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."
*****
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