Last week, a Labour council voted through plans for a major redevelopment in the historic area of Brick Lane. That development is motivated by greed – the greed that drives the creation of capitalist landmarks with no connection to the people who live around them. It’s the ‘architectural’ without architecture: real architecture is welcoming for all, a sentiment that Brick Lane has always embodied.

The area welcomed my dad in 1949, and allowed him to build a life and a community there until 1986, when he died in the same house he first lived in. For him, Brick Lane was where you got a haircut, got a key cut, and bought shoes for your children who attended the local school, also situated on Brick Lane.

But along with the school and the places of worship of all varieties, there was the ‘beast’—his words—known as the Truman Brewery. It was like a citadel. The Brewery’s bosses wouldn’t give him a job because he had a turban.

Brick Lane and Spitalfields were seen as separate areas until road signs in Bengali appeared. There was outrage then, but my mother and father longed for the community to work together, and to work on Brick Lane itself, where you could get help and help others to get by.

It is on the longstanding insecurities and fears of the locals that the new development plans play. The owners of the curry houses fear for their livelihoods; businesses are struggling and desperate. But the reality is that people won’t bother to go to Brick Lane to buy a curry soon – they’ll get it elsewhere.

Local people have always been bullied out by the big corporates, by the nasty capitalist machine. I don’t want to use the word ‘gentrification’: I want to say it’s social cleansing. There’s a sense of architectural superiority: the people behind this development have let academia take over the human values of love, kindness, and collective, cooperative living. To them, those things matter less than a house restored to a Grade II listed building status.

Once there were dozens of sewing machines buzzing away in what were rag trade ‘factories’. When I was a kid, I would listen to the banter between the workers gathered around five or six sewing machines to a room. The sound was poetic: the buildings were alive with work and beauty. Now there are one or two people living there.

These developers have an aesthetic superiority complex, as though it’s sacrilegious to put a Brother sewing machine next to Georgian panelling. Some abstract rules tell them it’s not ‘allowed’. The Georgian houses of Brick Lane were built on misery, on the profit from colonial escapades – but the soul of a building is its people, and if you rip out that soul, there’s no difference between the buildings of Brick Lane and the buildings of Bath.

The local community and groups like Nijjor Manush, the Bengali East End Heritage Society, and the Spitalfields Trust have mounted a brave campaign to ‘Save Brick Lane’, but we need to ask what it is we’re saving. It’s more about reclaiming Brick Lane: investing it with more community, more care, more love and kindness, and more support for the local alternative economy. After all, Brick Lane has long been known as a flea market on edge of the capitalist city. The people of Brick Lane deal in cash; they barter; they’re pedlars. It always had its own economy, separate from that of London, the financial centre of the world. But now its shops are being rented out for extortionate prices, all as part of an effort that culminates in a corporate mall.

We have to fight this, not only for ourselves, but for the younger generation. My father taught me to make sure my voice was heard. If you’re not happy with something, you have to say it.

That’s proven by the local experience. We demonstrated when Blair Peach and Altab Ali were killed. We demonstrated when we had had enough of the skinheads. They petrol-bombed us, but people went out and marched. It was us who would walk through Brick Lane, because we had to. Sometimes the National Front, headed by Martin Webster and John Tyndall, would be standing at the end of the road. Sometimes you’d see Martin Webster eat in the curry houses.

When I was young, the old Truman Brewery was a dark, frightening building. My father would say its land was cursed; so did the late Reverend Eddie Stride. At that time, it was known for its bad working conditions – for people who suffered with alcoholism, for women who suffered abuse. The sounds of the cobbled flooring and the beer barrels were resonant of those most difficult of human experiences – of toll and strife, of misery and gloom. Now the curse is returning, in the form of a shopping mall.