HT: It’s so nice to finally be able to talk to you, we’re aware of your work but it’s nice to finally be able to sit down and talk about the work you do.

NA: I agree with you, there’s a lot of cool people that I cross paths with, see at events, but don’t get to speak to.

I can start by telling you a little bit about myself. So I'm not traditionally trained in architecture or engineering or planning. I actually studied biomedical sciences.

There's a very long and convoluted story as to how I even got into Development. So a good place to start is I'm a typical sort of immigrant. Came to the UK when I was 2 and one of the places that I landed in was the Chalkhill estate. I'm still there, been there since 2003, so 20 / 21 years and the Chalkhill estate has got a very interesting story. If you do a bit of Googling, you'll see it reflects, and is affected by every single housing policy since the 60s.

So you'll see a little bit around housing action trusts and how that affects social housing, how there’s post war housing still there. So it's like a patchwork, a mosaic of the UK's housing policies, but it still retains the essence of what makes social housing beautiful- you've got an amalgamation of people from different cultures, people who've migrated to London and are trying to make a better life. I grew up in that environment, I learned English in that environment, in a single parent household. I learned a lot of my values and morals from not just within my house, but my neighbours. It’s like a village and so I grew up loving the ends. It's a very important place for me and I knew there were other villages around London, because on my way to school (I went to school in Harlesden) I would pass through Church Road, pass through Stonebridge and I would see other villages similar to mine. I'll go to school and meet people from other villages and it was mad love.

And then during my early adolescent years, not even one mile away from my Block, I could see sudden change in Wembley. I saw cranes going up and buildings being demolished and the erection of these huge skyscrapers and I'm none the wiser these times.

I’m a yute and all I care about is San Andreas and football and then I go through the schooling system like anyone else would. I studied Biomedical Sciences because it had the word ‘medical’ in it and my mum wanted me to be a doctor. So I thought that would be a way…you know how it is.

HT/RE: *laughs* Yeah, yeah.

NA: So I was like, cool, I'll just do that because I was good at Biology. But, even before I went to university, I would feel the pressures of British society and how they view us.

You have your run-ins with the justice system and you have your run-ins with people who don't deem you valuable, and that all shapes you growing up. I was definitely affected by that. I didn't really have much direction in my life, but in the background I could still see those cranes being built. I dropped out halfway through my degree, because I didn't care. Again, I didn't have much direction. I was still trying to find my feet, trying to understand where I was headed, where my life was going.

But I always valued the words of people who came from my background and one of those people was George the Poet. I would listen to George like any of our respected scholars, you know what I mean? Because he's from St. Raphaels- down the road from me. He talked about things that literally encapsulate my lived experience, and he was able to weave words together that made it very clear to me, and articulates it in a way that allows other people who may not be from our background to understand.

Listening to George, and being a bit more educated about my condition in the UK really changed my perspective on things. It gave me a bit of direction and it made me realise more and more that we don't have a lot of agency over ourselves. This sort of cluelessness of what's going on around me and just going with the waves. ‘The feds are just like that’ or like, you know, ‘We're from ends and this is how we make money’. I never really participated in the decisions that were being made on my behalf, and there was this illusion of choice in my life, but in retrospect there was clear choicelessness with me and my peers. I was quite uncomfortable with it and I thought, let me just go back to university and finish this degree, just so I have that bachelor's under my belt and try and work out what I want to do.

I graduate and I'm not trying to go into a lab. I'm not interested in the Sciences, so I was listening to George's podcast and he advertised for an internship to work with him.

I applied just out of the blue. I'm fresh out of uni, I'm not working. He ends up calling me in for an interview and I get it. So he was the first one that actually put me on. I was so gassed. I'm like, yo, this guy, he's an urban myth like he's someone I listen to and someone I admire. So to be able to sit down and try and make sense of what's going on in the city with him- it was life changing for me. Remember in the background, the cranes are still there, and slowly these buildings are starting to be completed.

And it's not just the buildings in Wembley. I'm starting to hear some of my friends are getting moved out of South Kilburn, and numerous other Block’s across London. I hear people are moved to Milton Keynes or they get moved to Brighton and it was traumatising.

People were losing access to simple things like community banking. Like if you're from the Caribbean you're much more likely to get money through a pardna system with your peers than you would a loan from the bank. And again, I didn’t study Architecture, or Planning, so my source of knowledge was music, John Singleton films, Kidulthood, Boyz n the Hood. Furious Styles spoke about this. This is gentrification.

