Kings Cross Local Environment

Kings Cross from the air - Central St Martins

Some marvellous if vertigo-inducing footage of the Kings Cross railway lands from a model airplane.  Courtesy of Steve Roberts a tutor at the new Central St Martins.  Click here if you can only see a black space below instead of the embedded footage.

 

62-68 York Way, Development Plans Progress

The Community Bulletin Board has recently learned that development is now moving ahead at the site at the corner of York Way and Wharfdale Road. Residents of York Central have received notification of work to begin as outlined in a "newsletter" received from the developers.Download 1766 1.0 Project Newsletter - Neighbour Considerate Contractor Scheme

This site has been an eyesore in the neighbourhood for years and the fact that development is moving ahead is good news. However, announcement have been made before and only time will tell if this announcement means real progress.

Celebrate the creative legacy of the Keskidee Centre 27 October

A great event coming up at the former Keskidee Centre on Gifford Street. Gives me another excuse to put up this great Bob Marley video filmed at the Keskidee and on Gifford Street.  Thanks to Diana Shelley for tipping me off. RSVP to [email protected]

Celebrating the creative legacy of the Keskidee Centre Islington's Black History Month Closing Event with Creative Islington and Islington BME Forum 27th October 2011, 7-9pm Creative Islington and Islington's BME Forum are hosting a joint Networking Event at the Keskidee Centre for the closing of Islington Black History Month 2011. It will be an opportunity to find out more about the rich history of this venue and enjoy talks and performances from artists originally involved. 

 

Oral Historian Alan Dein, who pieced together the remarkable and pioneering story of the Keskidee for Radio 4 recently, will be giving a short intro. The event will bring together many of those originally involved in the centre, with the aim of celebrating its impact and connecting up those individuals with current cultural groups and activity in Islington. All welcome! Book your place at [email protected]

We will have free refreshments, kindly provided by Waitrose, Holloway Rd. "The Keskidee Centre was unique. There was nowhere else that you could find that kind of ambience to nurture creativity." Linton Kwesi Johnson The Keskidee Centre was Britain's first arts and cultural centre for the black community. It was founded in 1971 near King's Cross and Caledonian Road and made an important contribution to London's cultural scene in the 70's and 80's.

Keskidee became known for its thriving theatre productions which toured the world and launched the career of many famous actors, and for many years, it was the only place to experience black theatre in London. It is where poet Linton Kwesi Johnson created dub poetry and Bob Marley se his 'Is this love?' video.

It was originally and continues to be used now as a church. Islington Council marked the fortieth anniversary of its opening this year with the unveiling of a green plaque.

Venue: The former Keskidee Centre is at Christ Apostolic Church, Gifford Street, off Caledonian Road, N1 0DF To book: Please RSVP to [email protected]

For the full Islington Black Fistory Month event listings check out: www.islington.gov.uk/bhm

Community Google map

As part of their Mapping our Patch project, local group King's Cross Community Projects have started developing a Google map showing related community activity. If you'd like to add something to the map, contact KCCP with details. Click on the markers on the map below for details of each current entry:

 

View King's Cross in a larger map

Clean air in London

Modern air pollution isn't as visible as the old pea-soupers, but it is just as insidious.  In areas like Kings Cross with insane road traffic levels, constrcution trafffic, long taxi ranks, bus stands and plenty of diesel trains air pollution is one of the most serious threats to health. I lived for a couple of years in a flat in the Kings Cross gyratory when it was all I could afford.  The traffic dust and fumes were horrible. I reject the majority of campaign stuff that gets sent to me at this website as alarmist or partisan, but I am convinced there is a major long term issue here.

The guys over at Campaign for Clean Air in London have been running a great campaign and it's well worth checking out their site and resources.  Their work identifying schools within 150m of roads carrying over 10,000 vehicles a day is particulalry good/worrying.  The campaign suggests the current and previous governments local and national aren't doing enough to keep up to international standards and there are some unpalatable issues for diesel public transport - taxis and buses.  The Campaign for Clean Air in London's Autumn update says

'Air pollution is rocketing up the public, media and political agenda in London and more widely. By Easter this year, London had already breached the number of ‘Bad Air Days’ for dangerous airborne particles allowed for a whole year. The standard has been in legislation since 1999 and required to be met since January 2005. 

