(12 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to make the case for Croydon to be granted city status. Before I begin, let me apologise to the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), for detaining him here in Westminster when he would obviously prefer to be on his way to the constituency that he serves with such distinction. I know that, in replying to my speech, he will not be able to comment on the merits or otherwise of my case. The decision is ultimately one for Her Majesty. I know too that he has already replied to other debates attended by hon. Members representing what I would argue are less well qualified towns, so I hope that it is some consolation that he did not have to prepare a fresh speech for today’s debate.
Croydon is not just the town that I represent in the House; it is my home. My parents moved there when I was a few months old and I have lived there ever since. Perverse as it may sound to those who know Croydon by reputation only, I cannot think of a better place to live. It is part of the greatest city in the world, but it is also a city, in all but name at the moment, in its own right. It is 15 minutes from central London and on the doorstep of the beautiful north downs. It has great schools, libraries, shops, theatres, restaurants and bars, a rich history and above all a wonderful mix of people who have come from all over the world to make the place their home.
I have had the privilege of representing Croydon in this House only for just over a year. I am, therefore, as they would say in America, very much the junior MP for Croydon. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) and the right hon. Member for Croydon North (Malcolm Wicks) have both represented the town for nearly 20 years. Neither is able to be here today, but they have both asked me to put on the record their support for the case that I am making.
Over the summer, Croydon has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. One month ago yesterday, a few hundred people, many of them, it is now clear, not from Croydon, looted businesses and set fire to historic buildings along London road and the Purley way, and in Old Town, south Croydon and New Addington. Of course, we were not the only part of the United Kingdom to witness such behaviour, but many will long remember the images of that night: the House of Reeves furniture story burning, and Monika Konczyk jumping from a first-floor window were images of my town.
The damage—the historic buildings that were destroyed, the blow to the town's reputation or the simple knowledge that living among us are a tiny minority who chose to do such things to their own town—cannot be undone, but set against that damage are the positives that have emerged from the ashes at Reeves Corner and on the London road: the thousands of people who helped with the clean-up or gave money to help businesses to rebuild; the dedication of the public servants who have housed the homeless, put out the fires, identified the guilty and brought them to justice; the way in which our courts have reflected public sentiment that a clear message has to be sent to those responsible; and above all, the renewed sense of pride in our town, that this is our home, that it has a lot going for it and that we will not less the wreckers win.
That is why I am here today. If the granting of city status were just an ego boost for the local council, it would not be worth fighting for, but that is not what this is about. It is about getting long overdue recognition of Croydon's true status and, even more important, about raising its profile and giving the town a much needed boost as we rebuild.
So what is our case? The Department for Culture, Media and Sport website is wonderfully vague about the grounds on which Her Majesty will make the decision. It points out that city status has never
“been a right to be claimed by places fulfilling a list of criteria”,
but it does refer to age, history and associations with royalty, so I will start there.
Croydon sits in a valley between the Crystal Palace escarpment and the northern slopes of the north downs. There is evidence that the valley was inhabited during the bronze age, with a barrow on the top of Croham Hurst, and that it was occupied in Roman times, but the name Croydon is almost certainly of Anglo-Saxon origin meaning “valley of the crocus”. It is due south of London and just north of a natural gap in the north downs, and hence it became a natural stopping off point on the route from London to the south coast.
In 871, the King granted Aethelred, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a charter for land in what is now Old Town and that began a long association between Croydon and the See of Canterbury. The Domesday Book records Archbishop Lanfranc as the lord of the manor in 1086, which then consisted of a church, a mill and 365 people. In 1276, King Edward I granted a charter for a weekly market and that spurred the development of the town. By the 16th century, the manor house had become a large palace that was the summer residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury. A number of monarchs, including Henry VII, Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth I, are known to have visited the palace.
In 1781, the palace was sold—parts of it survive today as Old Palace of John Whitgift school—and a new palace was built at Addington, whose grounds were landscaped by Capability Brown. That continued as the summer home of Archbishops until 1898. In total, 11 Archbishops are buried in Croydon, either in Greater London's only minster, next to the old palace, or at St Mary's church in Addington village.
