refuse to consent to the said
sale," the charity is now looking to recover
from the bicycle man almost £43,000.
Hardy-Smith
- 57, slim, grey and nervous - had acted like a
fool, making an emotional accusation he had no
prospect of standing-up. After a High Court writ
was issued against him in 1990, he apologised
through solicitors, offered to make an
undertaking in court and agreed to pay
"reasonable costs". But his apology was
rejected as "far from unreserved" - and
though the alleged libel was only made in a
private letter to the trust's chair, the trust
went on in 1992 to throw £30,000 of its
charitable funds at defending "the
professional repute of its staff".
It
was a vindictive action, which broke Hardy-Smith.
The only evidence I found of anybody being
seriously damaged by the episode is in a letter
from Hardy-Smith's doctor saying that he had been
treated for stress and depression "caused by
the protracted litigation". And since the
management committee had paid for the lawsuit,
evidently nobody believed what Hardy-Smith said
in the first place.
What
most bothered me here was the evident lack of
charity to this man. Why sledgehammer this
particular walnut? A second trust document put me
on the road: the essential sting of the
allegation seemed to be true. Despite feting
royalty. Matland was, on the face of it, prepared
to use dishonest tactics to achieve less than
charitable ends.
The
second document was written the day after
Matland's memo to Sinclair Taylor & Martin,
and concerned the red VW in Golborne Road - about
a quarter mile from trust land. In an apparent
bid to seize the vehicle to pay legal bills,
Matland, using staff member Janice, wrote to the
Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea,
falsely claiming it was somewhere else: "Red
Golf VW saloon - E313 PBP... The above vehicle is
parked on Trust land and we wish to ask the owner
to remove it. I would be most grateful if you
could supply me with the name and address of the
owner as of today's date so that I may write to
them."
Hardy-Smith
- now unemployed and suffering from diabetic
hyperglycaemia - reported this deception to the
data protection registrar and complained to the
trust's chair, Judge Gerald Gordon, 55, who sits
at the Old Bailey and recently presided over the
fraud trial of John "Goldfinger"
Palmer. Gordon, who has headed the management
committee since 1993 and is a former Tory deputy
leader of the borough council, took no action,
but merely replied to the bicycle man that if the
registrar made "any inquiries of the trust,
we will, of course co-operate."
A
one-off aberration? At first I thought, maybe.
Then other conflicts emerged, which have caused
even senior Tories to express dismay about the
charity. James Arbuthnot, a former Kensington
councillor and chief whip in William Hague's
shadow cabinet, for instance, wrote to Matland
three years ago saying he remembered the charity
with "a curious mixture of loathing and
fascination".
Some
of the most potentially inflammatory clashes have
been with elements of the local black community.
In 1996, for instance, local steel bands who used
to park two floats on unused trust land, 50 yards
from Subterania, were evicted in a protracted
lawsuit that cost the musicians more than
£10,000. The charity then erected a 10ft steel
fence, using grant money, which kept them out.
Then last summer there was more controversy when
the trust banned the Notting Hill Carnival from
two 40-by-20 yard plots of paved land at the
epicentre of the festival zone. And, yards from
where newsagents once sported "No
coloureds" postcards, six stalls
traditionally set out each year on Acklam Road -
by now elderly Afro-Caribbeans - were prevented
by police, on the charity's orders, from selling
"a bit of food".
Such
actions have sparked fury among the trust's black
neighbours - who incidentally got up a petition
in 1995 about aspects of the nightclub's door
policy. "I don't want to say much in case I
get in trouble," said Mrs Kelly, who said
she bit her tongue after hearing what happened to
Hardy-Smith. "They can take me to court, but
I haven't got any money, so they won't get
anything."
The
area's Labour councillors say they are worn out
by the quarrels, and appeals to the trustees get
nowhere. After a painter who decorated the
charity's offices in 1999 complained to Gordon
that it appeared to be attempting to avoid proper
payment for the work that it had ordered from
him, the judge responded: "Allegations of
dishonesty if untrue are libellous and if made in
relation to a person's employment are actionable
without proof of damage." The painter caved
in to a "consent order", abandoning his
claim for £1,000 at Lambeth County Court, with
an unusual clause demanded by the trust:
"That neither party shall discuss the matter
with third parties."
*****
This
report is copyright, Brian Deer. Responses,
information and other feedback concerning this
resource on the Westway Development Trust - North
Kensington Amenity Trust are appreciated - via
the briandeer.com homepage.
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