Through a process of congregational development the church has both renewed its congregation (growing in size to a weekly attendance of 70 in 2023) and looked beyond the church into the neighbourhood. CTC has supported the church in this work, building a core team of community leaders who have engaged with institutions in the wider neighbourhood, particularly mosques and schools to be part of making local change.
Our most recent success has been supporting the community leaders, who themselves have experienced insecure and poor quality housing, to win a campaign for between 35-40 permanently affordable homes as part of a Community Land Trust. In July 2024 the community secured a grant from the GLA to support the project through to a planning application with the developer London Community Land Trust. We’ve also won a campaign to save a local swimming pool and leisure centre, right next to the church, with the council committing to redevelop it and build between 20-30 council homes as part of the redevelopment.
These campaigns have emerged over a number of years, particularly from a campaign for lighting in the park attached to St George-in-the-East Church. A team of leaders from the church negotiated with Tower Hamlets Council to install lights in the unlit park to improve safety. This small but significant win gave the local community encouragement and confidence to explore how the area around the church could be improved, including building affordable homes for social rent and refurbishing the existing pool and leisure centre in immediate proximity to the park and the church.
The core team for these campaigns has been comprised of primarily leaders from the church, but also leaders from across the neighbourhood who the church has built relationship with through their membership in Tower Hamlets Citizens and the establishment of a pandemic response team, Shadwell Responds. The other institutions who have supported this work at different stages have included Darul Ummah Mosque, Tower Hill Mission, East London Mosque, St Paul’s Whitechapel Primary School and a number of other primary schools. The core team, as well as the wider community who have engaged throughout the campaigns, represent the diverse demographics of Shadwell and its neighbourhood and have developed new leaders of all ages to take on new roles and responsibilities.
St George’s pool, leisure centre and council housing redevelopment
In 2019 we partnered with Create Streets to support our community in creating a design and strategy to ensure local people can shape their neighbourhood. Although the campaign began from St George-in-the-East Church it is now owned by the wider community in Shadwell and hundreds of people have taken part in workshops, action team meetings and engagement events in the church, the park, local market and local primary schools. All engagement was possible thanks to neighbourhood mapping done with the core team and utilising their relationships and networks to bring the community together to act.
During the COVID pandemic the leisure centre and swimming pool closed and failed to reopen when others in the borough did as lockdown eased. Having already heard in 2019 that local people valued this facility but wanted to improve it, the leadership team campaigned to secure the council’s commitment to redevelop the leisure centre, ensuring local people, particularly children, were shaping the facility. The previous plans created in 2019 also included affordable homes to rent so we incorporated this into the campaign, aiming to secure a commitment to building family-sized council homes.
Our first public action in December 2021 called on the council to keep the pool in Shadwell. Over 1000 primary school children were involved in creating a piece of artwork to represent the children’s voices in the campaign. The action was led by Fr Richard (St George-in-the-East Church) and Imam Kazi Ashiqur Rahman (Darul Ummah Mosque). The action was attended by the Tower Hamlets Mayor who made a commitment to meet with the local community to discuss the future of the pool facilities. After a series of meetings and engagement events with the council officers, paired with persistent pressure from our action team (and despite a change in political leadership) the council committed to keep the pool in Shadwell and the community secured their WIN! The council has since also committed to building between 20-30 family-sized council homes.
The second public action, in March 2024, was organised in collaboration with the council and held at Tower Hamlets Town Hall. Having secured the commitment to the redevelopment, the team wanted to ensure that local children, who had missed out on this vital facility since 2020, could shape the redevelopment so it met their needs and the community had a sense of ownership over it. Seven local primary schools brought their school councils (100 children) to the event and presented their top 3 priorities for the new development. These priorities emerged from a survey that the children ran in their schools (some schools surveyed all their classes, some just did KS2), so the views of 1375 children were represented at the event. The Deputy Mayor and lead Cabinet member attended and committed to exploring all of our asks on both leisure and housing. The Mayor of Tower Hamlets also acknowledged the event on social media and the ask by the children for there to be a water slide in the leisure centre. Finally our action led to the council prioritising 3 and 4 bedroom homes in the 20-30 council homes they’re planning to build in the redevelopment as opposed to 2 bedroom homes which were initially prioritised in their designs.
