The Notting Hill surveys of the 60s highlighted the appalling housing conditions in the area. They also revealed a glaring lack of open space; according to GLC standards there should have been at least 173 acres for North Kensington's population of 77,000. Instead there were less than 20. The shortfall of over 150 acres – about two and a half times the size of Holland Park in the well-off southern half of the borough – meant that large numbers of children had nowhere but the streets to play. On average a child was injured in a traffic accident every five days. The need to establish safe play space was urgent and soon became a renewed focus for community action. 

Local freelance photographer, Adam Ritchie, had just returned from five years in New York's Lower East Side. There he had been impressed by the direct neighbourhood action he witnessed. At Tompkins Square, contractors who had dug out a huge mound of earth to build the foundations for an open-air theatre discovered that local children had claimed it for play. When they came to remove it, mothers and children made a human chain and refused to budge. The City Parks Commissioner, summoned to sort out the dispute, announced the mound could stay. Back in North Kensington, Ritchie saw a similar spontaneous process at work on land cleared for the motorway and temporarily claimed by the London Free School for the summer holidays in 1966. He was amazed by the 'complex, wonderful structures' children had created for themselves after he left out a hammer, saw and some nails. He was determined to do something to save the playground when the motorway’s construction began in September. 

At the last meeting of the short-lived Free School project, Ritchie called for volunteers to keep the playground open. The North Kensington Playspace Group was set up a week later with 26-year-old Ritchie as its chair. The secretary was 27-year-old John O'Malley, a trained teacher and sole fulltime worker with the Notting Hill Community Workshop. The initial aim of the group was to get some of the land under the motorway designated for play space. Over the winter they got an architect to draw up plans for a permanent adventure playground and sent it to the GLC, as well as the owners of the compulsorily purchased land and clients to the construction team led by John Laings. 

The realisation that land was suddenly becoming available in congested and run-down North Kensington fermented an intoxicating brew of possibilities for all kinds of other much needed amenities. The Playspace Group spent the next year (1967) trying to find out from the GLC what plans, if any, had been made for the land underneath the motorway. Putting in collectively 70 or 80 hours a week, they canvassed the views of local people to find out what they wanted once the road was built. From their determined detective work, it became clear that apart from a large area designated for open space at the western end beneath the roundabout, the only other GLC plan was for a car park in the central section. 'A more inappropriate and negative use for the space could not be imagined', commented Ritchie at the time. And when they checked with the Council, the Playspace Group discovered the GLC had no legal authority to build a car park – they had omitted to put in a planning application. So the Playspace Group put in their own for a comprehensive scheme of local amenities. The Council, now under local pressure to take on board the issue of the use of motorway land, called a meeting of officials and councillors drawn from the GLC as well as the Council. 

For this landmark meeting in April 1968, the Playspace Group – wanting to shift the public authorities' grudging perception of them as the upstart group who had forced them to the table – fielded an impressive group of 'local heavyweight politicos' including Sir Hugh Casson, architect and president of the Royal Academy, and Peggy Jay, a GLC committee chair and a local JP. And they brought a brochure hot off the press that outlined 'a scheme of amenities, play facilities and open space for North Kensington'. Based on a survey of local opinion and hundreds of hours of discussions with individuals and local groups, it identified a list of uses from study rooms to shopping centres, and restaurants to an art school. 

Obviously well-researched and extremely well designed, the brochure so impressed the meeting that a joint working party was immediately set up with the Council, the GLC and the Playspace Group. The Inner London Education Authority was also represented – they were to prove consistently constructive towards the scheme's education opportunities which they later helped to fund. The working party's brief was “to produce detailed planning proposals for developing the motorway site for recreational, social, educational and related community purposes”. It threw out the car park proposal at its first meeting. One immediate tangible gain was an adventure playground for the summer of 1968, carved out of the motorway site at St Marks Road by the contractors John Laings, who graciously footed the bill. After a year and a half of graft and lobbying, the Playspace Group had at last won official recognition for their imaginative, community-generated scheme for the motorway land. 

But keeping the initiative was to prove more elusive. Because the scheme was multi-faceted and cut across so many council and agency boundaries, the Playspace Group, renamed the Motorway Development Trust (MDT) in November 1968, wanted to form an independent organisation dedicated to putting the plans into effect. They recommended setting up a charity, with representation from community users of the land alongside the local authorities. 

The Council could have run the scheme itself. But this would have meant full funding from the rates – a non-starter in a Tory borough. In any case, the large housing association schemes, then working their way through committee, showed the Council preferred voluntary organisations to carry out social projects rather than to get directly involved itself. Interested in the idea of the development being done locally, it recognised that the MDT's proposal for an independent organisation was sensible. The new leader of the Council, Sir Malby Crofton, baronet, landowner and stockbroker (Eton, Cambridge and the Guards) had come into office with a determination to do something about the social and housing problems in North Kensington. He supported the idea of a new organisation and was attracted by its potential as a charity to go elsewhere other than to the Council for its money.

Implicitly, the motorway land was considered marginal; the risks too high and the returns too low to interest private developers. An independent community organisation might fill the gap that established development agencies were unwilling or unable to. Combining public, charity and private sectors and tapping the energy and resourcefulness of an active community seemed the best way to create amenities in an area where little would otherwise happen. 

