The touch and go years

 “It was touch and go whether or not it would be a success', comments Jennifer Jenkins, Chair of the Trust from 1974 to 1977. “Here was an opportunity to provide jobs and community services in a densely populated and neglected area. But it involved reconciling two partners - a Tory borough with left wing community activists. I still think it was one of the most interesting and difficult things I've ever done”. 

Commercial development 

Community organisations in the 1960s and early 70s were not generally involved in self-financing operations, let alone the commercial development of property. For most, the focus was on play projects and community associations, literacy schemes and welfare benefits, tenants' rights and housing campaigns. In North Kensington, many of the Trust's supporters had had bitter battles with private landlords and despised the idea of property development. So it was not surprising that some community representatives persisted with their wholesale opposition to the idea of the Trust developing any of its land commercially. 

The North Kensington Playspace Group, when campaigning for the motorway land had, as early as 1967, suggested that a proportion of income could be raised from rents. Commercial development of some of its land now offered the Trust the only realistic prospect of funding its ambitious plans for badly needed community facilities. Pressure from local groups, disenchanted with the Trust's lack of progress, influenced the committee. A majority now favoured the Trust undertaking some commercial schemes. 'We were anxious to get going whatever projects we could raise the money for – it was a question of seizing opportunities', says Jenkins. She steered through the Trust's first commercial project at Malton Road – the conversion of nine motorway bays into light industrial units to generate rental income. Two years after completion all the bays were occupied and, as an important consequence, brought jobs into an area of high unemployment. 

Learning to be a developer 

The Trust was still feeling its way forward with the opportunities that came to hand. Funding for Acklam Hall came from the GLC through an initiative from a working party of residents from the neighbouring Swinbrook Estate. The commercial mortgage for the Malton Road units was obtained through personal contacts. Financing of the charity offices in Thorpe Close started out as an act of philanthropy from a local developer. But in its new role as a developer, the Trust had some important lessons to learn. When Roger Matland, the Trust's new Director, arrived in 1976 he was shown over the charity offices being completed at No 1, Thorpe Close. The building looked fine on the ground floor. Upstairs, where the plans showed a second floor of offices, there was an empty concrete shell. The contractors were due to leave the site within weeks. A generous offer to pay half the capital costs of the building had been made by property developer Gabriel Harrison. But no formal agreement had been taken up by the Trust, and the offer lapsed with his death in 1975. Perry had stripped down the job specification in a desperate attempt to reduce costs. With some smart fundraising footwork by Matland and a prompt response from the Voluntary Services Unit at the Home Office, a grant of £75,000 saved the day. Thorpe Close was completed and provides two floors of charity offices, with a third of the offices reserved for national charities – a condition of the Home Office grant. 

The Trust's first commercial mortgage, obtained for Malton Road, was another lesson in how careful the organisation had to be in the way it financed its schemes. With interest repayments at 17% fixed for 20 years, the light industrial units were not going to pay their way. Sir Frederick Seebohm, Chairman of Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation Ltd, agreed to release the Trust at no penalty from its loan agreement and the Trust refinanced with the Royal Bank of Scotland at a fluctuating rate of interest over a shorter period. 

Taking charge of the land 

Once the lease had been obtained, ownership of the land focused the Trust’s thinking in other ways. At last in a position to develop, it found that temporary occupations, allowed in the early years, were now legal minefields. Consents given verbally or on the basis of a letter turned out to be far more expensive and time-consuming to unravel than properly drawn up legal documents. Two decades on, the Trust is still dealing with the consequences of some of these casually made agreements. Conversance with property law, reading the small print and working out the consequences of its actions for the foreseeable future had to be taken on board if the Trust was to take charge of its land. And the Trust came to appreciate that despite the desperate shortage of space in North Kensington, few voluntary groups had the time, confidence or resources to work up and develop their own building schemes. 

Westway Nursery Association

Westway Nursery Association was one of the exceptions – a group that did it themselves. Its members had already been involved in establishing local playgroups and now identified the need for integrated day care. Formed after a public meeting called by the Trust in March 1973, it took the Association five years of 'bureaucratic nightmare' to set up Maxilla Nursery – a pioneering day care centre catering for the needs of under-fives and working parents, with a nursery school combined. 

