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15 minutes with… Barbara Brownlee, chief executive of Soho Housing
Barbara Brownlee is the chief executive of Soho Housing, a housing association that celebrated its 50th anniversary last month. She tells Inside Housing about the landlord’s early days and its plans for the future
Tell me about the association’s history
We were founded in 1973 by a group of residents in Soho and Covent Garden who were setting out to improve housing conditions whilst protecting local people’s homes from redevelopment.
There was a lot of opposition to the Abercrombie plan [which would have lowered densities in central London and built replacement housing in new towns outside an untouched greenbelt, with circumferential highways to divert traffic from the core], so many housing associations became active in the community in the same way that Soho did back in 1973. It was a grassroots movement and there was huge pushback against the plan. It was a plan based on the car being king.
The protests actually began in Piccadilly, with a group of about 15 people who at that point were fighting to keep their homes and neighbourhoods affordable. But they fought – and they won.
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How did that shape the association’s early approach to development?
There was an almighty fight at the time to make the Housing Corporation give grants to buy up homes above commercial premises. The corporation had a rule that people couldn’t possibly live above commercial premises. That was just all wrong and they should have been able to.
So this group of people did a huge bit of research with The Sainsbury’s Trust to prove that people could live above commercial premises. And in the end, they single-handedly really changed the corporation’s funding rules.
This meant they could get grants from around 1975 onwards and they started buying up property in the area that nobody wanted. Low costs, totally dilapidated – nobody had invested in the property because everybody had thought it was going to be knocked down.
So they started buying their first buildings and went on from there. And it’s been going for 50 years in a similar vein. I think that’s why it’s so special for us. It came out of that level of fight to make affordable housing available for low-paid workers in the West End. And that is where it remains.
How challenging is your current development programme?
Well, now we own and manage almost 800 properties so we’re not that big and we’re not building huge houses with gardens.
We do have a few beautiful 1920s towers that are opposite the Royal Opera House but we don’t have any cladding near anything. We’ve got a fire door programme and we’ve done all of the inspections up to date.
What did you learn from your time as executive director of growth, planning and housing at Westminster City Council?
I put together a forward pipeline of 2,000 affordable homes to be built in the borough. But what I think I learned was there is land in central London in the ownership of affordable housing providers, and how fantastic and special Soho and the West End are.
I’ve lived in London for 40 years. So I kind of know that anyway, but working in it, you get very close. I got to know the school and local councillors, but also the tensions there are between residents and the night-time economy.
How do you manage that trade-off?
I mean, there’s been venues that have been here as long as the residents – it’s a long established night-time economy in Soho. It’s the proliferation of new licences that I find extraordinarily difficult… It’s noisier and dirtier.
And I think all of it is completely manageable and it has always been managed for 50 years in Soho. You know, there have been nightclubs chucking out at 4am in Soho since, well, before you were born.
There are about 22,500 residents in Soho. It’s full of people living ordinary lives, but we also have about 39 commercial premises so we are right in the eye of the storm when it comes to walking that line.
But the thing we want to do is curate our streets. We want small shops with the original facades.
To commemorate your anniversary, you commissioned some artwork. Can you tell me about that?
We had this new series of posters by London-based multi-disciplinary artist DJ Roberts, which depict life in Soho, with views of St Anne’s Church and collages capturing ‘the spirit of Soho’. It was commissioned to commemorate the area.
But it also goes back to what our mission is. If you work in the opera or the arts or whatever in the West End and you finish work at 2am, you need a little flat in Soho but you probably don’t earn enough. Everyone says they wants the arts to continue. However, they rely heavily on their backstage workers, who are not paid enough and have to commute miles just to find an affordable home.
In a nutshell, that’s what we’re trying to stop happening, by providing affordable homes for workers in the city where they need them.
Finally, what are your targets going forward?
So we’ve got a bit of investment in existing stock and we’ve got our biggest ever project at £6m – big for us – to do a complete refurb of Sandringham Flats. That’s our biggest block, with 125 flats all being brought up to modern standards.
To build something that is for social rent, you need in London if building on your own land a subsidy of about £350,000 to make it work over 30 years.
For new homes, the overall aim is between 30 and 50 in the next five years, which is very small but that’s what you can do in central London. It’s going to be challenging with rising costs, inflation and lack of grants.