The Mayor is correct to say – when comparing the public health risk with alcoholism, obesity and smoking – there were 4,267 deaths in London in 2008 attributable to long term exposure to fine particles at an average additional loss of life of 11.5 years. However, Clean Air in London (CAL) has found that this is a pure number, calculated after eliminating up to 40 other possible causes of death. It is more likely, in practice, air pollution may have contributed to all 15,800 deaths due to cardiovascular causes (i.e. one in three of all deaths) in London [in 2009] at an average additional loss of life of around three years for these people. Either way, this is as many early deaths as we thought occurred due to short-term exposure during the Great Smog of 1952 (when the impacts of long-term exposure were unknown). 

It is not just older people though who are at risk. Earlier this year, CAL published a list – obtained under the Freedom of Information Act – of 1,148 schools and other educational places within 150 metres of roads carrying over 10,000 vehicles a day after discovering new scientific research that traffic-related air pollution from such roads could be responsible for up to 30% of all new cases of asthma in children. This is a public health crisis and far too little is being done to tackle it. '

Who deserves a Queen's Award for voluntary service in Kings Cross?

There are loads of wonderful groups in our community - does anyone feel like nominating one for a Queen's Aw ard?  See this link to nominate.  Press notice with details and lots of blather follows:

"Last chance to nominate London community groups for2012 Queen’s volunteer award  If you believe a voluntary group in your part of London deserves to be recognised for the valuable service it provides to the local community, there is still time to nominate them for a prestigious national award. The deadline for nominations for the 2012 Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service is Friday, 30 September. 

The Award, part of the UK National Honours system, was created by the Queen to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and recognises the outstanding contributions made to local communities by groups of volunteers. Next year is the Award’s 10th anniversary and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year. To help celebrate these two events, the aim is to give even more voluntary groups a chance to receive the Award. In June this year, six outstanding groups in London received the Award after being nominated by friends, family, beneficiaries or members of the public, but there are many more groups in the capital that deserve this recognition for their volunteers. 

Present holders of the award include Esther Community Enterprise, which runs a team of 100 drivers, and many other volunteers, across London.They collect from supermarkets useable food and clothing that would otherwise be thrown away and redistribute them via a team of 36 organisations who partner with ECE. The recipients range from the homeless to schools and those facing financial hardship. June Ross-Wildman, who manages Esther Community Enterprise from her home in Croydon, said: “To find that we had won the Award was a blessing and a real boost to all those who volunteer and help us. It will really help raise our profile and validate the work we do, and I would encourage people to nominate similar voluntary groups in their own areas.” 

A winner of the Award in 2010, the London-based Coroners’ Courts Support Service (CCSS) was launched in January 2003 and supports bereaved families and witnesses at Inquests in a Coroner’s Court. CCSS volunteers provide a sympathetic ear, explain the processes and procedures of the court, and accompany families and witnesses into court, ensuring they have received all the necessary information from the Coroner’s Officer.   In London, the service is provided for Inquests in Barnet, Croydon, Fulham, St Pancras, Southwark, Walthamstow and Westminster. It is also available for certain courts in Buckinghamshire, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Berkshire, Surrey, and Oxford; and is to be introduced in Reading, Liverpool and Stockport.  CCSS Director Beverley Radcliffe said: "Receiving the award was fabulous and it was a boost to our morale to know that we were seen as a really professionally run voluntary organisation. I would definitely encourage nominations for other local voluntary groups."  

The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service Main Award Committee Chair and former broadcast journalist Martyn Lewis CBE said: “Volunteering groups make a huge contribution to people’s lives, often without praise for the incredible job they do. A prestigious UK National Honour such as The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service can prove invaluable in so many ways to their ongoing success. “The importance of volunteer groups is all the more apparent in the current climate, and I urge people across London to help recognise those doing outstanding work in their local communities. Whether you know a group or have benefited personally from their activities, get a form and nominate!” 

