Petrol bombs, police on horseback, angry crowds … no, not the scene of another raucous Amy Winehouse concert, instead these were all in evidence in March this year, when between 250,000 and 500,000 people descended on London for an action against the government’s agenda of cutting public services.
Clashes between police and protesters led to extensive damage to commercial property in Oxford Street and the surrounding areas, with high-profile targets such as Topshop and Fortnum & Mason coming in for particular anarchist attention.
As the ‘Age of Austerity’ continues to exert an influence on the UK, demonstrations seem set to remain an occupational hazard of maintaining a commercial property in a busy area such as the West End. Some shops choose to close early, some beef up their security, and some opt to do their bit for the carpentry sector and have their windows boarded up.
What would happen if the scenes witnessed in London were to be taken into areas of highly concentrated commercial property? Labour MP Tom Watson has proposed an amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Bill, allowing ‘quasi-public land’ such as shopping centres to be opened up as legitimate venues for protests.
The commercial property industry is, unsurprisingly, not amused. The British Property Federation argues that ‘shoppers should be left alone when they come to relax in privately owned shopping centres’; the British Retail Consortium says that ‘allowing such events to take place in shopping centres would be wholly inappropriate’; and the British Council of Shopping Centres deems it as ‘not necessary or appropriate to extend such rights to quasi-public space’.
The MP has been behind several high-profile political moves in the past. These include campaigning to have convicted sex offender Gary Glitter’s music banned, resigning in an attempt to oust the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and launching a verbal attack on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The media coverage these moves generated is easy to quantify, but the difference they made is less obvious.
Something for the commercial property industry to bear in mind is that this is a problem that is not going away anytime soon, so it’s good to have a friendly local carpenter on speed-dial!
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