The house I grew up in was being knocked down. Rollins House, a rundown Art Deco former factory in south-east London, was the kind of building that looks like nothing until you know what it is: unglamorous on the surface, full of history underneath. It was where my mother lived and where I was raised, and a developer wanted the site for flats. We had to fight, but couldn’t afford lawyers.
I decided to teach myself planning law in between school exam revision. I pored over archives nobody else had opened, putting together a dossier of precedents that would help our case.
