NOT many people have heard of H. Forman & Son of Marshgate Lane, London E15, but the ones that have tend to matter: Gordon Ramsay, Anton Edelmann, the Dorchester, the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. Forman’s is the oldest-established salmon curer in Great Britain, a family business dating back to 1905. When the £1.4 billion Hotel Wynn opened in Las Vegas last week, Forman’s supplied six tonnes of product.
In 2002, the expansion and reopening of its plant after a fire was important enough to attract a grant from the London Development Agency (LDA). Within a year the same people were telling Forman’s to pack up and clear off, another victim of London’s Olympic zealots.
We hear a lot about the dedication of Olympic athletes. If the capital succeeds in its bid to host the 2012 Games, the greatest sacrifice will have been made by 300 businesses crudely evicted to make way for the latest government sideshow. They include market leaders such as H. Forman, Sortex — Exporter of the Year 2004, no less — Edwin Shirley and local companies that provide thousands of humble jobs, clearing London’s waste and debris.
What Kelly Holmes gave up does not compare to the contribution expected from Lance Forman. There will be no gold medal on the day his race is run, more likely a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) and a derisory cheque in the post. In Marshgate Lane, an unlovely corner of the London Borough of Newham, a workforce the size of MG Rover is to be placed at risk for the sake of three weeks of sport. London 2012 was prepared to pay for the next Eric the Eel but, despite promises, has yet to reach firm agreement on compensation packages with 292 businesses affected by its plan to build an Olympic facility where their offices used to be.
Conspiracy theorists say the LDA is marking time until after the IOC selects a host city on July 6. Right now, there remains a battle for hearts and minds, but if London wins, the hoopla will begin and the LDA will be able compulsorily to purchase land without respect for local sensibilities. Forman’s will not be so much smoked out as thrown, head first, through the saloon doors. Olympic legends gaily stride through London in 2012 promotional videos; the reality is wholesale trampling on blue-collar jobs in an area not overblessed with career opportunities.
London 2012 says that the redevelopment of the Olympic Park area alone would generate work for 11,000, but this is bogus logic. Jobs created by a building project end when construction work is completed. Those who shaped Homebush Park in Sydney are not now employed selling tickets at an empty stadium. Tim Norman, managing director of Edwin Shirley Trucking — “we’re the warm-up track” — has worked at the company for 27 years. The Olympic Park offers only short-term employment while messing with jobs that could have lasted a lifetime.
It is the same fuzzy accounting that supermarkets always provide when charged with killing a high street. They cite massive job creation without mentioning that many of the positions are for cheap labour, unskilled and part-time. Supermarkets provide work for teenage shelf-stackers and lose it for butchers and fishmongers. The LDA is worse. When the last stone is in place it will not need hod-carriers any more. Think of the Millennium Dome.
To build it, hundreds of businesses were displaced. Yet how many people work there now? Six security guards and a German shepherd called Alfie.
The alleged rejuvenation of a run-down area of London is another red herring. Norman, more philosophical than foaming at the mouth, having been through a similar process when Edwin Shirley was relocated to Marshgate Lane to accommodate the Jubilee Line extension nine years ago, insists that the pictures of a desolate landscape that are invariably used to illustrate what a boon the Olympics will be to East London are of plots belonging to the LDA, which are deliberately underdeveloped. “It is not all tumbleweed and dry earth down here,” he told me yesterday. “It can be dirty, but London is a dirty place and a lot of dirty jobs need to be done. Truck firms, skip firms, cleaning firms, these are businesses that service the city. They cannot act as if they do not matter.”
To illustrate his point, he cites his neighbours, Bedrock, one of the largest concrete crushing companies inside the M25. Bedrock has been going for ten years and breaks down and recycles a million tonnes of rubble annually. It is the nearest plant of its type to the city, where most of its contracts originate. Present jobs include clearance from a site that once was Simpsons of Piccadilly. Bedrock’s business ensures that hardly any concrete goes to landfill sites and its yard takes up to 400 truck movements daily. So far, the LDA has come up with no viable alternate locations. A site in Dagenham, Essex, seven miles farther out, was dismissed immediately, while a position in Beckton, next to one of the biggest sewage farms in Europe, was understandably unpopular with staff.
Seamus Gannon, owner of Bedrock, said: “I think they have not set aside enough money for the project and are trying to rob us to make up the shortfall. Our yard has a river frontage. Right now it is an acre site for a concrete business but, once we are gone, I know what it will be worth. The LDA have offered me £750,000 — but where can you buy an acre in London for that?
“I have employed a guy to find me a site and he cannot get anything for less than £4 million. The LDA options were a long lease next to a sewage works at which the smell was horrendous or Dagenham, which is no good at all.” Gannon estimates that the extra journey time to the city necessitated by a move east would require the purchase of another 25 giant tipper trucks. These vehicles do eight miles to the gallon and his yard takes 400 trips each day. So weigh that alongside the commitment of Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, to anti-pollution measures. On one hand, he is planning to charge Londoners £8 to visit their city by car, on the other he is part of the process to put 25 more petrol-guzzling tipper trucks on the road, doing 2,800 extra miles daily. Very green, Ken. Even more overpowering than the stench of the Beckton sewage works is the hypocrisy of these flag-wavers for London’s bid.
The LDA has spent the past year rubbishing the Marshgate Lane businesses as a greedy minority, when what comes across time and again is its own desire to grab land that cannot be replaced on the cheap.
Lance Forman reached agreement in principle with the LDA over relocation on the understanding that purchase, planning and design costs for his new smoking site would be met. Having found a place in nearby Hackney, no more than 7 per cent bigger than his present position, he presented the good news to the LDA, only to be told the deal was off.
He could, the LDA said, buy the site and if the 2012 bid were successful it would make a contribution; if it was not, he could sell the land and stay where he was. Except Forman is a salmon smoker, not a property speculator, and could not take such risk. Nor does the market- value offer for land that cannot be found elsewhere impress him. “It is like being stranded on a desert island and getting offered market value for your raft,” he said.
After a meeting with Mark Stephens, the lawyer representing the businesses, the LDA promised to come up with a solution today. Given the shortage of land locally, Stephens, whose father competed for Great Britain in the last London Olympics in 1948, was not hopeful. Asked if he could see the LDA making up the difference between, for instance, Bedrock’s £750,000 sale and its £4 million purchase of a new site, he grimly laughed.
“The LDA talk the talk but they cannot walk the walk,” he said. “There is insufficient land with appropriate access and planning permission. I would estimate one or two firms will get a life preserver but the overwhelming majority will not be able to survive. We are in dire straits and I am probably more despondent than at any time in two years.
“The LDA specifically said it would rehouse businesses by swapping the land in Marshgate Lane for land of its own. Whether by conspiracy or cock-up, this has not happened. Now they are being left to their own devices to build factories if any land can be found. Many of these businesses are financially vulnerable. They have preyed on the weakest members of the business community. If London gets the Olympics there will be a CPO issued for July 2007, with the first compensation hearing due a year later, and in many cases longer. It does not need a genius to work out there will be real difficulty staying afloat.”
For shame, the Prime Minister, Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, and Lord Coe, the 2012 bid leader, have not paid a visit to Marshgate Lane. Maybe they sent an emissary in Paula Radcliffe, though, who passed within 1.7 miles of the site when she last ran the Flora London Marathon. After all, what she paused to do in the streets of the capital is pretty much what the organisers of London 2012 will be doing to the locals if they get the green light on July 6.
- E-mail Martin Samuel at aogy90@dial.pipex.com