Nominations can be made at any time, but for those wishing to be considered for the 2012 Award, forms must be received by 30 September 2011.   For further details of how to nominate and to see The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service recipients visit www.direct.gov.uk/qavs or contact the Award Administrator on [email protected] – Ends – For media enquiries, please contact:Simon Holder, COI News & PR London, 020 7261 8342.

For nomination enquiries, please contact:Award Administrator at [email protected] call 020 7271 6206  

Notes to editors The winners of the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service 2011 in London were:·         Esther Community Enterprise – across London, based in Croydon
·         Petts Wood Playgroup for Children with Special Needs – Bromley
·         Redbridge Education and Social Welfare Support Group (Awaaz Group Community Empowerment)
·         Redbridge Voluntary Care
·         Scene and Heard – Camden
·         Value Life - Tottenham

About the Queen’s Award for Voluntary ServiceIn 2002, in celebration of Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award for Voluntary Service by Groups in the Community was established within the UK National Honours system. Its purpose is to recognise groups of individuals who are giving their time freely for the benefit of others. It is the highest honour that can be bestowed upon groups of this kind and is equivalent in status to the MBE. As such, the Queen’s Award not only serves to provide recognition of volunteer groups, but also demonstrates the high respect in which volunteering is held. Next year, the Award celebrates its 10th anniversary in the same year as Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee and these two events are expected to be marked appropriately, making this year’s number of nominations received important.   

The Award is overseen by the Office for Civil Society (OCS), in the Cabinet Office.  OCS leads work across government to support the environment for a thriving third sector (voluntary and community groups, social enterprises, charities, co-operatives and mutuals), enabling it to campaign for change, deliver public services, promote social enterprise and strengthen communities. Groups must be nominated for the Award – self nomination is not permitted. A group (two or more people) can be nominated if it is based in the UK, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The group has to have been volunteering for the benefit of people in the UK or overseas for at least three years and more than half its members must be volunteers who have the right of residence in the UK.

Groups solely concerned with fundraising for charitable purposes are not eligible. Further details on entrance criteria and the nomination process are available at www.direct.gov.uk/qavs   

Issued on behalf of the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Serviceby COI News & PR Contact: Simon Holder;tel. 020 7261 8342; [email protected]

Change at Kings Cross - pictures and video

It's always handy to have a reminder of the scale fo the change that Kings Cross is undergoing and indeed has already undergone.  Allan McKever who is a train enthusiast over in YouTube has put up a slideshow of his photos and some videos.

 

Cultural constructions in the Cross

I’ve only lived in King’s Cross for four years, but I’ve already got ‘superlative fatigue’. I can only imagine what it’s been like for residents of ten years or more contending with ‘Europe’s largest regeneration project.’

Autumn heralds a key moment in the King’s Cross Central development — the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), housed in a renovated and extended granary building, is due to welcome 4,500 students in just over two weeks. It’s unleashed a new wave of superlatives, as I found when I went on a site tour with other locals earlier this month, led by the joint chief executive of the developer Argent, Roger Madelin.

In the coach on the way to the site, sitting in Euston Road traffic, Madelin provided a steady stream of not-so-trivial trivia: “It is, we’re told, the largest art and design facility in the world — outside of China.” he points out, drolly adding: “We don’t know if there’s a bigger one in China, but we have to say that.”

The handsome six-storey CSM building (pictured) now gives this industrial and transport ‘ground zero’ a heart, or a centerpiece. But it will be eventually be dwarfed by a forest of 20 or so buildings to the northern part of the development, which was the first stop on the tour. However it’s hard to picture at the moment, a handful of apartment buildings in various early stages of construction sit on the edge of a large stretch of gravelly desolation, along with an old sawtooth-topped warehouse that’s sadly due for demolition. Nevertheless, Madelin reels off a list of housing types and numbers: 143 apartments in one of the buildings he points to, 40 for ‘frail elderly’, 20 ‘special needs’ apartments. Some more affordable housing along York Way, along with 117 ‘non-affordable’. It’s also around here that the already infamous the 27-storey student accommodation tower will be located, but not finished until autumn 2014.