Archbishop John Whitgift left a particular mark on the town. He petitioned Elizabeth I for permission to set up a hospital and school for the “poor, needy and impotent”. In 1599, the hospital of the Holy Trinity was completed and it survives today at the centre of the town as the almhouses, run by a charitable foundation named after John Whitgift which also runs three schools, a residential home and a nursing home. I should declare an interest: I am a governor of that charity. Her Majesty visited the almshouses on 21 June 1983.
The spur for the transformation of Croydon from small Surrey market town to the heart of south London, which is what it is today, was the development of the railways. In 1803, the Surrey Iron railway from Wandsworth to Croydon opened; it was the world’s first public railway. It was followed by the London and Croydon railway linking London Bridge and West Croydon in 1831, and the London, Brighton and South Coast railway in 1860. That led to a population explosion with a 23-fold increase in population between 1801 and 1901 and Croydon’s incorporation as a borough in 1883.
Croydon also played a key role in the development of air travel. It was home to London’s main airport from 1920 until 1952 and was the first place in the world to use air traffic control. Amy Johnson embarked on her historic solo flight to Australia from Croydon. The town also played a key role in world war two. Croydon airport was the target of the first German raid on the capital, and it was from Croydon—Kenley airfield in the south of the borough and Biggin Hill just over the border in what is now Bromley—that “the few” took to the skies to defend our country during its “darkest hour.” The town suffered substantial damage in the war and afterwards twinned with Arnhem in Holland, which had suffered similarly during Operation Market Garden. The 1950s and 1960s was a time of great rebuilding, with skyscrapers, a flyover and an underpass leading to the “mini-Manhattan” nickname and giving the town its current form and character.
There is much more to Croydon than many people know, therefore: Anglo-Saxon origins and a strong association with the See of Canterbury and royalty, as well as being a key location in the development of the railways and aviation, and playing an important role in the second world war. Being a city, however, is about more than just having a rich history. The “Oxford English Dictionary” tells us that a city is:
“A title ranking above that of ‘town’.”
Although a few places that have been granted city status in the past are fairly small today, most cities have large populations. On that test, Croydon is clearly best qualified of all the applicants. It is home to more than 340,000 people—more than in Belfast, Cardiff, Coventry, Newcastle, Nottingham or Southampton. Indeed, of the 66 existing UK cities, only nine have a larger population than Croydon. It is as big as Bilbao or Nice; indeed, we believe it to be the largest town in the whole of western Europe.
People also think of cities as commercial hubs, and Croydon has more than 8 million square feet of office space and more than 10,000 employers. It is home to dozens of blue-chip companies, including Nestlé, Mott MacDonald, BT, Barclays and AIG, and the local authority has the fifth highest business rate yield in the country. That gives some feel of the scope of the business centre.
Croydon is also a huge transport hub. There are 17 main line stations in the borough. The key station is East Croydon, from which there are 27 million journeys annually, making it the fourth busiest station in the country outside central London. Croydon is within a 15-minute journey of the west end and the City of London, and has excellent connections to Gatwick airport and the south coast by rail. Under our Mayor of London, the East London line extension was recently completed, adding Croydon to the tube map and giving excellent connections to the docklands. Croydon is also set apart from some of the other applicants, in that it is a transport hub in a number of ways. The tram system that was opened in 2000 connects large areas of south London, with Croydon at the hub, and there are more than 28 million journeys a year on that network. In short, it is one of the best connected places in the country, with a similar number of people coming into Croydon each day to work as the number commuting out to London.
Another characteristic that one expects of a city is that it is a public services hub. There are more than 155 schools in the borough, including some outstanding state schools such as Coloma and the Harris Academy in Crystal Palace, which was one of the first city technology colleges. There are also some outstanding independent schools. I referred earlier to the Whitgift Foundation and its three schools, Whitgift, Trinity and Old Palace. There is also the Al-Khair school, a high-performing Islamic school. There is the BRIT school of performing arts, too, whose graduates include Adele, Amy Winehouse, Jessie J, Katie Melua and Leona Lewis. Croydon College is one of largest further education colleges in the south-east, and is shortly hoping to open a university centre so that young people in south London can get a degree from the University of Sussex while studying at home and paying tuition fees well below the level that many universities are now charging. We have an excellent hospital in Croydon university hospital and the third busiest public library in the UK.
