Local
historian and housing specialist, Peter Williams, relates the interesting story behind one of
Forest Gate's most prominent land marks: Donald Hunter House.
Introduction
Most Forest Gate residents will be familiar with the tall building
at the corner of Woodgrange Road and Romford Road above the Iceland store.
Older residents will know it as Telephone House. Newcomers may know it as
Donald Hunter House, and it has quite an interesting history.
That corner of Forest Gate suffered substantial damage in
the Blitz, with the original Victorian Methodist church destroyed by bombs on
17 April 1941. It was replaced in the post war period by the current church. The
Princess Alice pub was also destroyed and had to be replaced in 1950s.
Council flats were built to replace the Victorian villas of
the Woodgrange estate. The council took the opportunity to provide a new public
library for Forest gate. This was at first floor level above the council built
shops with an entrance in Claremont Road. This was replaced in the last 15
years or so and the old library became a training centre run by a local
charity.
The architects model below commissioned by Newham Council
shows the vision for the area from Osborne Road to Romford Road. Not all of
this was built but Telephone House can be seen to the right, and the low rise
shops with library above to the left.
The current Forest Gate library occupies the ground floor of
what was Telephone House. The library was originally branded The Gate, but has
been recently rebranded the CNC or Community Neighbourhood Centre, reflecting
the new role libraries have assumed in Newham. The book stock has been reduced
and space created for a wide variety of community activities and events.
Telephone House, Woodgrange Road, was built in 1958 by
what was then the Post Office, that ran both what we think of as post offices,
but also Post Office Telephones, the forerunner of what became BT (British
Telecommunications) when privatised by Mrs Thatcher.
The
building was the headquarters of Post Office Telephones for the eastern area of
the London. On the ground floor was a Post Office, which later moved across the
road into a private shop. There was also a showroom on the ground floor of
Telephone House displaying the latest telephone equipment for sale when you
could only by your phone (landline) from BT. There was no choice in those days!
BT leave
Around about the year 2000 BT declared the whole building
including the tower block redundant as they rationalised their offices. In
recent years it has become commonplace to convert old offices into residential
(not least because the Cameron government liberalised planning laws to help
this happen, developers often no longer need planning permission). But in 2000
it was still relatively rare to convert office to residential.
The old Telephone House was bought by a company called
Peabody Unite plc with the intention of converting it into housing for
keyworkers. There was already a housing crisis in London and people like
trainee nurses, social workers and teachers had a desperate need but cheap but
accessible accommodation.
In the 1980s Newham Council in fact had made some hard to
let council flats available for teachers, social workers and other young
professionals who they found hard to recruit into the borough to work for them
and other public bodies, but by the late 1990s these schemes had come to an end
as homeless pressures increased and the council could not spare flats. The
Metropolitan Police also had small tower blocks of its own to accommodate young
constables at Selsdon Road, Upton Park and another one behind East Ham police
station, but these were sold off many years ago.
Donald Hunter House, today |
Peabody Unite plc was itself an interesting organisation, a
joint venture between the famous Peabody Housing Association, founded in
Victorian times by the great American philanthropist George Peabody, and Unite
Group plc, then a small private company
specialising in key worker housing. As the press release put it:
London NHS workers gain new affordable
homes with Peabody Unite's £33 million investment
2 August 2000
The UNITE Group plc, the UK's
leading specialist provider of accommodation services for students and key
workers, has today announced that its joint venture operation with the Peabody
Trust, Peabody Unite, is developing two schemes in London, which will be worth
£33.3 million on completion, and will create more than 500 quality, affordable
bed spaces for Barts and the London NHS Trust homes workers in Whitechapel and
Forest Gate, East London.
On
completion the building was renamed Donald Hunter House after a well known
doctor and according to the company “provided quality Peabody
UNITE
homes for 256 key workers.”
In
2013 the owners applied to vary their original planning permission which had
said that they could only house ‘economically active’ people i.e. keyworkers in
the dwellings but Newham Council refused to agree this change to the planning
rules for the block. In 204 a different planning application allowed the
building for the first time to be used as a hostel. (see below)
Quality
was always an issue in the building as the faculties were fairly basic with
small rooms and shared facilities such as communal kitchens. It was never
hugely popular with the NHS staff it was targeted at and Peabody Unite began to
market it to a wider audience of keyworkers, and by late 2013 when it closed in
that form they were housing some students there.
