Yesterday (Saturday 13 June) Lend Lease, the Australian multinational property development company, opened a marketing showroom for the luxury flats in its “Elephant Park” development on the site of the former Heygate Estate in London SE1. The event was crashed by masked invaders who barged in with a sound system and banners.
They made a big mess by scattering builders’ rubble, paper confetti with slogans, and other rubbish around the site. Then they blocked the entrance outside with a banner reading “The ruins of the Heygate will come back to haunt you”, and gave out flyers to people in the street.
A handful of police turned up after about half an hour, by which time the group were outside the building.
Lend Lease is the main corporate accomplice of Southwark Council in its clean-up of the Elephant and Castle area. The Heygate estate was cleared and demolished, glass towers and yuppiedromes are springing up in its place, with multi-million pound apartments marketed to investors the world over. In the next phase, the shopping centre and market, a major social hub for Latin American Londoners in particular, will be wiped out and replaced with some identikit corporate mall.
Lend Lease is not only active in building prison-like sanitised urban landscapes. It is also the developer of the actual Mega Prison being built in Wrexham, North Wales, which was recently targeted with sabotage.
