Russell Gray is a redoubtable property developer, who has, among other projects, remade Bermondsey. He is also a self-styled anarchist and an arts patron. What keeps him going?
‘I don’t like being bullied,’ Russell Gray told me indignantly, beneath an enormous wooden bust of a Hindu deity. The divine sculpture’s attention was mostly directed towards his desk opposite. But it watched over us from one side, as we perched in the kitchen alcove of the Dragons Den-style warehouse from which he conducted his business.
We were in The Tanneries. Once a key cog in Bermondsey’s hide processing trade, the property developer and self-styled anarchist has transformed the site into a sprawling complex of office buildings, art spaces and a yoga studio. ‘Beautiful setting and perfect for yoga and meditation,’ says one reviewer on Google. ‘Shame the owner is not as zen.’
I was not at The Tanneries for flow yoga. I was there about the sharks. Russell, who is in his late 60s, with cropped yellow-white hair, has spent much of the last five years fighting to return five giant fibreglass sharks to Regent’s Canal. The art installation – named Sharks! – was first due to grace the waters outside Hoxton Docks in August 2020. But Hackney Council got wind of Russell’s plans and came down hard. They launched multiple High Court injunctions against the installation, ordering its removal, and as the owner of the artwork and of Hoxton Docks, it was down to Russell to defend it. Hackney Council argued that the sharks were a danger to the community; that Russell’s attempts to antagonise them had gone on long enough. But it was all in vain.
At times over recent years, only one shark had appeared in the water by Haggerston Bridge, sometimes none at all. But now the full cohort has their rightful place in the canal, leaping defiantly out of the water atop metal NATO pontoons.
Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction, capable of razing entire universes to ash to fulfil the natural cosmic cycle of regeneration. He’s a good guy, basically, immensely powerful and wise but prone to bouts of rage. He is also, as it happens, the name of Russell’s property restoration company, Shiva Limited.
Shiva was founded in 1989, after inheritance money allowed Russell to move into the commercial property market. Bermondsey was being abandoned by the factories and industries that had occupied it for decades. Prices were cheap, and so Russell was able to pick up the ex-tannery buildings for less than £500,000. As the value of the land shot up, he fortified his portfolio, acquiring other buildings and land around the area. As an avid military hardware enthusiast, he began collecting combat vehicles.
When Southwark Council refused his application to build along Mandela Way in the mid-90s, he knew just what to do. He placed a Soviet T-34 tank on the plot instead, and pointed the turret directly at the council offices.
He named the tank Stompie, after Stompie Seipei: a teenage activist murdered by Winnie Mandela’s security detail in 1989. As Stompie became a local icon, the council stopped trying to remove it. This provided a valuable lesson. ‘They always give up’ he said. ‘They make fools of themselves for long enough, and then they just sort of throw in the towel.’
Gray had taken care to preserve Bermondsey’s heritage, renovating what were dilapidated old warehouses into stylish studios and workspaces. But blue-chip firms, rushing into the area with proposals for angular skyscrapers in the late 2000s, didn’t care about any of that. ‘Secrecy is the name of the game with the Shard,’ he vented to the BBC in 2010. With a clear stake in the area’s development, he founded the Bermondsey Village Action Group (BVAG): a conservation movement that portrayed Bermondsey as a kind of medieval hamlet under siege from corporate developers.
This man-of-the-people framing could be seen as curious for a multimillionaire with property holdings all over the area. After an offshoot of BVAG applied to become the community representative on planning matters, several respondents to a council consultation were horrified by the conflict of interest. Others questioned Russell’s conduct, with one person claiming that ‘Russell is a bully and not someone who can represent anyone beyond himself’, while another alleged ‘he would always be angry and aggressive’, ‘at one point berating the then-chair of the group [Bermondsey Neighbourhood Forum] so much that he reduced her to tears’. Of course, many residents shared Russell’s enthusiasm for Bermondsey’s heritage and so supported the proposal. The Bermondsey Neighbourhood Forum was a rival to BVAG. So, as Russell put it in a letter to Southwark Council, any negativity towards him was likely just ‘sour grapes’. The council appointed the new group to represent the area with Russell as chair.