Unite
plc (not with Peabody) went on to be a major provider of private sector student
housing in London building many new blocks all over central London. Their rents
are not cheap, and now they attract a huge number of foreign students with rich
parents who can afford their market rents.
They
have massive new-build schemes in Stratford, notably the thousand home red
building with a stepped profile that towers at 28 floors over the Olympic Park
behind John Lewis, (called Stratford One and opened in 2014) and the 750 room
scheme at the corner of Angel Lane by Stratford tube station opened 2015. East
London has been a success story for them.
Donald
Hunter House was less of a success and was put up for sale around 2014. On 15th
October that year 4-20 Woodgrange Road was acquired by an offshore company Stratos
Holdings, Martello Court, Admiral Park, St Peter Port, Guernsey. It is the
only property owned by the company in the UK and the holding includes both The
Gate library and Iceland stores. So,
Newham Council are paying rent to Stratos in order to run a library there.
This information is drawn from public Land Registry data
that has featured on this site before in an article showing links of Forest Gate properties to tax havens (see here).
Stratos was specially created offshore to hold the building
but the actual owner are Saudi Arabian oil interests. When it became clear that
Forest Gate was to become a beneficiary of the opening of a Crossrail station, Donald
Hunter House was snapped by this Saudi company, sensing a good return on the
investment would be pretty much guaranteed.
The Saudis decided they did not want to demolish and
redevelop straight away so they looked round for an interim use. They got in
touch with one of a number of private sector companies that have developed over
the last decade or so specialising in providing homeless temporary
accommodation to London boroughs.
Homeless
accommodation
London councils have always wanted to try to avoid the use
of so called Bed and Breakfast hotels, which in reality are simply another form
of private rented accommodation where the council is paying a premium for its
immediate availability. Central Government introduced a target a few years ago
saying councils must not leave families in B&B for more than 6 weeks, and this
forced councils into the hands of a different kind of private landlord,
offering short term lets in the private sector at a price below a hotel price
but normally above rents for ordinary self contained private accommodation.
Often it was the same businessmen involved in both kinds of accommodation.
Nevertheless this new style of homeless temporary
accommodation was often of a slightly better standard than the traditional
B&B with a higher degree of self containment, some being small flats or
studios. Councils entered into longer term contracts to secure a better overall
price.
One such private property company was TANDO who did business
with Newham council in Canning Town to put back into use some empty council
flats that were awaiting a more comprehensive redevelopment. However they ran
into some difficulties there outlined in a story in the Newham Recorder early
in 2017.
This story was also covered in the Guardian. Another of
these specialist companies was Theori:
A Freedom of information Act (FOI) request to Newham in 2015
sought to tease out the relationship between Newham Council and the following
companies:
·
Tando Homes Ltd and associated companies
·
Theori Investments
·
Omega Lettings - and associated companies; and
·
Mears Group
All these companies have links. Tando in fact is a shortened
form of Theori AND Omega, T and O. To
quote from a council report online in the context of Canning Town and Custom
House:
Theori Property Services Ltd has
a stated environmental policy that demonstrates a commitment, wherever
practical to use environmentally friendly products (such as condensing
boilers). They have a waste management strategy designed to deal with
refurbishment and build waste. Both the environment policy and waste management
strategy will be adopted by TANDO Property Services Ltd.
Donald Hunter House was under the Omega lettings brand and
in recent period has been block booked by Tower Hamlets Council for their
homeless families. Newham Council had used it briefly in 2014/15 but Tower
Hamlets were able to pay a better price due to the quirks of the Housing
Benefit system – the rent allowance is higher in Tower Hamlets than Newham.
Many of the social care and education costs of these families of course fall on
Newham, though some families travel back to their home borough for schooling.
Omega operates as a Registered Provider, regulated by a government bod,y but
unlike a housing association it makes profits for its shareholders.
Conclusion
When it comes to homelessness there is a ‘dog eat dog’
attitude amongst London boroughs as they are all competing for scarce housing
resources, and landlords are able to profit from this lack of cooperation in
London. London has 32 housing authorities; New York is just 5 boroughs and with
a Mayor across the whole city with stronger strategic powers than
London’s. In London councils have been
forced into the hands of highly profitable property businesses specialising in
homeless temporary accommodation due to the lack of affordable supply. Donald
Hunter House is held offshore in a tax haven pending re-development by Saudi
oil money.
References
Planning applications can be seen online at Newham planning
portal. FOIs are here:
where did the g.p.o. engineering staff go when leaving telephone house ?
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