Another feature that marks out cities is outstanding leisure facilities. Indeed, the Government guidelines say:
“Ministers take the view that the places to be honoured with city status…should have supplied convincing evidence of their ability to welcome people into their areas and to provide, promote or facilitate access to a wide variety of places, activities and events.”
Croydon is home to Fairfield halls, one of the best concert halls in the country. Fairfield halls is the home of the London Mozart players, an outstanding chamber orchestra whose patron is His Royal Highness Prince Edward. A mark of the repute of the concert hall is the fact that over the past five years, people have purchased tickets from Fairfield halls from all but two of the main postcodes across the United Kingdom. This is not just a local venue for people in south London but one that people from across the country frequent. We also have the Warehouse theatre, which puts on its own shows and has an annual playwright festival. Croydon is the home of dubstep music, a new genre of music that was created there.
We also have outstanding green spaces, parks and open spaces. Ten parks in Croydon have been awarded the prestigious green flag award and the Royal Horticultural Society recently voted us the UK’s greenest “large city”. In sports, Croydon is home to Crystal Palace football club—south London’s greatest team—although at the moment, sad to say, that is not necessarily the greatest accolade. Surrey county cricket club play some of their games at Whitgift school and just on our border we have Crystal Palace national sports centre.
There is more than 2.5 million square feet of prime retail space in the town, £1 billion of annual retail turnover and more than 800 restaurants, bars and clubs. On all the tests of the town’s being a hub for retail, employment, transport and public services, Croydon clearly passes.
Another test for a city is a thriving voluntary sector. There are several thousand voluntary groups in Croydon and some 50,000 people give time as volunteers each year. I want to take a moment to name a few of the groups that are active in my part of the town and that do a wonderful job. We have a huge range of local residents’ associations but I want to single out in particular the work done by “People for Portland Road” for the community in south London and the new pathfinders group that has been set up to take forward the regeneration of New Addington.
There are also all sorts of service-based local voluntary groups. Like many towns, we have a thriving Crossroads group and a week on Sunday I will be doing a walk around my constituency boundaries to try to raise some money for that excellent charity, which provided outstanding help to my family when my father was sick with Alzheimer’s disease. There are also many voluntary groups that support the diverse communities we have in our town. I recently had the pleasure of going to the annual celebrations of the Kerala cultural and welfare association, which provides support to the strong Keralese community in our borough.
One clue that the Government’s guidelines give is that the successful applicant should have a “vibrant, welcoming community”. Croydon clearly passes that test. People from all over the world have chosen to make it their home, nearly 40% of the population is from a black or minority ethnic community and more than 100 languages are spoken in the borough. All of the world’s major faiths are practised in the town. What was until recently Croydon parish church, which was rebuilt in 1870 by the great Victorian architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, was recently dedicated as Greater London’s only minster in recognition of the wider role the church plays not just in Croydon parish but across south London. There is also Croydon masjid and Islamic centre and several other mosques, several Hindu temples, a synagogue and Croydon gurdwara.
Croydon has more young people than any other London borough and it is home to people of all backgrounds, with some of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods and also, in the Webb estate and Shirley Hills, some of its most expensive housing. There is a sharp contrast among the northern districts of Norbury, South Norwood and Thornton Heath, with their densely packed Victorian and Edwardian residential streets, the southern areas of Shirley, Selsdon, Sanderstead, Purley, Kenley and Coulsdon with their commuter-belt semi-detached and detached homes, and the town of New Addington, which I am hugely proud to represent, built on top of the north downs after the second world war as homes for returning heroes.
Taken together, these four factors make Croydon a diverse, vibrant place to live which is, or has been, home to people such as business man Sir Philip Green, model Kate Moss, artist Tracey Emin, film director Sir David Lean, composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, footballer Ian Wright, Wilfred Wood, Britain’s first black bishop, and a former Speaker of this House, Lord Weatherill, who represented Croydon for 28 years with great distinction. People often talk about the country, or parts of it, being tolerant, but toleration is not the right word in this context. I do not tolerate the fact that people have come from all over the world to make it their home—I celebrate it and think it is one of the great strengths of our town.
As well as having a lot going for them, cities often also have problems—urban living is not perfect. Most cities around the world have issues that need to be addressed and the same is true of our town. We suffer from congestion, and recent events a month ago demonstrated the problems of gang culture that we need to tackle as a community. Also, much of our 1950s and 1960s architecture and urban planning is now in need of renewal. The council has great plans in place to address all those problems, but it is important to put them on the record.
