Somers Town is a mainly working class neighborhood close to the Euston & Kings Cross terminals. There's a plot of land there, at Brill Place WC1, behind the British Library, that that belongs to the central government, who are planning to sell it on the open market to highest bidders.
The most likely contenders in the frame at the moment to buy the land are a bunch of property developers who want to build luxury flats near to the new Eurostar terminal or a consortium involving the University of London, who want to build an animal research / contagious disease scientific establishment.
Neither option is particularly appealing to the local residents, who are campaigning for the site to be used for a mixture of social housing (which there's a desperate shortage of in the area) and community spaces / facilities (also very scare)
So today the local residents under the banner of the Somers Town People's Forum held a protest "demonstrating the change they to want to see" from around 11-am until just after 12 noon. The protestors ranged in age from toddlers with their mums, through to school kids and pensioners. They included people born in the area, who’d lived they all their lives, and more recent migrants to the UK. They made placards and banners, and put them up on the fence surrounding the site. There were speakers, folk singers and London Rhythms of Resistance samba band.
After about half an hour the protest decided to march to the British library on the Euston Road along the road, chanting “whose Street? Our Streets! Who’s Land? Our Land!’ - ’What do we want social housing! When do we want it now!’ On arriving at the library, security men from the British library came out and attacked an ITN cameraman who was filming the protest, to the massive disapproval of the crowd.
After this less than neighborly behavior, the protestors decided moved off again and processed with the samba band around the council estates of Somers Town, to the cheers of the locals, before finishing up again at the site of the contested land at Brill Place.