Then the buildings in Wembley were nearing completion, once the hoarding got removed some of my neighbours and I went into the area just to see what's new. We weren't welcomed inside the buildings. There were a lot of private development employees and private security. We would sort of get moved along to the pseudo-public realm that was provided in the development across the road from our Block.

So I was like, OK, I’ve witnessed the construction of these my whole life and it was never designed for me. Never had me in consideration. Never had my mother, my cousins or my bredrins in consideration. Places we actually occupy are getting demolished and people are being moved out.

These new cities were not being built with us in mind, in fact it was at our expense.

So, I had a bit of a loud mouth and I would vocalise my disdain for what was going on.

In the meantime, I’m still on the Block.

I remember there was one particular summer, there was a lot of violence happening and it broke down the community on my Block quite a lot. So I thought it would be nice to organise an event in the local park and get everyone to come up, but funding it was an issue. So I knocked on the door of a developer (who was building in Wembley), they said No but turned up to the event anyways. That put me on their radar. I was getting to the end of my internship with George and I was offered an opportunity to stay with the team. Then, out of the blue I get an email from the property developer who said they remembered the event and ‘we were impressed with your tenacity- we would like to offer you a job.’

I told George, and George told me one thing that stayed with me to this day (remember this was 2018). That none of the mandem work in Development, and we’re really blind to what's going on there, and gentrification is one of the biggest threats to us. It is your responsibility to free up the information you come across. That's how I learned everything from scratch, from 2018 to now. What I’ve been doing since, is democratising the information I’m exposed to there.

Amidst the madness I tried to understand why/how gentrification happens? Is it actually a bunch of old white men sitting in a room around a table, plotting and scheming how to get rid of poor people? It wasn’t as sinister as I thought it was. What I witnessed was a combination of austerity and capitalist motivation within a global financial market. We end up being collateral damage. So rather than taking this impossible task of attempting to fix this huge problem I thought it would be best to protect us by seeing what changes can be made internally.

So, that's how ‘Privatise the Mandem’ was born. It was packaging all the information that I was exposed to and packaging it in a way that was legible.

RE:... in accessible language?

NA: I was aware that it needed to speak to my people, my people aren’t all architects and planners.

RE: What I love about the language you use, is that it’s very clear who you’re directing it to- it’s for the mandem. I remember reading it, and remembering my part 1 and 2 experience, remembering details about how developers would use some of these ‘loopholes’ you describe to just acquire more capital, and more land. I remember thinking, why don’t more of us know about this.

HT: It’s really powerful how you say it’s about protecting your people, because often it feels like the narrative we should accept is that ownership and freehold isn’t for us, and that instead we should be lucky to accept models like shared ownership and affordable rent, that continue to become more and more inaccessible, more and more unaffordable.

RE: Yeah, it’s really empowering information.

NA: One of my learnings was, all it takes is for the mandem to buy one building, just one and then the domino effect can start.

When you own the freehold of a building that's when you enter a whole new world of accessibility, new financial instruments. To give an example, you can do an equity release- take the value of the first building and buy the next one, then the value of them and buy more.

A lot of people ask me ‘how are we going to afford to do it?’ and I sympathise with that question a lot. But the principle of Privatise the Mandem isn’t in individual success, it’s in the introduction, the first chapter. It's about collective action. I grew up in an environment where you didn’t let your neighbour go hungry. I have a responsibility to my neighbour and vice versa.

I learned English from my neighbours, they protected me from the EDL (English Defense League), the way they had to also protect themselves from the NF (National Front).

Capitalism and imperialism has its roots in racism and very much rewards individualistic thinking and places the White hetrosexual man at the top of the pyramid, everyone else’s labour is to be exploited. There are so many barriers, but not barriers I think we can’t overcome.

That’s what I'm dedicating my work to- if one building becomes privatised by the mandem in my lifetime I would be very happy.

I want people to have access to choice, because that’s fundamentally what freedom is. I try to do it through education- that’s what the book, Privatise the Mandem is about.

HT: It’s interesting to see how you’re making a model out of this mindset, of looking after your neighbours and the community. It’s the values we culturally were raised on, but we’re also seeing a lot of people who start there but overtime become more and more conservative and develop a scarcity mindset.