I hope it is clear from what I have said thus far that Croydon is a city in all but name and that if it were not a part of London it would formally have been made one years ago. It is on this rock that past bids for city status have failed. We are part of London so how can we apply to be a city ourselves? Let me make it clear to my hon. Friend that this bid is not a declaration of independence from London. We are proud to be part of our great capital city, but we also believe that we are more than just a suburb of London: we are a city in our right within the world’s greatest city. London already has two cities—the City of London and the City of Westminster—and it seems to me that there is no reason why it cannot have a third. The Mayor of London agrees. He says:
“My ambition for London to continue to dominate world enterprise would certainly be furthered by the addition of a third city, and having this at the heart of south London would bring much needed investment south of the river Thames”.
We believe that we meet the key test in the Government guidelines of having a “distinct identity”. Look out on south London from the top of the Crystal Palace escarpment and Croydon literally stands out. It is a hub for south London and the near south-east—a city in its own right on the edge of a larger city, similar to Jersey city’s relationship with New York.
That then is our case. Croydon is rich in history, is larger than most existing cities and is a centre for employment, shopping, public services and leisure facilities. It is one of the best connected places in the country and is a vibrant place that is home to people from all over the world with a strong sense of community. It is not without problems but is brimming with potential; it is part of the world’s greatest city but is clearly a city in its own right. On 17 August, His Royal Highness Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall visited the town to see the damage done by rioters, and their visit was deeply appreciated. Early next year, Her Majesty will have the chance to help us in our recovery by recognising my home town for what it is—London’s third city.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) on securing the debate and I thank him for his kind words at the beginning. Rather than being a chore to be here, it is a great pleasure to listen to him set out the case for his home town. As he said, he follows our hon. Friends the Members for Reading West (Alok Sharma), for Southend West (Mr Amess) and for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) in securing an opportunity to set out the case for their areas’ hopes of winning city status in the diamond jubilee competition for civic honours. I learned many things in those debates and I have learned many things about his area today. I know that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, have chaired these debates before and I suspect that both you and I will be here again as other hon. Members seek to make the case for their areas. In that process, we learn about our United Kingdom.
I confirm that Croydon’s entry into the diamond jubilee competition for civic honours has been safely received. It is one of 25 entries seeking city status and there are also 12 entries seeking lord mayoralty status for existing cities. The level of interest and enthusiasm in the competition shows how much the country is looking forward to celebrating Her Majesty’s diamond jubilee in 2012 and how attractive these civic honours are to local communities. I know that my hon. Friend understands, as do other hon. Members, that I cannot possibly endorse Croydon’s aspirations, just as I had to remain neutral in those other debates. Ministers have to remain impartial to ensure that city status continues to be a real honour that is fairly bestowed and to ensure that the diamond jubilee competition continues to be a real competition. Fairness is crucial because, as my hon. Friend said, there are no hard and fast criteria for becoming a city. It is an honour granted by the sovereign, nowadays following a competition, as a rare mark of distinction for an area. Reasons for success or failure are never given, and city status is not, and never has been, something that towns can claim by just ticking off a list of hard and fast criteria. The reason for that is fairly obvious.
Any attempt to draw up a list of criteria to capture the nature of existing UK cities would run into difficulties. Some are large, some small. Some have conspicuously attractive and well laid out city centres; that applies less to others. Some have wonderful cathedrals, universities, airports, underground systems or trams; some do not, but boast a vibrant cultural life. We have described some of the criteria and qualities that we would expect a new city to have. My hon. Friend set out some of them: a vibrant, welcoming community, an interesting history and a distinct identity.
My hon. Friend set out his and Croydon’s case very well. He reminded us that Croydon Central—his constituency—and Croydon are not just his constituency, which he has represented since the general election, but also his home, which I believe he represented as a councillor for a considerable time. From his speech it was obvious that he knows his town very well, and will continue to represent it very well in the House. I can assure him and his constituents, and all those in the rest of the town, that Croydon’s entry will receive a thorough, impartial appraisal of its merits alongside the other entries. The assessment process in the competition is under way, and the plan is to announce the results early next year, at the start of Her Majesty’s diamond jubilee year.
Question put and agreed to.