The tracks of High Speed 1 skirt the northern edge of the site. A Southeastern train dawdles and then stops. “I know it doesn’t look it, but that’s the fastest-accelerating train in the world. It runs on the same track as the Eurostar, but stops a lot more, so it needs to accelerate quickly…[it’s what enables] the journey time from St Pancras to Stratford to be six-and-half-minutes.” says Madelin.

We’re also shown the beginnings of combined heat and power station, the siting of a primary school and a possible police station. It’s also going to be the resting place of the recently dismantled Gasholder no.8, the last of an original group of 14, is “up in Yorkshire being sandblasted and painted — and will be put back here to wrap around cylindrical residential buildings.”

Back outside the CSM building, Madelin is keen to paint the picture of what he sees as a new cultural quarter for London. Next to the part of the building he touts as the “world’s largest school of sculpture” (which has produced the likes of Anthony Caro and Antony Gormley) is a beautiful old Victorian glass canopy, and under it, a squat building from a similar era that used to store potatoes. Here, he says, are plans for a food store (not a supermarket, he stresses), cooking school, wine school and of course, a food market. There are ambitions to have some sort of market in place before Christmas. And events. Lots of events. This is London, after all. And Madelin adds that one of the requirements for CSM was that they would hold at least 200 events a year that were open to the public. He also sees this as a place for niche food happenings: “There’s 265 different types of tomato, so why not have a tomato festival here. There’s a lot of demand for this type of thing.” Fitting for an area that was once the arrival point for much of London’s food supply.

Madelin tells us that 50 per cent of fashion at London Fashion Week (LFM) is from CSM graduates. King’s Cross has lured the influential school and students from the West End — could it eventually usurp places like Somerset House to hold LFM events?

Out the front of the Granary building, the much-vaunted square (its size still wearingly being compared to that of Trafalgar Square) is taking shape and due for completion next summer. A new road: ‘The Boulevard’ is starting to scythe its way from just outside the new King’s Cross concourse building, up to the new square. Its opening date is 22 November.

Like an episode of Grand Designs on steroids, I wonder: Will they get it right? All the ‘biggests’ and ‘bests’ and claims such as the Boulevard being the first new road in London for a century (really?) are beguiling, but ultimately beyond the point.

The same can be said for the water feature in Granary Square billed as what will be the largest fountain, by area, outside of Las Vegas. There’s where any comparisons with such a city should end, as it’s the biggest worry for this development — that it becomes an event-based theme park on an inhuman scale.

Rather, there’s inspiration closer to home, which, like King’s Cross, was borne out of a regenerated former industrial area. The Southbank shows that it actually is possible to 'get it right' and create an open, accessible and egalitarian cultural quarter.

The next few months will start to reveal just where King’s Cross Central is on the Vegas-Southbank spectrum.

Clare Hill

The Mystery of the TG Lynes building

We are now quite a few years into the redevelopment of the Kings Cross area and a great many things have improved immensely. Streets have been cleaned up, houses restored, shops, bars and businesses invigorated, but anyone who lives at the southern end of Caledonian Road will be aware of one glaring anomaly – the former TG Lynes building.

The building has been boarded up and in the process of ‘redevelopment’ for over five years and, peeking through the hoarding, seems no closer to completion than it ever has been. It’s huge ugly frontage blights the look and feel of this local shopping area and it’s stubborn refusal to metamorphosise from its grey, tattered shell into a useful shop/restaurant/business/anything is surely holding back further improvements to this section of Caledonian Road.