NA: What I aspire to do, is remind people of the values we brought up with, instead of what we’re seeing on social media. We as a people have existed (not exclusively in the ends) for generations. Many of the architects that designed social housing projects then were sort of post-war defecting/communist architects, who built with people in mind. So there's plenty of estates like Alexandra Road Estate, intentionally done because the architect says life is meant to come here and make it messy. That's really what brutalism is.

When you go there, that's what you see. There’s life, there’s character. So much art and creativity comes out of these places. Some of our best athletes, rappers, and political thinkers come from there. These places are nourishing.

With a lot of these new developments, interacting with neighbours is discouraged. Your fob doesn’t allow you to access other floors. It seems like we’re heading in a direction that places monetary value in isolating you.

I’m also interested in what a post-colonial city looks like, and I think we have to assess ourselves when we think about decoloniality. It’s difficult because I’ve grown up here all my life so I have internalised a lot of colonial thought.

One thing I’m working on right now is a campaign called ‘Decolonising Wembley’ which identifies all the commemorations of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, this year is the centenary and there’s an ongoing debate about whether it’s appropriate to commemorate the exhibition or not. But there's a difference between celebrating and commemorating. I’ve had to do a lot of reading on the psychology of why we name places, and it comes down to the desire to invoke a memory.

Now, if the British Empire Exhibition was sort of an imperial spectacle that tried to showcase the exploits of the Colony. Why do you want to invoke that memory?

I refuse to believe that it’s a zero sum game, that there must be a loser for me to win.

HT: That's a strong mindset. There’s a huge amount of rage you must have had to overcome to enter these spaces and not have your humanity and values chipped away at.

NA: I’m still on the Block. The people who instilled those values in me are still in my life.

Thomas Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso said (I’m paraphrasing here) that if you want change you have to have a certain degree of madness and I feel like a lot of my peers, you guys, and a lot practitioners I come across have that madness, and they come across scrutiny, but in reality the system just doesn’t work for us.

I’ve been angry, it never worked for me. I’ve had to move past it, it’s not my place to say how someone should feel about me. I did not get to the place that I’m at now without failing a million times. I’m an experiential learner, I’ve gotta fail 100 times before getting it right.

One thing I’m trying to do now (still expanding on it) is how to convince the mandem that the ends are beautiful. And specifically the word beautiful, because I know that beauty and ugliness will be used to justify and approve regenerations projects in planning. It’s a subjective matter, but if ugliness gets associated with the ends then it will just further drive gentrification.

I think architecturally they are beautiful, it’s mismanagement that causes them to decay. Grenfell is a prime example of that.

The foundation of my work is love. I want my people to see themselves as beautiful and their ends as beautiful.

RE: ‘Privatise the Mandem’ does feel like a love letter to the community.

NA: I love that.

RE: You know when I was reading it I was feeling emotional because I’ve realised I have fallen out of love with London if I’m honest. I grew up in an area that was EDL-central and very violent. For a long time I avoided the area completely, I still hate it. Now, my resentment towards the city is how inaccessible it has become to us, and how we’re constantly made to feel like we should accept crumbs like it’s gold.

NA: When it comes to how I frame the ends, I’m always careful who is in the room because I don’t want to romanticise it either. Just to speak for myself, my Block, we’ve been through a lot of violence- I’ve lost people to the soil and the system. There’s a lot of processing that has had to happen to arrive at a place where I can see my Block as beautiful.

“Currently our cities are being built with the imagination of capitalists. ‘Privatise the Mandem’ allows for people, via a collection of freeholds to build from collective imagination. Our culture is collective imagination, it’s not like we struggle to come up with ideas, in fact we produce the largest amount of cultural capital in Britain.”

RE: Another thing about Privatise the Mandem is that it’s super strategic and simple in its delivery, and you’ve taken us through your journey and some of the people that have nurtured your practice, like George The Poet, but also your aspirations for the community, which prompts me to ask what do you need now to realise those dreams.

NA: It’s gonna sound like such a dead answer- I need physical space. It’s so hard to attain in London but I need space to sit down, and talk to other changemakers. A space that nurtures the creativity it takes to implement change, and the permanence of that space would be important.

I’ve never submitted a funding application, my issue with funding is that I don’t like someone looking over my shoulder. I have a negative relationship with philanthropic activities. Because you got super rich, now you want to be philanthropic? When in reality it’s just tax breaks.