We are now awaiting the council’s planning application to confirm which of our asks they are including and hope to publicly celebrate the success of this campaign in Autumn 2024.
Cable Street Community Land Trust
This is a campaign led by St George-in-the-East Church and neighbours for 35-40 permanently and genuinely affordable homes as part of a Community Land Trust on a disused piece of land very close to the church. Our experience in campaigning for affordable housing is that it takes a long time and we have learnt a great deal already through the Cable Street campaign which began in 2016. After an assembly in Shadwell in 2016 with 10 local institutions where the lack of good quality affordable housing was the primary concern, the church led a research action to find a plot of land where the community could build homes that local people could afford.
Throughout this campaign CTC staff have supported the church and others in the local community to propel it forward, initially partnering with Darul Ummah Mosque through membership in Tower Hamlets Citizens. After identifying the site, discovering it was owned by Transport for London and gaining the support of the local council, the leadership team partnered with London Community Land Trust (LCLT) to submit a bid for the site through the Greater London Authority’s Small Sites Small Builders Programme. The CLT model is designed to tackle the issue that families are continually being forced further out of London, where their work, community, and often family are. In 2018 the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced that LCLT’s bid for the site had been successful and TfL would sell the land to LCLT to develop into affordable homes. Since 2018 we have built the core team and support in the wider community, particularly among families currently living in overcrowded housing (22% of household in Shadwell are overcrowded)
During the pandemic the church and mosque focused their attention on more immediate issues such as food poverty and digital inclusion as part of Shadwell Responds, winning a successful campaign to have Iceland added to the Government’s food voucher scheme. This prioritisation meant that, although the team for Cable Street continued to meet online, it was difficult to sustain momentum for the campaign. There were also issues with the financial viability of the site identified in 2020 which stalled its progress.
However, over the past year there has been a renewed campaign for securing affordable homes on this site. After years of technical negotiations which shut out the wider community, St George’s decided to take action. CTC has supported this work over the past year, building a more robust relationship with the London Mayor and Deputy Mayor for Housing.
The first of these actions took place in November 2023, where we gathered outside City Hall to ask Deputy Mayor Tom Copley to ‘get the deal over the line’, ensuring the land was secured for the purpose of building community-led genuinely affordable housing. 97 local people attended, including 30 school children from a local primary school, 5 of whom prepared and shared their own testimony about why this campaign mattered to them. Unfortunately the Deputy Mayor could not himself attend but a representative at the GLA came and committed for the Deputy Mayor to visit the site in January, meeting our community, and confirming support to complete this site.
At the action in January, our turnout was even greater with 115 people from across local institutions including Darul Ummah Mosque, East London Mosque, Queen Mary University, London CLT, and St George-in-the-East Church, supported by London Citizens. Alongside the Deputy Mayor’s attendance, the Bishop of London joined us 5 years after first blessing the site and shared her support for our perseverance as a community. Bishop Sarah also declared that the next time she visits she hopes there will be bricks on the site. Tom Copley publicly reaffirmed the public commitment of the GLA and TFL to support a planning application for a CLT on this site. The actions also gained the campaign regional recognition with Mayor Sadiq Khan naming the site specifically when committing to delivering CLTs across London in April 2024.
The project is now making good progress with funding secured through to a planning application, which London CLT hopes to submit in Spring 2025. The team, primarily rooted at St George’s, but with leaders from across the Shadwell neighbourhood, has grown in strength and there is a greater sense of ownership among the church with a belief that we will not give up fighting for the completion of Cable Street!
