A DEVELOPMENT in Kilburn is undemocratic – because there is no process for people to make their views known. Kilburn is a village split between Camden and Brent and this creates several problems.
Is it not time to lift the Curse of Kilburn? It was inflicted upon us some 900 years ago and it gets worse as the years go by.
Kilburn was born in the year 1134 when Kilburn Priory was built for a dozen nuns, in the middle of the Great Forest of Middlesex.
But by the end of that year the curse was inflicted upon us.
The two landlords were the abbot of Westminster and the canons of St Paul’s. They carved up the area between them and used the Roman road, Watling Street (today Kilburn High Road), as a convenient boundary, cutting the parish in half – and that is our curse.
It didn’t matter much until Kilburn’s open fields were enclosed in 1815. Modern Kilburn was born with the building of Greville Place in the 1820s – where five of the original houses remain. The great development followed soon after, with the arrival of the horse bus in 1829 and the Underground in 1863.
But instead of taking the moment of expansion to unite the two Kilburns, the curse was confirmed. Two vestries (civil parishes created by Elizabeth I and not to be confused with church parishes) sustained the carve-up.
Kilburn remained divided between the vestries of Hampstead and Willesden. In 1899 all urban vestries in England were abolished and Hampstead and Willes-den became boroughs.
Finally, in 1965 Hamp-stead was merged with St Pancras and Holborn to make Camden.
Brent was born in much the same way.
So today Kilburn has two town halls, one in Euston and the other in Wembley; both are miles away from Kilburn, where we face the absurdity of two police boroughs on opposite sides of the same street. Everyone knows that this is crazy, but we have got used to it and our political leaders refuse to face the problem. Everything just drifts – until now.
Something is now afoot that makes it impossible just to carry on as before. Right in the middle of Kilburn High Road (the boundary between the two boroughs) is Kilburn Square. It is just about Kilburn’s only architectural asset. The main shops are in or around the square. It houses the market. It has a rather fine open space that contains some urban character. It has all the making of a good civic centre.
Now along has come a commercial developer who proposes a plan that means the effective destruction of the square by halving its open space in the cause of making money. They propose advancing the 110-metre shopfront by no fewer than six metres. This means that the square would cease to be a square.
What is equally as bad is the presumption that the proposed development is solely the business of Brent. Only Brent people are being consulted.
The future of Kilburn Square concerns the very nature of Kilburn and is of equal interest to all residents regardless of their living in Camden or Brent.
Furthermore the period on public consultation was limited to 21 days and that period expired on December 22. This is disgraceful.
Kilburn Square cannot be abandoned to mere money-makers. It is a matter of concern to all who live and work there. Can we make this clear and put an end both to this proposal and, at last, to the appalling curse itself?
We need an all-Kilburn community council through which to register our feelings. Legislation exists to make this possible. Can we use it?
And to compound this, at the last general election 41 per cent of the electorate abstained. The normal percentage is 24 per cent. New Labour is looking for an answer – and they think they have found it.
Restore locality, they say, and to encourage this, we got Single Reeneration Budget schemes and Kilburn received more than £6million. Then the subject was taken up by the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Our local authorities were deluged with plans on how to re-activate our communities and end, it was hoped, the political apathy.
But how can we work on localities if they have no political structures through which to work in practice?
We used to have these structures in Camden – they were the vestries of Holburn, St Pancras and Hampstead. They were small.
Councillors and officers had close connections with people on the ground. Government was personal.
But when in 1899 all vestries were turned into boroughs, party politics took over. The personal touch went into sharp decline. In 1965 the three boroughs were fused into one and the personal touch all but vanished.
The wards and constituencies bear no relation to community life. They are artificial devices dreamed up for electoral reasons.
I have lived in Hampstead and Kilburn for 35 years but politically neither exist.
So each of Camden’s 16 townships needs its own Town Hall, with extensive decentralised powers and funding – and perhaps the curse of Kilburn will be lifted, once and for all.
• Peter Cadogan is a former tutor in the history of ideas at Birkbeck and WEA and chairman of the London Alliance for Local Democracy.