BVAG had few members. But like many of Russell’s projects it styled itself as a giant slayer, a collective who would defend Bermondsey’s skies from tyrannical town planners. A grainy YouTube video from 2012 shows Boris Johnson being ambushed by BVAG outside his mayoral offices. He fobs off the politer protesters, promising that Network Rail’s proposed revamp of London Bridge Station angers him too, deeply, and then cheerily whirls back towards the building. At this point, a small man in a polar-white parka unleashes a barrage of threats: Johnson will see him in court if he doesn’t help them stop this. ‘I’m sorry, who are you?’ he says, momentarily thrown off guard. The man thrusts down his hood and strides forward. ‘I’m Russell Gray.’
If he could wear down local councils – and demand meetings with mayors – by sheer force of will, other foes required a different approach. When Marlborough College expelled his son in 2005, he took them to court. His son, Rhys, had accrued almost 400 disciplinary warnings. But Russell was determined to clear his name. ‘If you’re mugged, what do you do?’, he said to Jon Ronson, who was covering the case. ‘Lie down and let them punch you, or do you fight?’ He spent around £200,000 on legal fees, and lost.
Money appeared to enable Russell to take up causes he was passionate about. After purchasing Brunswick Wharf (part of Hoxton Docks) in Hackney in the early 90s, he fostered a thriving creative scene there: leasing the site at a discount rate to arts charities, allowing Turner Prize-winning artists like Rachel Whiteread to take up residence. Hackney Council attempted to sequester the site from him in 2004, claiming to need it for the City Academy school they wished to build. They, too, failed.
By the mid-2010s, they were at it again, ordering Russell to remove various art installations from the site. They claimed that rooftop structures like Beach House, an experimental building made from recycled materials, could spoil Haggerston Baths next door. This was the same glorious Victorian bathhouse that the council had allowed to run derelict after abandoning it in 2000. It felt personal to Russell. In 2017 Shiva started sponsoring a new arts and architecture charity, Antepavilion, the ‘A’ encircled on their logo. It immediately began hosting an annual architecture competition at the Hackney site, with a remit to challenge or subvert local planning laws.
When Bill Heine speared a sculpture of a 25-foot great white shark into the roof of his suburban Headington home in 1986, Oxford City Council was furious. Yet as the council fought to remove the shark, it took on a cult-like status, becoming a beacon for self-expression against the petty bureaucracy of local planning officialdom. After six years of legal wrangling, the Department of the Environment eventually waded in to approve the installation. ‘Any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky,’ said the planning inspector, Peter Macdonald, in his official ruling.
Decades later, when an architect called Jaimie Shorten saw that the brief for the 2020 Antepavilion competition was to ‘highlight the tension between the authoritarian governance of the built environment and aesthetic libertarianism’, his mind went straight to the Headington Shark. ‘I just knew I’d won,’ he told me over coffee.
The Headington Shark was partially a commentary on Operation El Dorado Canyon, the US bombing of Libya in 1986. With American fighter jets leaving for Tripoli from the nearby air base at RAF Upper Heyford, its sense of incongruity was meant to symbolise the absurd violence of a bomb plunging from the sky. So Shorten gave his creation a political angle too. In addition to blowing bubbles and delivering lectures on urbanism, the five sharks were to ‘sing Charles Trenet’s La Mer, in harmony and in French, as a poignant reflection on the UK leaving the EU’.
On a balmy late-summer evening, after months of building, Shorten and Gray were finally ready for launch. But unbeknown to them, Hackney Council had spent the week prior hurriedly applying for a High Court injunction against Sharks!. Around 8pm, after spending all day finalising it, officers from Hackney Council arrived at Hoxton Docks to slap down their ruling. There would be no more sharks. ‘I told them to fuck off,’ Shorten told me proudly, as the team moved swiftly to dunk a massive megalodon into the canal.
