The drift of the piece by Stewart Payne is that the Enfield Lock scheme was the model for the decontamination of a series of other brownfield sites, worked-out sheds, shacks and bunkers that once operated alongside London’s rivers and canals. A cosmetic scrape at the topsoil, a capping of the lower levels, wouldn’t do.
An attitude of mind that found its apotheosis in the Millennium Dome on Greenwich peninsula was evident throughout New Labour’s remapping of the outer belts, the ex-suburbs. Nobody can afford to live at the heart of the city, unless they are part of the money market (or its parasitical forms). The City of London is therefore the first Island Village; sealed off, protected, with its own security. Middle-grade workers and service industry Transit van operatives will be pushed out towards the motorway fringes. The hollow centre will then be divided up: solid industrial stock, warehouses and lofts, will go to high-income players (City, media); Georgian properties (formerly multiple-occupied) will recover their original status (and double as film sets for costume dramas); jerrybuilt estates will go to the disenfranchised underclass, junkies and asylum seekers.
Unsafe as Houses: Urban Renaissance or Toxic Timebomb (Exposing the methods and means of building Britain’s homes on contaminated land). A report, commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Enfield Lock Action Group Association, revealed that planning permission had been granted before questions about contamination had been resolved. Planning permission was, in fact, granted on the basis of information supplied by the developers. Enfield Council’s chief planning officer, Martin Jarvis, stepped down from that role. He soon found a new position: as a director of Fairview Homes. He was among familiar faces. His son also worked for Fairview, as did the daughter of Richard Course, chairman of the council’s environment committee.
‘Should I cover my shoulders?’
I returned to Enfield Lock, to a cottage in Government Road, with the filmmakers Chris Petit and John Sergeant. We had arranged to record an interview with local activist Beth Pedder. Pedder lived on the edge of Enfield Island Village. She was one of the authors of the Unsafe as Houses report. Her testimony confirmed the impression I formed on the original walk with Bill Drummond and Marc Atkins: bad turf, suppressed history.
Pedder became involved with community politics when she started agitating against cars and for a school. ‘Our first issues were traffic and the overloading and log jamming of our local roads, already laden with industrial traffic. We worried over the lack of health care, and the lack of a new school for an Island development of 1,300+ new homes in an area already deprived of services.’
National journalists and television companies took an interest when the exploitation of brownfield sites was advocated as the solution to the housing problem by a telephone directory-sized report from an urban task force, chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside: Towards an Urban Renaissance. That’s Lord Rogers as in the Richard Rogers Partnership, Dome designers by appointment to Bugsby’s Marshes. Greenwich peninsula was showbiz brownfield, Peter Mandelson as Kubla Khan. Enfield Lock was left to Fairview Homes plc. They picked up the Royal Small Arms Factory makeover: land contaminated ‘with an Arsenic to Zinc range of chemical substances, plus explosives, oils and tars and the by-products of five gas works’.
In 1984 the Ministry of Defence, which controlled a major parcel of land (very loosely mapped) around Waltham Abbey, on both sides of the M25, decommissioned the Royal Small Arms Factory and sold it to British Aerospace (BAe). British Aerospace got together with Trafalgar House to launch a joint venture company, Lea Valley Developments (LVD). Limited tests were carried out on the contaminated land. In 1996 LVD sold the land to the housing wing of Hillsdown Holdings, Fairview New Homes.
Pedder found herself being interviewed for Panorama. ‘Wear black, cover your shoulders, get rid of the Pat Butcher earrings,’ she was told by the media Taliban. They didn’t want her coming over as a central casting hippie, a wacky-baccy anarchist of the suburbs. We didn’t care what she wore. Our motives were just as suspect. Pedder’s tattoos were a work of art: naked nymphs climbing out of lilies, with a few revisions and skin-graft cancellations elsewhere. Silver bracelets, rings. Black nail varnish.
None of which had anything to do with what she had to say, the seriousness of her research and the effectiveness of her pursuit of the true story. She couldn’t set foot in Enfield Island Village. Conservationists, bird-watchers and tree-lovers had been chased off by the hard hats. Some had been threatened with sticks. Beth kept at it, digging for facts, writing letters to ministers, asking to see documentation. If Pedder hung on, won the day, it couldn’t be long before Julia Roberts would be hired, painted tattoos and nose-stud, to battle the corporate giants in a Californian mock-up of Enfield Lock.
Beth spoke with feeling. ‘We were concerned that the MOD had produced no records for this site. We would be interested to know why.’ Enfield has a long tradition of enforced silence. ‘It was always a very secretive site. Ex-workers said that no one was allowed outside their own area. People didn’t have a clue what went on in other areas. We had one ex-worker who attested to the fact that the building she worked in was tested every month with a geiger-counter. They had large X-ray rooms and three lead-lined rooms with lead floors, lead ceilings. They had a rocket test tunnel that ran the length of the site. It had an internal railway. There were people with white coats and radiation badges who went further into the site than anyone else was allowed to go. Workers were blood-tested every month.’
The zone was known as the ‘Enfield Military Complex’.
Secret State parkland. Surrounded by water. Pedder was concerned that the local developers had no experience with contaminated land on this scale. ‘They didn’t have any MOD records. They didn’t at first acknowledge that there was much contamination, despite the fact that previous test results had shown high levels of mercury, lead, nickel, cadmium, chrome, copper, zinc. There are PCBs, high quantities of asbestos. They don’t even have a complete set of maps to show where the pipes run. There was a bash and burn policy with the MOD. They either burnt their leftovers, or they made them much smaller, bashed them up and buried them. A report was done by a Government body that expressed concern that the MOD didn’t have records for a lot of these sites, sites where radiation appeared to be present.’
We drink our tea in a pleasant kitchen, in one of the workers’ cottages from the old days of the Small Arms Factory. We walk out into the garden. Look across a brown canal at the new estate. Pedder talks about the stink from the London Waste site at Edmonton. ‘With all incinerators, there’s a five-mile circumference within which you can suffer the effects.’ Smoke. Hanging clouds that never migrate. In the early days, Pedder contacted her MP, Tim Eggar. He phoned her back. ‘This is business,’ he said. ‘There’s big money involved.’ When Pedder pressed her case, Eggar replied: ‘Are you entirely stupid? Profit before people, that’s how the world works.’
Memory is trashed. ‘I was told by an ex-worker, at the time when the site was decommissioned, that MOD turned up and took away vast amounts of files. It looked like they had been ransacked, records and details scattered about the floor. They came and flooded the place. We understand the records were taken to Aylesbury. Without the MOD records we will never know. There could be anything. A lot of the substances are mobile in water. A lot of them are carcinogenic. Crown Immunity means the site was never inspected by a local authority. They weren’t covered by the rules for disposing of substances. The MOD’s accepted and published policy, they’ve admitted to it, was bash, burn, destroy.’