Okay of course I was drawn to this update in my inbox because I saw the name Peter Riley! One of my favourite poets, now in his eighties and living in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire with all the other poets. So that would have been a surprise.
But swivelling quickly round, here is one of the reasons I love this blog so much. I’ve been reading Spitalfields Life since about 2007 or 2008, when its ‘Gentle Author’ had moved into an old house in this historic part of town (back when someone who had some money could still do that) and was tearing out all the layers of modernisation, revealing its old wallpapers and paints, its staircase, its floors… I found it gripping, poetic and beautiful, and have been a frequent reader ever since.
I thought it was a house blog. But it turned out to be so much more. In post after post, this blog has never stopped finding aspects of the ever-changing East End to champion, celebrate, extol: its people, its history, its streets and buildings, its gardens, its businesses, its art… The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the Bethnal Green Mulberry, the Trumans Brewery ‘shopping mall’ fiasco, the destruction of Norton Folgate… Tower Hamlets is both one of the richest and one of the poorest places in the UK. Spitalfields Life and its writer have become a real force in the fight to save the East End from the City, and the global dark money it now represents. It’s hard to think of another world city with such a famous historical district, where those in power are so keen to rip it to shreds.
So having caught my eye with a poetry hook (ouch), this post reeled me in with a different one. Yes, it singles out one homeless person to say he's deserving — when obviously anyone sleeping under a bridge is by definition deserving — but that can be taken as read. The story is the thing here; it encapsulates how easily, given a fluke event or two, a person’s life can just fall between the cracks.
When I lost my flat in Stamford Hill to that huge rent increase in 2018 (the year when ‘private renting’ took over from ‘relationship breakdown’ as the number one cause of new homelessness cases), so many of my nice, kind, middle-class friends told me I should ‘get on the council housing list’. They had no idea that I’d already spent six years living with three kids in a one-bedroom flat in London Fields, on the housing list.
During that time I’d been working in Tower Hamlets Council’s housing department, and a young local guy who came to work with us told me he had grown up on the housing transfer list, in hideous overcrowding. A Hackney Housing employee told me that to get a flat I would have to be standing on the pavement with my children and possessions around me, and this was twenty years ago. By 2018, 55 per cent of families in (often disgusting and unsafe) temporary accommodation had an adult in work. As in this Peter Riley’s story, a single human being without an obvious disability comes nowhere on the list — in his case literally, as they simply dropped him off it.
Finally the ‘housing crisis’ is beginning to make mainstream news — though some of us have been talking about it all this time. In about 2003 or so I accompanied a Parliamentary Subcommittee on Empty Homes on a tour of the Ocean Estate in Stepney. I was nicely dressed and in a professional sort of job: communications manager at the Ocean New Deal for Communities programme. First, the MPs couldn’t believe the overcrowding they were seeing. Second, they were totally gobsmacked when I told them it wasn’t just ‘the poor’, and that my kids and I lived in a one-bedroom flat.
The reasons for the housing crisis go back to 1983, when Thatcher’s government brought in the Right to Buy, and council flats were sold at discount, with the money going to central government — and rules were made that explicitly prevented them being replaced with more social housing. All that Milton Friedman ‘Reaganomics’ and ‘trickle-down’ has now been comprehensively proven to be fraudulent. It was never going to work, and it never did work; all the money trickled upwards. When the new Tory government brought in its ‘austerity’ policy in 2010, they didn’t even bother to invent anything like trickle-down; they simply said there was no money for us, and started to squeeze. Since then they’ve systematically starved local authorities — and especially poorer ones — of the money needed to provide for their residents. Tower Hamlets has had to carve £200m out of its budgets since then.
This sort of personal story, Peter Riley’s story, is one thing Spitalfields Life really excels at: without being too overtly political — though he is always at ground level, and always supports the small and human — he shines a light, in close-up.
And he keeps doing it. Over time, although yes 'the Gentle Author' does sound arch, I've come to see that it's brilliant how he's retained his anonymity, and avoided becoming a personality cult. I used to know someone who used to know him in his previous life, though. Like Banksy, someone knows who he is.
Here's hoping Peter Riley gets a good outcome.
Great, interesting, post. I taught in TH for ten years and my parents were from Stepney and Bethnal Green plus a granddad who was born and lived on Commercial Road. I don't know Peter Riley (to my shame) so will check him out. Your notes about the housing scenario and monetarism are so true. But very few capitalist states have ever resolved what would seem to be quite solveable and should be, surely, the basis of any so-called civilisation.
I've been invited to read one of my poems tonight at a Medical Aid for Palestine event. I've never done this before, so, big breath and away we go.