The Maxilla Nursery group, originally made up of six young women community workers, parents, child minders and teachers, took on a job they felt the Council should have been doing, but were determined to do it in their own style. “It was our idea and we wanted to keep control” says Judy Wilcox, a founder member of the association and coordinator of the nursery today. “We had done the research and the thinking and were close to local people”. Funded by charities and local and national government, the group guarded its autonomy. “ILEA (the Inner London Education Authority) and the GLC put the building up. But we were the clients, in charge of design, construction and purchasing equipment. God knows how we got it through their legal departments”, says Wilcox. 

Raising the money took several years. Then there was a scare over lead pollution from the motorway, and building was delayed while tests were run. The results showed that children were no more at risk beneath the motorway than in their own homes nearby. The nursery opened in 1978 and has places for 88 children. Childcare experts across the country and from abroad continue to visit and to study how the centre works. 

Difficulties for independent projects on Trust land

The nursery centre had an intricate funding package and it is a tribute to the patience and stamina of the Westway Nursery Association members that it was ever put together at all. Their success in establishing and then maintaining the centre has relied on their ability to keep the public authorities behind them. Building in the nursery school as an integral part of the centre committed the ILEA to a continuing involvement and financial input, which was taken on by the Royal Borough when it became the new education authority. 

The success of the Acklam Road adventure playground, another independent project on Trust land, has also depended on attracting continued grant aid from the local authority. Where stable funding has not been forthcoming, the fortunes of independent groups seeking to build their own projects on Trust land have been more variable. For some, the difficulties of putting a funding package together left the high costs of building under the motorway out of reach. Others who succeeded in raising the initial funds to put up buildings found it difficult to sustain funding over subsequent years. This was to prove particularly the case with projects reliant on government training scheme monies. Several independent black groups who set up training schemes on Trust land were to find that changes in government criteria and a reassessment of the training they were providing left them without the income on which they relied. 

"Under the motorway was just dead cats. People dumped rubbish and nobody cleared it. My idea was to have big archetypal figures and a continuing landscape of hills and green fields to bring a sense of space and freedom to the concrete bays.” Emily Young 

The Trust has to take the lead 

As the difficulties and extended timetables of developing and maintaining projects under the motorway became clear, the Trust could see that it increasingly had to take the lead. No-one else was coming forward to finance and develop the 20 derelict acres and 60 empty motorway bays that still stood out as eyesores in 1976 after the first buildings were completed. If the Trust did not take the initiative in getting funding and working up schemes, the land would remain derelict for a very long time indeed. 

To tackle the job the Trust needed to be capable of seeing through long-term developments. And to become competent for the task, it had to establish its independent professional role, free from in-fighting for political control. The struggle which went on between 1971 and 1976 stretched the Trust to the limit before the issue could be resolved. 

Committee battles 

The arguments and political battles had been a continuation of old struggles between the Tory Council and the community activists of North Kensington. They were waged in committee meetings and avidly reported in the local press. All concerned wanted to see the Trust succeed, but on their own terms. Crofton and the Council continually feared a left-wing take-over. The MDT, keen to ensure the Trust's accountability to North Kensington, was determined to see off Council control. Between the reefs of political polarisation, staff had tried to find the middle ground. For Perry, throughout his five years as Director, the political arguments were a constant headache. 

A change of Chair 

In the early years, the failure of the Council to back the Trust with sufficient funding or an adequate secretariat had not helped. Reilly, as the first Chair, found he wasted 'grotesque' amounts of time chasing Trust matters at the Town Hall. Perry felt that having any dealings with the Council was 'like pushing a massive stone up the hill'. The usual response to one of his proposals, he said, had been 'a reflexive no followed by a maybe'. Reilly said some fairly frank things about the Council in his speech at the Trust's second AGM in October 1973, concluding with the observation that, for the Council, the Trust 'had turned out to be, if not quite a Frankenstein, certainly a far more troublesome infant than it ever expected'. Chastened by his experiences, Reilly retired after that AGM. 

Cold feet 

A successor did not prove easy to find. The constitution gave the Council a veto on the appointment of the Chair and Crofton wanted time to find his own candidate. In the meantime, the Council's Town Clerk, as secretary of the Trust, refused to call meetings – until a petition from a majority on the committee forced his hand. After a six-month interregnum, it was Jennifer Jenkins – the candidate proposed by the community representatives – who was offered the job. Although she had links with the Left through her husband, who was then Labour Home Secretary, she said very plainly that as Chair of the Trust she had no intention of being other than what the constitution required – independent and non-political. The Council who initially objected to the appointment on political grounds found they had to climb down in the face of such publicly respected neutrality. Crofton nevertheless got cold feet and put himself on the Management Committee as one of the Council's representatives. The committee then had on board both the leader and deputy leader of the Council. For the Left, it was the signal that the gloves were really off. 