“A kind of community strip, a bustling social market place, complementing the commercial activity of Portobello Road.” – Robin Moore describing the Motorway Development Trust's vision for the centre section of the motorway land. HELP, January 1969. 

However the Council's view of the community activists who had come to prominence in North Kensington was that they were 'politically dangerous' and 'administratively incompetent'. Throughout the 60s, they had not given the Conservative Council an easy ride. Over the campaigns for better housing, the Council had often been the object of attack. Radical politics emerged alongside the traditional political boundaries of the Borough's north-south divide (Labour councillors were only ever elected to North Kensington wards; the rest of the borough voted Conservative). The New Left, action centres, anarchists, communists and the student movement shaped and enlivened the community politics of North Kensington. A range of broadsheets and newsletters lambasted the Council. And the 60s saw the emergence of new political styles that challenged the established order. Representatives of community groups disputed the legitimacy of Council rule. Direct action challenged decisions of Council committees. Open forums criticised the Council’s 'behind closed doors' debates. A network of community alliances with good links to the local press kept North Kensington politics on the front page. 

Against this background, the Council wanted to be sure of control over the new body that was to develop the motorway land. And through its lease with the GLC, it had the power to influence the nature of the organisation to which it would sublease the land. The first constitution proposed by the Council in mid 1969 met stiff opposition from the Motorway Development Trust who objected to the built-in Council dominance and the limited local accountability. The Council was eventually forced to back down on several strategic points. MDT allegations that the Council had hijacked the community scheme were well covered in the press. And local concern was reinforced in November 1969 when a crass proposal for legislation was sought by London Transport to allow them to build a huge bus garage under the motorway between Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road with no obligation to consult. Although London Transport backed down in the face of local and Council opposition, the incident was not reassuring. It was seen as yet another example of the insensitive behaviour of a public authority in the face of local needs. No wonder the MDT were so nervous and jumpy about local authority control of the scheme. 

The Council had come up against another important obstacle to its initial proposals when it encountered the realities of charity law. As a registered charity, the new organisation would need to act independently to safeguard its charitable aims. This was incompatible with overall Council control – a point insisted on by the Charity Commissioners and by the City Parochial Foundation, a large city charity whom O'Malley and Ritchie had originally approached for funding and who were now discussing a possible grant of £100,000, spread over five years. The revised constitution that was announced in 1970 brought the Council just short of holding the balance of power. On the Management Committee for the new Trust there was to be an equal balance between seven nominees of the Council and seven annually elected community representatives. Between them they would elect an 'independent' Chair. The Council gave up its right to veto elected community representatives (as originally proposed in its first draft constitution), but retained it for vetoing the Chair. And it insisted that the Town Clerk (as Honorary Secretary) and the Borough Treasurer (as Honorary Treasurer) should provide the secretariat for the Trust. 

By laying stress on the independence of the Chair, Crofton gained the acceptance of the Charity Commissioners for the constitution. The City Parochial Foundation backed it, with some reservations, because they saw Council goodwill and support for the new organisation as essential to its success. The MDT however never accepted the details of the new constitution, nor the secretive way in which they had been worked out. Unconvinced of the Council's willingness to allow the committee an independence free from political control, the group continued to campaign for some years after for increased community control. 

“There was a time when everything in the area seemed to be flattened or surrounded by corrugated iron. People could hardly find their way around because roads had been chopped, rerouted or renamed.” – Mary McIntosh, local resident. 

Picking Partners

Fresh controversy arose over which local groups were to be invited to elect the seven community representatives. The Council wanted to pick a handful of respectable, moderate and non-political organisations to send forward their representatives. ‘Registered bodies', as Crofton said, 'with trustees that may still be in operation in a hundred years' time'. The MDT, who did not appear on the Council's chosen list of respectable organisations, wanted elections to be opened to the network of community groups in North Kensington. Finally four representatives were put up by organisations approved by the Council, while the other three places (with Ritchie and O'Malley occupying two of them) were filled by an election among community groups held by the MDT. 

The Trust was to be billed as an innovative new partnership with the Council, a 'unique experiment' to carry out a development sensitive to local needs. But at the outset it was also a negative compromise between reluctant and mutually suspicious partners. The argument over representation and local accountability persisted. 

Meanwhile, some months before, the Council had started looking for a founding Chair. It wanted someone whose name would carry weight with charities. An offer was eventually made to 61 year-old retired diplomat Sir Patrick Reilly. A former ambassador in Moscow and Paris, he had recently come to live locally (the constitution stated the Chair should live in the borough). At a press conference, Crofton announced that the Trust was going to be set up and that Reilly had agreed to be Chair. It was, as it turned out, a brave decision from a man who seemed on the face of it a most unlikely candidate. 

On Friday 5 February 1971, seven months after the motorway had opened, a year after the Trust had been announced, and four and a half years after the formation of the Playspace Group that had campaigned for it, the North Kensington Amenity Trust was formally inaugurated at a party (to which the MDT had not been invited) at the Town Hall. A daunting task was awaiting it.