London Property
Have obviously been looking at lots of commercial properties and it is crazy out there. Everything is only available for 2-5 years (at most!) – all the landlords know they can redevelop or sell. Canning Town at £13 per sq ft is the one that keeps getting me - £13! Before rates, service charge, utilities, insurance, health & safety, fire safety, maintenance …
All the spaces require extensive works, and in the past five years rent prices have doubled, in some cases tripled – and this is not just because we are coming out of a recession – these are hardly high end spaces - it is because there is such tremendous demand for space. London’s centre has become all high end, international development; those people that actually live and work in London can no longer afford to live there, are moving out of the centre, and developers are building for them further afield. Artists (and the poor) are retreating further and further as we too are priced out. If we do not make a push to buy buildings now, we are going to be looking at zone 6 before we know it. People keep asking why this matters, saying that artists will always go to new areas and be part of their regeneration.
Apart from the obvious: 'why should we have to be so itinerant?', a very large part of what has made London so special for so many years is that affordable studios have been really central – artists can move between centres of production and centres of exhibition relatively easily – this makes the whole scene more dynamic. As the circle from London’s centre gets wider, we get further and further away from each other. Everyone loses out, and art suffers.I really believe this is a critical point in London’s creative development. What we manage to get done now will define the city’s art scene for decades to come.