Meet the 83-year-old activist who’s fought gentrification for 50 years – and is still going strong

When protesters march against gentrification in Peckham, South London, on Saturday (March 1), among them will be 83-year-old Eileen Conn.

The pensioner has been a tireless community activist for more than 50 years, standing up for the local community and protecting local architecture and heritage from being bulldozed.

The latest project that raises her ire is a plan to redevelop the 1980s Peckham shopping mall the Aylesham Centre.

Conn and 14 community organisations have joined forces to form SHAPE (Southwark Housing and Planning Emergency) in protest at the number of affordable homes included in the plan.

Campaigners claim developer Berkeley Homes is slashing the ratio of affordable homes delivered in the project from 35% to just 12%. Southwark Council is aiming for at least 50% of homes developed in the borough to be genuinely affordable.

More than 2,200 objections have been submitted to the council’s planning website – many targeting the lack of social housing on offer in a borough where the waiting list for social homes tops 18,000 households – while campaigners said 27,500 people have signed petitions to block the plan.

Activists will take to the streets on Saturday (1 March) to voice their anger and Conn will be among them. It is far from her first rodeo.

“The problem with the planning system at the moment is that it’s oriented towards developers and not to communities and neighborhoods,” said Conn. “Now developers are, of course, important because they make important developments. But one of the things that’s wrong with the current situation is that the national housing policy is relying almost totally on commercial developers to meet the housing needs of people who can’t afford the kinds of buildings that they create.

“We see that in such stark ways in the Aylesham site because now Berkeley Homes are saying that they can’t afford to offer more than 12% so-called affordable housing and we know a proportion of that will definitely not be affordable.

“Well, it’s quite obvious, isn’t it? Across the country there’s no way in which the government can rely on the commercial development world to build the housing that most people need. The system just doesn’t work. It’s clearly broken. It needs to be quite different.”

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A former Whitehall civil servant, Conn has been living in Peckham since 1973. She turned on to activism in her local area a couple of years later.

She told the Big Issue her first significant campaign was preventing the partial demotion of Peckham High Street to build a new town hall and a four-lane carriageway back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Her campaigning and commitment to the community has earned her a number of honours.

In 1998, Eileen was named as Southwark Citizen of the Year and in 2006 she started community group Peckham Vision to boost civic engagement in Peckham town centre. 

A decade later, in 2008, she received multiple accolades, including community activist of the year, active citizen of the year, and Southwark woman of the year.

Her commitment to community service was further recognized in the UK’s New Year’s Honours of 2009, when she was awarded the MBE for services to the community.

At 83, she shows no sign of slowing down.

“I’ve lived here for 52 years and so Peckham is part of my soul. I know every inch of Peckham town centre – it’s part of my identity really. That’s what’s so important. Our relationship to the place we live is what binds people together locally,” said Conn.

“I have been active in the community in Peckham since the 1970s. Over the last 20 years we have had thousands of people involved in the campaigns in Peckham town centre.

“The thing that hangs all this together is that the institutions which take the decisions are remote from the place where people, who are affected by their decisions, live and do their work every day. There’s not a good way yet of engaging the two different kinds of people, those in the town hall and in commercial companies, who are developing these plans remotely, and the people who live and work and experience the physical spaces every day.

“We’ve proved in Peckham that when you actually engage local people and help ways in which they can create their ideas about what could happen with the place and find some way to get that into the council’s policy processes, we can actually produce something good together.”

Labour has announced big plans to reform the national planning policy framework in a bid to build 1.5 million homes while in parliament.

The government has targeted building on disused parts of the green belt – known as the grey belt – as well as recruiting new planning officers to help councils hit mandatory housebuilding targets of 370,000 homes a year.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has also given backing to big infrastructure projects, including a new stadium for Manchester United football club and a controversial third runway at Heathrow Airport. Reeves has also streamlined environmental rules to mean “developers don’t need to worry about bats and newts”.

Labour’s plans are hoping to move away from the discretionary planning system that is routinely blamed for a failure to build enough homes to halt the UK’s housing crisis.

Conn believes that leaders’ failure to include communities in the planning system has played its part in the problems.

She also believes that has been echoed elsewhere in society.

“It is contributing significantly to the alienation between the people who take decisions, whether they’re policymakers, politicians, civil servants, developers, you name it, they’re so separate now from the people whose decisions are who are affected by their decisions, it’s a disaster,” Conn said.

“And you can see that in the way in which people, people are dropping away from voting in local government elections, quite apart from all the other horrible things that are happening in the world now.

She added: “It’s an emergency in planning as well as an emergency in housing, we’re bringing together all the people who are involved in these different kinds of campaigns, because actually they all link together.

“Because of the inflation of house prices and rent, the vast majority of people are very concerned about housing. It’s not just the very poorest, which is what council housing to start with was, it’s now such a large part of the population, and everybody cares about the neighborhood they live in.

“If we can all focus on what it is that we share together to get the right plans for our neighborhoods, involving us who live in the places in the neighborhood from the very beginning and before the beginning in a different kind of way, then we might actually get something where we’re not always at odds with the authorities.”

So what does Conn hope her legacy will be?

“A completely different way of local councils understanding how to bring local people in neighbourhoods into their policy thinking about planning for their neighborhoods. That’s why I’m still doing it 50 years on,” she said.

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