For Gray, it was typical. Arguing the sharks’ case in the High Court, he protested that the injunction reflected a ‘demand for control for the sake of control itself’, and for ‘the intrinsic satisfaction it brings to those who aspire to exercise it through public office’. Hackney Council said the installation lacked suitable planning permission, and that it was ‘likely to attract the attention of passersby due to its appearance, its noise and its bubble-blowing’.
When the Architecture Foundation, the co-sponsor, cut ties with Antepavilion after the Sharks! injunction, Gray refused to back down. He represented himself in court, writing seething witness statements and legal defences that pulled apart the constructions of the council.
Russell could be aggressive. But he had a vision for what Antepavilion and the design industry in London could be, and appeared to pursue it out of a strange combination of civic duty and personal vengeance. Hackney Council welcomed the big developers that were stultifying the area, yet were flexing their muscles over this artsy industrial site that had contributed so much to the community.
As he fought back, the public took to the sharks much as they had in Oxford. A pin for Sharks! on Google Maps has 39 reviews and a 4.8 average rating, the vibe generally captured by reviews like ‘me and my friends had a great time!! would recommend’ and ‘Yay Sharks! Boooo Hackney Council >:(’.
After over three years, and a cost to Hackney Council of over £80,000, Gray was vindicated: in January 2024, the planning inspectorate granted Antepavilion permission to reinstall the sharks, if only for nine months.
It should have been a joyous moment for Shorten. But over the years his relationship with Gray had frayed. Sitting with Shorten on a biting November day, he told me that part of the reason they’d parted ways was artistic differences. Silly stuff, really. The sharks were meant to be floating freely in the water, not standing on pontoons. But Shorten was angry for another reason: the money.
In the brief, Antepavilion promises the winner of each competition £15,000 for the build and £10,000 in prize money. Yet they also note that applicants ‘are free to put a portion of the prize fund towards their construction budget’, and allocate part of their personal winnings to create something beautiful and innovative.
As Jaimie tells it, ‘When it was all done and dusted, [Russell] said “you’d spent all your prize money on doing things with the sharks.” I never got a penny.’
You don’t enter competitions like Antepavilion for the money, and other winners I spoke to were not surprised to find that by the end of the project, there could be little money for them either. As the brief makes clear, the combined budget is £25,000 – and Jaimie, Russell said, had exceeded that considerably.
Yet he’d stuck with Russell as the others broke ties with Antepavilion, standing beside him in court to defend the artwork. And so, despite not technically breaching the rules of the competition, Jaimie was aggrieved that after all that work there was no money for him left over.
Most of the earlier competition winners were in their 20s or 30s. Part of Antepavilion’s allure was that it could elevate a newly formed practice, and offer architects fresh out of university the chance to get their hands dirty. It offered practical building experience and a chance to get your name out there. But Jaimie wasn’t an up-and-comer. He was in his 60s, with his own successful practice already. In many ways, he wasn’t the ideal ‘type’ for Antepavillion, and members of the judging committee expressed their reservations about awarding him the commission. But Sharks! was so perfect, so in tune with Antepavilion’s ethos that it would be crazy not to go for it.
Shorten, however, was upset at how he’d been treated and wanted his voice out there. ‘It was bullying,’ he said, when I asked how Russell was to work with. He described being ‘screamed at, because he’s like that – he’s a maniac’.
Shorten said he would arrive at the docks to find Russell, his sons, and a small army of eastern European labourers at each other’s throats. The oldest, Harley, was the site manager. He held all manner of events there, with Jeremy Corbyn choosing the docks as the location for the final rally of his 2019 election run. When not renting out the site, the Grays would work on fractious family projects, like the military-grade yacht they planned to sail to India. Some of the stories around Russell can sound overblown. But several people I spoke to insisted that the boat was kitted out with machine-gun mounts, from which the boys would somewhat implausibly repel Somali pirates. One person familiar with Antepavilion at that time joked that, were they ever to set sail, they would stop off in Cairo to pick up rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
The atmosphere at Hoxton Docks could be bizarre, said Ellis Woodman, director of the Architecture Foundation, and he felt cautious about sending young architects into the macho den that the site could be. But many of them took to it. Nima Sardar won the 2021 competition, enjoyed it, and found the £10,000 all present and accounted for. ‘My father is like him,’ he laughed, ‘so I’m used to someone talking like that. It’s not a problem.’