Political games 

At the 1974 election for community representatives, three new left-wing members had joined the committee, including two Communists. Crofton had called for an enquiry into the elections, and again for constitutional changes to ensure that in future only representatives of 'respectable', nonpolitical organisations would be eligible to stand. Neither had happened. But this particular dispute inaugurated months, if not years, of wrangling and argument which turned Management Committee meetings into little more than an irrelevant farce so far as the practical work of the Trust was concerned. Facing each other across the meeting table, the Council and community representatives had routinely opposed each other's proposals, however sensible. 

The councillors tended to fall in behind the flamboyant and imperious Crofton. The community reps would meet in a pub beforehand and agree their line. During the meetings, two or three would regularly spin out 'matters arising' for as long as possible in order to exhaust councillors' patience and send them home early. Despite the fact that meetings had often lasted until midnight, little that was useful got done. For all except those who enjoyed playing political games, Management Committee meetings in the mid-70s had become a disagreeable waste of time. 

A change of Director 

One casualty of this politicisation of the Management Committee had been Anthony Perry. Exasperated by 'the endless political pressure and the total lack of interest in the Trust's constructive work from the elected side', he developed serious health problems and left the Trust in 1976. 

Although the political squabbling had brought the Trust to the brink, its expanding building programme, which started in the autumn of 1974 just as the MDT launched some of its most bitter attacks, had continued. It showed that the Trust, despite the dire in-fighting, could still manage somehow to work after all. Jennifer Jenkins' resolute chairing and the 'icy politeness' with which she treated both sides of the political divide helped, in Perry's words, to 'unite our motley coalition towards practical action'. 

Roger Matland, the newly appointed Director to the Trust, had been running Dame Colet House – one of the old settlements in the East End. Reviving it as a centre for community action had forced him to obtain considerable fundraising experience and a decade of knocking on doors and arguing his case had given him a range of good contacts. Experienced in the management of voluntary organisations he had initiated pensioners' action groups, adventure playgrounds and tenants' co-ops. Through his involvement in setting up a neighbourhood law centre, he had become familiar with the process of setting out coherent and well rehearsed strategies to win community battles. 

Prudent interests 

Matland had also developed a taste for the law as it related to charities and was now able to underline the Chair's insistence on the committee's independent role. With a letter from the Charity Commissioners he drew the attention of members to their legal duties and liabilities. As individual Trustees they were required to act with prudence, in the best interests of the Trust. These responsibilities could not be served by the extremes of group caucusing that kept distracting the committee from its task. The reminder helped to re-focus the work in hand. 

"Early impressions of the Trust land were of its emptiness. It was eerie walking past a boarded-up bay in the evening and seeing 30 or 40 vagrants there round a bonfire.” Roger Matland 

Getting the finances under control 

Matland had discovered that the Trust was effectively bankrupt. This was brought home when the Royal Borough's Deputy Director of Finance (standing in for the Honorary Treasurer of the Trust) rang Matland to let him know the Trust's bank account could not cover the month's salary cheques. The incident made the financial issues very clear. The Trust had to claim its independence from the Council if it was to manage its own affairs. Matland insisted on the transfer of Trust finances from the Town Hall to the Trust's own office, under Trust control. Financial information needed to be instantly available and, if the organisation was to be effective in carrying out the big development task ahead, it needed a long term financial strategy. Hand to mouth financing was no longer adequate. 

The new approach 

The move towards financial self-sufficiency in the late 70s was initiated by Roger Matland, David Wilcox (Jennifer Jenkins' successor as Chair) and Stephen Duckworth (a community representative and Chair of the Trust's Finance and Staff Committee). The new approach showed community representatives that there was a better way of achieving independence and building amenities than endlessly demanding constitutional changes and fighting the Council for money. The emerging strategy provided a stronger common purpose and co-operation in committee. The contribution of individual members was now more welcome, their differences better respected and their skills and experience increasingly valued.