No Room In The East

LYNCHPIX

Daniel Lynch Photography presents:

‘Image Of The Week #16’

This week’s fave frame is from my native east London.

A very interesting story broke last week right on my doorstep in one of the country’s poorest boroughs; The London Borough Of Newham. It circled around their housing waiting list, which is the most stretched in the capital with over 30,000 people waiting on a property.

The story was a relatively simple one; to alleviate this pressure on the borough & to lower that housing waiting list, the council were to offer residents housing placements outside of the borough instead. It turns out the placements offered were a loooong way outside the borough. Out of London in fact to Stoke-On-Trent among other places.

So that was that. My journo Kevin & I were dispatched to Plaistow to get a bit of colour for the piece gauging local opinions on this story.

We got a couple of great quotes from customers at a local laundrette including a guy who told us he’d recently been made homeless. He expressed his concern at the whole idea telling us of many unoccupied & derelict properties in the borough he’d happily move into rather than make the move north. It didn’t take much looking to find some.

After stumbling across a whole row of boarded-up properties in the Canning Town area, we agreed there was a much more interesting story here. Was it actually cheaper to leave these properties derelict & not collect their rents than the cost of actually repairing & maintaining them?

As host borough of the coming Olympic Games, all eyes are on Newham. This topic has become a bit of a political hot potato with various factions accusing the borough of ‘social cleansing’ ridding themselves of the undesirables before the world arrives. I’m not sure what to make of it, but our last discovery of the day was certainly an eye opener.

We stumble across Lund Point; a tower block on the edge of the Olympic Park almost completely empty. Residents have been all-but cleared out to make way for the BBC whom have acquired the upper levels to broadcast from (for an undicslosed fee).

We are granted access to the flat of one of the last remaining residents high up on the 17th floor. He tells us they are battling the council to remain in their homes. The block is set to be demolished shortly after the games closes with it set to be replaced with ‘affordable housing’. The guys we speak to are unconvinced any of the other residents will ever return…