Woodman showed me photos of ballet performances on summer evenings at the docks. He told me about happy volunteer crews all chipping in to nail together the winning designs, and felt that, for the most part, ‘everyone went in with their eyes open’. Competition winners worked hard and won great publicity. Trading unpaid hours for exposure is an unfortunate standard of the creative industries, and besides: it’s not like Russell was making any money out of this. He could have turned the site into flats long ago if that’s what he wanted, as he liked to say. More to himself than in response to any question in particular, Woodman muttered, ‘I’ve never met anyone like him.’
I’d first emailed Russell before the full richness of his backstory was apparent to me, more interested in Sharks! than the volcanic figure many had described. But when you mention Gray’s name in architectural circles there can be a slight hardening of the air. He is a serial litigant, whose list of legal adversaries includes his son’s school, the executors of his mother’s will and both of his neighbours in Knightsbridge. The terrain of his collaborations is characterised by scorched earth and burnt bridges. So, as I walked up to the tall golden doors of Shiva HQ, which were engraved with cobras, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Surrounded by cream leather armchairs and exposed brick, seated at an almost comically large wooden desk in the centre of the room, was Russell. ‘Right,’ he said, turning to greet me. ‘Here’s how this is going to work.’
He enjoyed telling me that he used to be a journalist himself, for a snazzy UK magazine that covered all sorts, and offered his assistance with the editorial process. I declined.
Clearly Sharks! was still a raw subject. He would impatiently grill me on the details from various court cases, frequently declaring that he was done talking before launching into another bitter tirade against the council.
Russell: ‘You notice that they try to treat it as a heritage building. It’s a fucking 1950s cheaply built warehouse. Did you notice the heritage quality of Hoxton Docks?’
‘I saw it had a conservation area drawn around it.’
‘Why do you think that was?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Have a guess. You should have read enough about this by now.’
‘You think that was a deliberate attempt to control you?’
‘Of course it was. They put a fucking conservation area around us, and the shit block of Barratt flats next door. I mean, I’m sure you’re not an expert on architecture, but you know St Paul’s Cathedral from fucking Aylesbury Estate, don’t you?’
Because Hackney Council quoted an article by Olly Wainwright in their evidence against Sharks!, Gray is ironclad that the Guardian journalist colluded with the authorities (Wainwright did not respond to my request for comment). Despite this, he could not resist sharing his latest plot to take on Southwark Council with me. Shiva would deploy a cunning series of planning applications, luring them out ‘so that the full extent of their exclusive interest in money is laid bare’.
Speaking with Russell can feel like being pulled under the swell of a wave, and as I stepped out into the black wet December night it was like I was finally coming up for air. I walked over to a bench and sat under the glittering blue-black skyscrapers crowding over The Tanneries.
Several people I spoke to viewed Russell as a last gasp of the countercultural movements of the 70s and 80s, someone who’d come of age in wilder and less regulated times. They may not have found him pleasant. But in Hoxton Docks and The Tanneries he’d preserved edges of a gritty, transgressive London that had been sanded down elsewhere. Antepavilion could be a vehicle for personal vendettas, but it carved a space for joy along the way.
Several days after visiting The Tanneries I walked over to Hoxton Docks, eager to get a sense of place beyond the sharks. Crossing over Haggerston Bridge, the cushy affluence of the canal gives way to something seedier, a fragment of the Hackney of old. Rusty barbed wire topped the front gate, Haggerston Baths peering over in all its pitiful abandonment. A custom matte-black Land Rover guarded the entrance, beside a row of motorcycles underneath lurid orange coverings.
With the feeble winter daylight fading, I gave Russell a call, asking if I could finally see this bohemian enclave for myself. Not today, he said. A fox had gotten into the site and he needed to kill it.
