The Walk - A Ruskin/Gandhian Tour

A history focused community trail across four centuries: the walk takes its cue from John Ruskin’s holistic vision of citizens’ duty to posterity. It starts at Building 3, Chiswick Business Park — RIBA Award >>> Richard Rogers Partnership 2000 (www.enjoy-work.com). Other focal features are Gunnersbury Triangle (www.wildlondon.org.uk); the heritage rich South Acton Estate: polyglot, top graded centre of character shaping early childhood education; resident-governed, self reliant and William Morris themed birthplace of Royal Academician Patrick Caulfield; mixed architectural styles - 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st Centuries; sensing a "Villages-of-Vision" / New Lanark (www.newlanark.org) connection; and that of the Royal Society (www.royalsociety.org); through community owned recreation ground; crossing the 'Stamford Brook' to view Woodlands Park Ice House; the homes of William Willett (builder / originator of Daylight Saving Time) and Richard White, co-founder of The Law Society.

The Right to Manage Excellence and Beauty by Design

London's Courtauld Institute art graduate Gillian Darley is an award-winning architectural and landscape journalist/author. Her biographies of celebrated 17th century diarist John Evelyn, the John Ruskin mentored social housing innovator Octavia Hill and legendary architect John Soane are all assessed as seminal.

But the work for which it appears she is most admired is 'Villages of Vision'. In this she unveils a fascinating area of national heritage -- a neat profiling of hundreds of planned villages across Britain and Ireland. Included are Ealing's Bedford Park and Brentham Estates, and four World Heritage Site candidates: Saltaire, Bournville, Port Sunlight and New Lanark -- all characterised by varying measures of community self-reliance and self-management.

A Revolutionary Invention

Council Housing, as one of Britain's truly revolutionary social inventions (easily ranking with the NHS in original intent), is in many ways a twentieth century adaptation of Darley's visionary world.

But, alas, when municipal architects/urban designers pioneered the council housing model, only a few observed Octavia Hill's self-management vision and the Ruskin/Morris preventative maintenance maxim ('Put protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care'). That mistake was confronted over a quarter century ago when Sir George Young, then Ealing Acton MP and Tory Housing and Planning Minister, piloted through the British Parliament 'Statutory Instrument No 627, The Housing (Right to Manage) Regulations 1994'.

The period 1992 -- 2013 saw three studies (by Price Waterhouse Coopers, Oxford Brookes University and University of York) all fully endorsing the Right to Manage (RTM) as the way to govern, renew and regenerate council-owned residential estates and street blocks.

In 2002, the Tony Blair-led Labour government extended the RTM regime to leasehold tenants in the private sector. This development was initiated by MPs Frank Dobson and Nick Raynsford who dubbed the RTM an '... end to feudalism'.

Habitat Stewardship For Sustainability

The South Acton Neighbourhood (SAN / Acorn South Neighbauhaus*) features a mix of commercial and residential estates, including the multi-landlord South Acton Housing Estate, represented since 1997 by the Cabe/Arts & Business Award-Winning South Acton Residents Action Group (SARAG).

The core of SARAG's work is the 20 years of action research & learning with campaigning. It is heritage-guided and aimed at resident governance of South Acton and other residential blocks and estates in Ealing and beyond.

The guiding mission of SARAG is the attainment of community governance of SAN as a prototype aimed at guiding architects/urban planners in how to design the ingredients of resident management / governance into the early stages of planning residential blocks and estates. It is to this end that SARAG pursues the RTM as a key investment in sustainability through self-reliance.

Thus, in 2010, SARAG's strictly residents only Management Collective established the South Acton Community Builders Co-operative Ltd (SCBC) to deploy the 1994 RTM statute as a high value investment in sustainable habitat stewardship and participative regeneration. The aim is to guide replication of the South Acton pilot elsewhere as a contribution to community empowerment generally, and specifically to play a key role in the work of Cooperatives UK, and the Community Rights Movement, eg A Community Right To Beauty (www.respublica.org.uk) and A Community Right To Learn (www.right2learn.co.uk). Read more on all these rights at: www.mycommunityrights.org.uk

Participative Regeneration

Almost everything that SARAG does is action researched. Within the national culture, council housing estates are considered places with wrongs that need fixing by 'the powers that be'. Challenged to embrace Dr Booker T Washington's "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are" philosophy and always to start not with what is wrong, but with what's right about the place where they live, South Actonians have emerged a community of resilient, audacious, confident and exemplary doers! This is a community engaged in a prolonged, aesthetics driven rebellion against the status quo and towards an equitable agenda. The Chinese have a gem that expresses the tone of the landlord/resident relationship being sought: Pendeng Huli = 'Equality and Mutual Benefit'.

So, what if with the RTM, Britain's 2.5 million council tenants could be mobilised to move from their present purely consumer status to a vanguard role in national and global housing? What if, indeed …

The Right To Manage: Key investment in the Equitable and Sustainable City we need

“London might well be the greatest city in the world; plenty of us think so, but we’re biased (of course we are – we’re Londoners.) But London could certainly be better – more balanced, more equitable.

"A city for everyone, regardless of wealth” – Open House London 2016

“It is easier to rebuild communities around the best of what you’ve got than starting afresh” – Charles Wagner, Head of Regeneration, English Heritage (Regeneration & Renewal, March 17 2006)

Only what’s Equitable is Sustainable: Britain has the evidence -- New Lanark, Port Sunlight et al.

So, whether it’s building, or altering, a residential block or estate, The Community Right to Manage is now alongside the Right to Access, an Architectural/Urban Design Imperative.

“. . . And when we build, let us think that we build forever” – John Ruskin