Financial Urbanism

A collection of 25 posts

Railway Bell, Gipsy Hill, London

Saving the Local Pub: Why Buildings Like the Railway Bell Matter and How Communities Can Protect Them

Historic pubs survive most securely not merely when they are listed or temporarily protected through planning refusal, but when communities succeed in embedding them once again within the social and economic life of the places around them.

Gipsy Hill

Railway Bell Planning Objection: Why the Cawnpore Street Pub Scheme Should Be Refused

Social infrastructure rarely disappears because a community no longer needs it. It disappears because it cannot easily survive the valuation regime imposed upon it.

Asset monetisation Featured

Who Captures Liverpool Street? A Political Economy of Network Rail & ACME

Part III: Value Capture, Governance, and the Station First Alternative Liverpool Street is not merely a station in need of repair. It is a public node that generates value, 94.5 million passengers in 2023 moving through a 5.6 hectare estate held largely freehold by Network Rail and TfL.

ACME Architects Featured

Who Captures Liverpool Street? A Political Economy of Network Rail & ACME - Part II

Without a station first baseline, without a clearly costed and deliverable minimum scope that could be pursued without the commercial overbuild, the city cannot honestly judge what it is buying and what it is surrendering.

ACME Architects Featured

Who Captures Liverpool Street? A Political Economy of Network Rail & ACME - Part I

Liverpool Street Station’s redevelopment has now been approved, a 19–3 vote taken under conditions that made “public benefit” feel both decisive and strangely unmeasurable. In our previous report we showed how the hearing’s structure rationed democratic time, how key benefit claims shifted under questioning, and how the

Brett Christophers

Brick Lane, Rendered Legible to Capital

A city is not an investment pipeline. It is a shared public life built over generations — and the right to live it cannot be priced as an “acceptable” loss.

Brett Christophers

Final Day — Brick Lane on the Scales: Class, Capital and the Financialised City

31 October 2025, Tower Hamlets Town Hall. On the last afternoon of the Truman Brewery Inquiry, the microphones were the same, the bundles the same, the cast of characters mostly unchanged. What shifted was the frame. The closing submissions no longer pretended this was only a dispute about façades and

Brick Lane

Day 9 (Afternoon) — Need, Weight, and the Test of “Good Growth”

Tower Hamlets is, by the appellant’s own concession, “more acutely in need of housing than any other borough in London”

Brick Lane

Day 9 – Light, Language and the Right to Remain

“This crisis, we all know, is the housing crisis… Kensington has zero data centres. Westminster has one. Why should the most densely populated borough in London be the one with over 30? Why must the most marginalized people in our city be forced out by speculation-based real estate?”

Berkeley Homes

The Ayelsham Inquiry Day Four — Maximum Reasonable: Housing Need, Viability and Who Gets to Stay in Peckham

The scheme’s viability is calculated not against the need profile of Peckham, but against the investment horizon of a PLC

Aylesham Community Action

The Ayelsham Inquiry Day Three — The Arithmetic of Clearance: Viability and the Price of Peckham’s Future

Prelude — The People Around the Table By the third day of the Aylesham Centre Inquiry, the cast was familiar; what had changed was the script. We were back in the same near-square, fluorescent-lit room in Southwark Council’s Tooley Street extension. Three walls were lined with desks; the

Brick Lane

Day 8 – Afternoon Session: Planning as Alibi, Capital as Client

As the Inquiry nears its end, the data centre is no longer merely a structure. It is a valuation event.

Aylesham Community Action

Day 2 – Heritage and the Moral Script of Regeneration

“The character of Peckham is not merely architectural. It is a combination of tangible and intangible life — its traders, its global-majority communities, its creative scene.”

Brick Lane Redevelopment

Day One: From Brick Lane to Rye Lane

“What is being regenerated if the people who made Peckham what it is can no longer afford to live here?”

Brick Lane Inquiry

Day 7 — Afternoon Session: The Public Re-Enters the Frame

Public testimony itself became evidence: proof that planning is a living process, not a closed algorithm.

Brick Lane

From Heritage to Humanity - Day 6 at the Truman Brewery Inquiry

“There’s no evidence here of what residents or community groups said,” she observed. Henley agreed: “That is obviously the case from what I can see.”

Brick Lane

Day 6 - The Conversion of Place — Data, Value and the Truman Brewery Data Centre

By excluding questions of ownership, profit, and displacement, the inquiry preserves its image of neutrality. In truth, neutrality is the mechanism of capture.

Brick Lane

Day 5 — The Heritage That Matters: Cross-Examining Historic England’s Legacy

Who now decides what 'heritage that matters' means?

Financial Urbanism

Part III — London for Sale: An Open Objection to Towards a New London Plan (2025)

London’s greatness was not built by speculation but by solidarity—by communities that repaired, reused and renewed their environment through time.

Financial Urbanism

Part II — The Financialisation of London

When housing, heritage and open space are treated as investment classes, moral boundaries are replaced by yield curves.

Financial Urbanism

Part I — The Empire of Finance: How Property Became London’s Primary Market

Financialisation does not merely alter prices or tenure; it remakes governance itself.

Brick Lane Inquiry

Truman Brewery Redevelopment: Independent Analysis Finds Scheme in Breach of London Planning Law

Our research brief finds the Truman Brewery redevelopment in breach of London’s planning law — and unfit for approval in whole or part.

Aditya Chakrabortty housing memo

Day 4 Morning – The Architecture of Justification

This was not evidence but reiteration: the legal language of compliance performed as fact.

Brick Lane Inquiry

Brick Lane Inquiry — Day Three (Afternoon): The Aesthetics of Adequacy

“Once the means of decision become routine, the imagination collapses.”

Brick Lane Inquiry

Brick Lane Inquiry — Day Three (Morning): Landmarks and Blind Spots

Forshaw’s testimony turned planning jargon back into moral language. “The battle,” he said, “isn’t over style — it’s over stewardship.”