What started as a routine governance dispute has produced, by my count, eleven public meetings, three QC opinions, and one anonymous Twitter account that nobody can fully explain

By Lowri Griffiths. With reporting credits to Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

I am writing this from the cafe at Parliament Hill Lido, on a Wednesday morning, having just attended what is, by my count, the eleventh public meeting in the ongoing dispute over the governance of the Mixed Bathing Pond at Hampstead Heath. The meeting was, like the previous ten, attended by approximately 200 people. It produced, like the previous ten, no resolution. It generated, like the previous ten, a follow-up email chain that has by now consumed, I would estimate, several hundred thousand collective hours of London’s professional class.

The dispute itself is, on first description, not large. The City of London Corporation, which manages Hampstead Heath under a 1989 Act of Parliament, has proposed minor changes to the operating hours, signage, and entry-fee structure of the Mixed Pond. The proposals are, by any honest reading, modest. They would adjust hours by approximately 47 minutes per day, change the signage in ways that would be invisible to anyone not specifically looking for changes, and increase the entry fee by 50 pence.

The response from the various Heath user communities has been, across three years and eleven public meetings, the most sustained piece of civic mobilisation I have observed in North London since the original Heath protection battles of the 1980s.

What The Dispute Is Actually About

The dispute is not, despite what every public meeting has suggested, about the proposals themselves. The proposals are, on every measure I can identify, basically reasonable. The dispute is about who has the right to decide what Hampstead Heath is for.

The City of London Corporation believes, on the basis of the 1989 Act, that it has the right to make these decisions. The Heath user communities believe, on the basis of approximately 200 years of accumulated practice, that they have the right to make these decisions. The 1989 Act does not, on careful reading, definitively resolve the question. Nor, on my reading, does it pretend to.

Three years of public meetings have, accordingly, been three years of competing assertions of authority over a question that nobody, including the original drafters of the 1989 Act, ever quite intended to resolve. The meetings have not produced resolution because the question they are trying to resolve is not, in fact, capable of being resolved through the procedural means available.

For ongoing coverage of the dispute, see The London Standard, who have been remarkably patient about it.

The QC Opinions

Three QC opinions have, in the course of the dispute, been commissioned. Two were commissioned by the Heath user communities. One was commissioned by the Corporation. All three opinions are, by any honest reading, defensible interpretations of the 1989 Act. None of them is wholly compatible with the other two.

The first user-community opinion concluded that the Corporation has limited authority to make changes to the Pond’s traditional operating practices without substantive consultation, and that the consultation process to date has been inadequate. The second user-community opinion concluded that the Corporation has, in any case, breached its duties of consultation regardless of whether its underlying authority is broader. The Corporation’s opinion concluded that the Corporation has full authority to make the proposed changes, has discharged its consultation duties adequately, and is being substantially harassed by the user communities.

The opinions have been, in cumulative terms, quoted at virtually every public meeting since they were issued. The quotation has not, by any reasonable assessment, advanced the resolution of the underlying dispute. It has, however, sustained the meetings.

The Anonymous Twitter Account

I should mention, because everyone in North London is talking about it, the anonymous Twitter account that has emerged in the dispute’s third year. The account, which calls itself simply @HeathPondTruth, has approximately 14,000 followers, posts daily, and is widely believed to be operated by a senior figure within either the Corporation or one of the user communities. Speculation about the operator’s identity has produced, in the past six months, what one Hampstead resident described to me as, quote, “a level of paranoid fascination that I have not seen since the Brexit years.”

The account’s content is generally well-informed, mildly humorous, and consistently sceptical of both sides of the dispute. It has been suspended twice by Twitter on the basis of complaints from the Corporation, and has both times been reinstated after, in its own framing, “consultation with the platform’s content moderation team.” It has, on three occasions, broken stories about the dispute that subsequent reporting has confirmed.

I have, in my professional capacity, made several attempts to identify the operator. I have failed. I have my suspicions. I will not share them here. They would, if correct, end the operator’s professional career.

What The Pond Itself Is Doing

The Pond itself, throughout three years of dispute, has continued to operate substantially as it always has. People swim in it daily. The water is, depending on season, somewhere between bracing and Arctic. The lifeguards remain, by every measure I can identify, exemplary. The Pond’s actual users include, on the available demographic evidence, a remarkably broad cross-section of London. The Pond is, in some honest accounting, working.

What is not working is the question of who controls it. The question of control has, as it has been allowed to develop, become substantially more important in the public conversation than the question of operation. This is, I think, the central pattern of the dispute. A working institution has been disrupted, not by any operational failure, but by the inability of its various stakeholders to agree on whose institution it actually is.

The Political Stakes

The political stakes of the dispute are, in some sense, larger than the dispute itself. The Heath is, by accumulated practice, one of the few genuinely communal spaces in inner London. The City of London Corporation is, by structure, an institution whose primary constituency is not the residents of inner London but the financial firms whose presence has, across decades, financed the Corporation’s various charitable obligations including the Heath’s maintenance. The conflict between these two structural positions, briefly visible in the Pond dispute, recurs across the broader question of how London’s commons are governed.

Nobody, in any of the eleven public meetings I have attended, has been willing to address this larger question directly. The QC opinions do not address it. The press coverage rarely addresses it. The Twitter account, occasionally, gestures at it. The avoidance is, in some sense, the most honest thing about the dispute. The participants understand, I think, that the larger question is genuinely difficult and that addressing it would not produce a more comfortable answer than the one currently being avoided.

An ongoing analysis at Reason has examined comparable governance disputes around urban commons in other jurisdictions. The patterns are, broadly, the same.

What I Think Will Happen

What I think will happen, on the basis of three years of attentive observation, is that the dispute will continue substantially as it has, for several more years, with no decisive resolution but with gradual accumulation of practical compromises that allow the Pond to continue functioning. The Corporation will, in operational practice, implement most of its proposed changes through quiet administrative action over time. The user communities will, in operational practice, accept most of those changes once they are implemented and have not produced obvious harm. The QC opinions will continue to be quoted. The Twitter account will continue to post. The eleven public meetings will become twenty. Nobody will declare victory. Nobody will declare defeat. The Pond will continue to be cold.

This is, I think, more or less how North London disputes resolve. The resolution is procedural rather than substantive, gradual rather than dramatic, and substantially shaped by the simple operational reality that the institution itself, the Pond, has its own gravitational pull that none of the disputants can ultimately ignore.

I will continue to attend the meetings. I will continue to swim, occasionally, in the Pond. I will continue to read the Twitter account, in approximately the spirit one would read a particularly well-written village newsletter. Read more from Lowri Griffiths.

Related at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/hampstead-heath-mixed-pond-wars/