Case Study

Shadwell

Campaigning

Over the last two and a half years St George-in-the-East church in Shadwell, East London, has facilitated and won a campaign for affordable Community Land Trust homes on a piece of land opposite the church. 

Shadwell parish is home to over 12,000 people, with a large Muslim Bengali community. It is one of the most deprived parish in England, ranking 890 out of 12,508* , with a lack of affordable housing, poorly maintained social and private housing, and overcrowding. Selina a local Muslim woman and community activist who became involved in St George’s housing work early on, said: ‘For larger families like ours, it’s a struggle’. Selina currently lives in a two-bedroom housing association flat around the corner from the church with her husband and their five children.

St George’s project started in 2015 when the church, having identified affordable housing as the most pressing concern in the community through a listening process, invited its members, Darul Ummah Mosque and the wider community, to a “Walk for Affordable Housing”. During this walk, they discovered a piece of brownfield land opposite the church which was owned by Transport for London and had been earmarked to be sold off as a commercial development. 

During the autumn of 2016, the church, mosque and wider neighbourhood developed an action team to campaign for the land to be developed as a Community Land Trust (CLT), a form of community-led housing which means that homes remain affordable across the generations by linking house prices to average incomes. In June 2017 children from the local school and adults in the action team testified about the impact of the housing crisis on their lives at a Shadwell Citizens Assembly with the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, who pledged his support for the campaign. 

In January 2018, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced the success of the campaign: all the housing to be built on the Cable Street site would be part of a Community Land Trust, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) would compensate Transport for London for the revenue they would lose by not selling it on the open market. Since then, with the support of London Community Land Trust, the church has been developing their proposals in consultation with the community. In 2020, they were awarded a £2 million grant to progress work.

Crucial to the community organising approach taken by St George’s is the principle that the means of working towards affordable housing are as important as the housing itself, as they seek to empower and develop leaders within communities. Father Angus, one of the Parish Priests at the church, said that central to the church’s vision is ‘a deep commitment to the agency of the poorest and the conviction that God chooses and raises up those whom the world counts as nothing’. As well as sharing their stories of housing difficulty in front of local councillors, members of the action team have planned and chaired meetings and developed other skills during the campaign. Longstanding congregation member and local East Londoner Phil described the importance of going beyond immediate relief and organising for justice, saying: ‘you need to get people involved, give them a purpose and help them realise they can change things…if you just give people a food parcel, they walk away’. 

Fr Angus felt there had been increased trust and strengthened relationships within the parish as a result of the campaign, with those who don’t have a Christian faith having seen the church as a place which cares for the whole neighbourhood. He said: ‘The church has been willing to recognise the activity of God in people beyond it’. The depth and diversity of friendships formed during the campaign, particularly across religions and such differences were a highlight for all of the interviewees. Selina for example, said: ‘The housing crisis is a common purpose and goal that we all share. I’m a Muslim, but this initiative was taken by the church and I have been welcomed…I feel I am part of the church’. These relationships were key to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Certain aspects of the church’s approach were crucial to the campaign’s success, in particular the collective institutional power and wider support provided by the Citizens UK alliance, of which the church is a member institution. ‘If St George’s hadn’t been a member of the wider alliance, none of this would have been possible’ Fr Angus said.  At a London wide Housing Assembly in November 2017, at which hundreds of institutions came together to hold the with Deputy Mayor of London to account on a range of housing issues, the Cable Street site was raised directly; a turning point in the campaign. For both Sarah-Emily (another member of the congregation and action team) and congregation member and local East Londoner Phil, these bigger assemblies provided inspiration, momentum and energy to sustain the smaller team. 

Fr Angus spoke about the physical ‘space’ that the church provided for the community to come together: ‘Churches, along with mosques and synagogues’, he said, ‘are the places and spaces that people in neighbourhoods can gather across difference to put their lives into a bigger picture and act for the good of their neighbourhood’. Selina, not a member of the church, nonetheless felt the campaign was strengthened by having an establishment that people could recognise, with existing relationships and a reputation. 

Sarah-Emily felt the resource of having a formally employed community organiser at the church, as a point of contact to hold everything together, facilitate meetings, provide focus and motivation, had been valuable. Indeed, since the campaign’s start, three part-time organisers have been employed by the church as part of a collaboration with the Centre for Theology and Community. The support of London CLT has also been valuable in providing the technical expertise resources, skills and capacity. For example, it assisted in designing a bid to submit to the GLA once the land had been won, proposing different ideas for what the site might look like when CLT homes are built, and has since facilitated community workshops. 

Interviewees were motivated strongly by their personal faith, and a sense of the church’s wider ministry and mission. Fr Angus said this work comes out of a deep theological and spiritual commitment by the church to ‘listening and participating in what God is doing in people’s lives, especially the poorest’ whilst Sarah-Emily spoke of how, ‘it’s important to me as a Christian to look after the needs of other people and try to leave the world in a better place, it is through activities like this that people come to God’. For Phil, ‘it’s all part of pastoral care really, isn’t it?’, something which he feels is the duty of the church. Phil and Selina’s motivation for getting involved was also underpinned by lived experience. Phil, who was born in the East End in the 1950s, had the memory of growing up in housing deprivation. He now lives onsite accommodation at the Royal London Hospital where he works, so appreciates and wants to share the benefits of comfortable, affordable and secure accommodation close to the place where he works. 

The church’s campaign has not been without challenges. Working at a pace that engages with people’s lived experience, particularly those experiencing acute housing need, Fr Angus and Sarah-Emily both said, is not easy. It could be hard to find times when everyone could make meetings and to sustain commitment beyond a small core of people within the action team. Selina was heavily pregnant when she first got involved, and spoke about how ‘I was struggling, but I went because there was a light at the end of the tunnel… this is not just about me, it’s for the benefit of the whole community’.  Sarah-Emily said that maintaining momentum in the earlier stages of the campaign was difficult: ‘It took a while for anything to happen’. The community organising approach takes time and persistence, which can be challenging when dealing with a set of issues as immediate and urgent as housing.

Despite a huge need for affordable properties to rent as well as own, the CLT homes will only be available to buy. This, Fr Angus said, is because of how difficult it is to build living rent homes which are not susceptible to Right to Buy – something which would risk the homes being sold on at higher prices in the future, continuing to fuel the housing crisis, and undermining the CLT model. This has been a source of disappointment to the team, in light of which they have identified the need to act on a range of housing issues. 

These identified issues are reflected in their future priorities which includes more action around renting and the increasingly poor conditions in Housing Association properties, something Selina and others in the team have experienced first-hand. The group also plans to explore a number of other pieces of land near the church. In Selina’s words: ‘We’re just at the beginning really. If we work collectively as a community, with the church leading and supporting us, much more will happen’.

St George-in-the-east have now identified additional sites where affordable housing and temporary accommodation for homeless people could be built. For more information, see their blog about this.

*and CUF look up tool, where 1 is the most deprived parish.