1a Pike

1a, KX Exchange David Pike – page for additional material and links.

Camden council documents relating to the events described in David Pike’s vignette:

comments are open so the author or others can add material.

LBC overview for KX Exchange 8 11 88

Camden’s 1988 Community Planning Brief https://kingscrossfrombelow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/1988-lbc-community-planning-brief.pdf

Contributors’ Dialogue:  David Pike

This has been a  stimulating journey back in time for me. It has involved working with a friend and ex-colleague Bill Risebero and with community activists who were during my time at Camden Council mainly on the other side of the table. However we all shared a strong commitment to a future Kings Cross that would embrace the basic needs of  the surrounding communities for decent housing, jobs, shops, schools and leisure facilities. Yes the development of Kings Cross, because of its unique focus as a transport hub would have London-wide, national and international significance. And as professional planners we were required to weigh this in the balance. But as local authority planners it was clear that our priority should be to promote the dreams and aspirations of local people. The clue was in our job title.

Listening to and reading the reflections of the fellow authors of this book I have been struck by the enormous expertise and wide range of  experience the local activists and academics brought to the process of dealing with such a huge inner city development. There cannot be many more concentrations of such expertise anywhere in the UK and indeed much of this is still present as witnessed by this book! The question is, to what extent was this enormous local resource used by those both designing the scheme and those evaluating it. Because of the planning system requirements to take strategic as well as local issues into account not all the activist’s aspirations could prevail. But did any prevail? This book aims to provide answers from their perspective.

In the end the test of the success of Kings Cross as what has been called an exemplary inner city development lies in how it meets the needs of the people experiencing it day to day. So how does it stack up?

Most would agree that a very positive benefit is the banishment of the drug dealing, kerb crawling and prostitution that we faced in the 1980s. There are well-paid jobs and expensive apartments for people from all over London, Europe and the rest of the world. A highly ranked art school in which I taught provides tuition for many overseas students. High-end shopping and restaurants are there for the relatively affluent to enjoy. The well-designed spaces of Granary Square and the canal side provide relaxation and enjoyment for visitors and  some of the historic industrial fabric has been well conserved. The outstanding examples of this are the St Pancras Station engine shed and hotel and the frontage of Kings Cross station. Neither of these were part of the Argent scheme.

But the development site is surrounded by low-income Camden and Islington communities living mainly in social housing in the estates of Somers Town, Regents Park, Kings Cross south of Euston Road, Copenhagen Street, Caledonian Road and Pentonville. The Argent scheme seems to offer little to these thousands of people in their every-day lives other than perhaps a pleasant place in which to occasionally wander.

The story told in this book suggests that the powerful voices within these communities were heard but not acted upon sufficiently to have much influence on the outcome. One of the ironies of the story is that apparently Camden Council and the developer were keen to avoid the ‘calling-in’ of the planning application by central government, firstly  to avoid delay in the implementation of the scheme but  secondly to prevent too much emphasis on market-driven, central government concerns at the expense of local needs which paradoxically is exactly what we see in the Kings Cross of today.

Finally I think the ‘Recollections Based’ process adopted by the editors in the telling of this story was the right one. It  has a different sense of rigour to that of the strict data driven approaches frequently adopted in research of this kind. This book is a deliberately partial but highly accessible account of a  complex process of urban development from the point of view of local community activists and innovators wanting to influence the future of their area. It is history from below!

July 2025