On 5 February 2026 Zoë Garbett, Green Party member of the London Assembly hosted a gathering at City Hall under the banner Fighting London’s profit-driven estate demolition and gentrification.
Speakers from a number of threatened estates testified to the injustices and miseries increasingly imposed on tenants and residents as the increasingly profit-driven ‘regeneration’ machine operates across the city. Tenants from the Lesnes Estate at Thamsmead, Brick Lane, Aylesbury, West Kentish Town and many others spoke, as did Joseph Jones from the London tenants Federation and Richard Lee from Just Space – the 2 organisations which set up and manage the EstateWatch.London web site.
A detailed write-up including the many round-table discussions among the 100 or so participants will be posted here when it is available. Here is an account from Focus E15 including the speech of Joseph Jones of LTF.
Richard Lee of Just Space said “The question for our tables to discuss is about the resources and practical measures that are needed to protect tenants whose estates are under threat.
Knowledge about housing and planning is central to this, as we have heard, but other types of knowledge are very important too. Tenants need to know their rights and have access to legal advice. They also need to know about tools they can use to make the case for an alternative to demolition, such as retrofit surveys and trauma informed practice as part of a community health impact assessment.
Most of us here need more support to be able to do the above, but what about tenants on estates who are not here! We very much need resources for an outreach programme. How can the London Assembly support this? Where else do we go for resources and how do we coordinate this? Coordination of our activities is a big issue. Zoe has brought us together today, but we need a space that brings us together more often. We are asked today to give our ideas for policy change but without resourcing communities on the ground, good policies will never be put into practice.”
A group of students at the Bartlett School of Planning at UCL have been working with EstateWatch.London to update the web site and have prepared a leaflet suitable for use in door-to-door canvassing on estates. A copy can be downloaded from here for you to print:
https://justspace.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/FinalJustSpaceGuideLeaflet.pdf
Also available is the full report by EstateWatch, Alternative Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration.
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