Residents have watched with curiosity, amusement, indifference, irritation and finally a growing sense of anger as activity at the site becomes ever more protracted and bizarre.
Huge (and I mean huge) quantities of earth and rubble have been removed from the basement in the last five years. Sometimes it comes out on a makeshift belt cobbled together and slung at head height over the pavement, emptying into a skip parked on the (red route) road, sometimes by gangs of men with wheelbarrows and shovels. Cars and pedestrians alike regularly have to swerve around the various skips, vehicles and make-do building equipment and underneath rubble chutes left blocking the area, and still the digging continues.

Large holes, and last December, four random windows, have been punched through the rear exterior wall, straight into the communal garden which sits directly behind it. This wall is the original C19 boundary wall and until that point had never had any holes in it, especially not ones then filled with cheap single glazed windows of random and varying sizes. These holes were used to pump building dust and bits of rubble directly into the communal garden behind the wall, contaminating the garden and residents with brick dust for many weeks. This is, no doubt, a Health & Safety violation and presumably the builders thought it was more acceptable to contaminate the garden than pump the dust into the street, which might have attracted more attention. These holes were then crudely filled with cement. Complaints were swiftly made by residents but the issue seems to be languishing on the desk of the Planning Department and, TEN months on, nothing has been done. So much for protecting the Keystone Crescent Conservation Area!

Large numbers of York stone street pavers are lifted and badly reset, water drips continually onto the pavement and pedestrians from the upper stories come rain or shine, strange noises are heard day and night, large quantities of building materials, steel beams and occasionally vans are swallowed up into it’s interior. One day, workers spent hours removing reams of paper from the site which were shredded in a van parked on Caledonian Road. The list goes on.

What local residents want to know is; what on earth is going on with this building, when will the redevelopment be completed so Caledonian Road has a chance to continue its regeneration and, is the whole damn lot about fall through on to the Circle line?

Islington Planning Department we are looking at you and asking why we are getting no response to our questions and why no enforcement action has been taken…

 

TypePad Conversations » Answer this question!

Boundary Commission proposed boundary changes in Kings Cross, Islington South and Holborn and St Pancras

Islington South is proposed to grow to accomodate the Camden wards of 'Holborn and Covent Garden' and 'Kings Cross' and also swallows up the City of London to become 'City of London and Islington South'.  But loses the Holloway Ward to Islington North.  

The desire to make constituencies come within standard size bounds means that the old, neat arrangement of largely contiguous fit with local government  boundaries is all messed up in London.  Islington was considered too small for two seats, so the new seats spread across Camden, Islington and City of London boundaries.  What was Holborn and St Pancras now becomes (I think) Camden and Regents Park.

These are proposed changes and will probably be debated at length.  Writing this article hurridly i can't quite work out the implications.   If I have misunderstood something please let me know in the comments.  

My gut feel is that these changes will make it even harder for local people to relate to their MP. Someone has broken the embargo on the proposed Boundary Commission changes but these seem to be it.  Here's what the Boundary Commission has to say:

44. In Islington, we noted that the electorate was too small for two constituencies and we decided to expand the existing Islington North constituency to include one ward (Holloway) from the existing Islington South and Finsbury constituency. To replace the Holloway ward, we propose to include the City of London and two Camden wards (Holborn and Covent Garden, and King’s Cross). Although the City of London has had a longstanding constituency link with wards from the City of Westminster, we noted that there are also close communication links between the City of London and the south of the Borough of Islington. We decided that the constituency should be renamed The City of London and Islington South.

45. In Camden, we noted that the existing Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, which contains wards from the boroughs of both Brent and Camden, had an electorate within 5% of the electoral quota. However, with the inclusion of the Fortune Green ward in the Finchley and Golders Green constituency, it was necessary to alter the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. We propose that it should contain only two Brent wards (Kilburn and Queens Park) and eight wards
from Camden, including three (Gospel Oak, Highgate, and Kentish Town) from the existing Holborn and St Pancras constituency. The seven remaining Camden wards, including one (Belsize) from the existing Hampstead and Kilburn constituency, form a Camden and Regent’s Park constituency, together with four wards from the north east of Westminster.