Street fighters #13 – Elizabeth Pascoe

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Interesting murmurs in Liverpool, where the new Labour council administration has vowed to launch an “urgent review” of the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) scheme which has seen so many communities decimated and decent homes demolished over the past seven years, amid claims that people no longer aspire to live in terraced housing.

This thinking will be of cold comfort to the many residents who have already gone through years of stress as they watch their areas decline, topped off by being forced out by Compulsory Purchase Order.

I’m prepared to accept that there are many people who do okay out of this process but it’s not really their voices that I’ve been trying to capture here.

And any pastiche of Housing Market Renewal campaigners would be incomplete without Elizabeth Pascoe, who – along with a group of neighbours – fought unsuccessfully through two public inquiries and numerous high court hearings to prevent her home from being bulldozed as part of a road-widening scheme.

Elizabeth was forced to leave her home off Edge Lane, Liverpool, in March this year and her house may well have been cleared by now. New housing in its place will be funded by HMR.

Or will it?

None of the nine HMR Pathfinder schemes running across the North of England has any funding agreed beyond the current 2010-11 financial year. The Tories haven’t said a huge amount about what they plan to do but it’s possible that a change in government – not to mention the UK’s huge public sector deficit – could herald a change in direction for the programme.

Over to Elizabeth. [** apologies in advance for the extremely ropey audio here. This was recorded before I honed my skills with some training with duckrabbit]

TRANSCRIPT

who cares, wins

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I’ve put my young carers portraits into a gallery on the photo section of my website and turned the story into a short audio slideshow which can be seen on the multimedia section. A written feature on these amazing young people is going to be going into a national paper over the coming month and I hope to get some interest from radio and online. We shall see…

update:

The multimedia piece has had some great feedback from the young carers involved, HERE and HERE. That means a lot.

trapped on the margins

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It feels like a long time since I first wrote about a family of vulnerable and homeless British Gypsies from the York area who are enduring almost medieval living conditions and being moved on every three weeks under an asbo that they were handed five years ago. Well precisely nothing has changed in that time and the story finally made it into print this week. I’m still shocked by their situation, which I’ve seen on several occasions with my own eyes. It’s an incredibly complex and politically sensitive issue of course. I hope the authorities in the area will pull the stops out to help them but I’m not going to hold my breath.

girls’ night out

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I’m not usually one for hen dos and last night was only my second. I have to admit they’re a phenomenon I find morbidly fascinating, even more so after spending time photographing on the streets of Manchester on a Saturday night a couple of months ago. Yesterday’s was tame in comparison – not a stripper or sex doll in sight – but I can’t help but think there could be an interesting series of photos buried within the hen party scene.

bowling for mancunia

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I think I’m already officially bored of this Lomoesque camera which I used for the first time the other week on a uni assignment. But I took it with me when I went Crown Green Bowling on Monday afternoon with the over-50s group from the Booth Centre, just to see what I came out with using black and white film and to try and mix up what I come out with from that project. The twist is that this is the first film I have ever processed (bar one last week that I completely screwed up by agitating the developing tank too much). Just to ensure the images came out extra-specially terrible, I scanned the negatives myself – again, the first time I’ve had a go at this. I can’t really tell where the problems begin and end but it’s been quite fun and certainly an interesting learning curve. Once again, I think I need to learn some patience…

Street fighters #12 – Liverpool Picton

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The leader of Liverpool Council made quite an astonishing admission today – but also quite a calculated one. He admitted publicly – for the first time as I understand it – that the city’s Housing Market Renewal scheme has been a shambles which has wreaked untold damage on the communities it is meant to be regenerating.

Quite a confession, but the timing is no accident. The city council is, after all, a Lib Dem administration which has been behind the rolling out of this heavy-handed New Labour regeneration scheme. Now, with two weeks to go before the general election and when the writing would appear to be on the wall for the government, it would seem that the council is trying to distance itself from what has been a controversial and divisive programme.

I found out about this interview in an email from a housing campaigner in Liverpool, who forwarded it onto a number of contacts. One of the responses I was copied in to was from Steve Ord, a former Liverpool resident and landlord who I’ve interviewed for my Street Fighters project.

“So does that mean I can have my house back?” was his bitter response.

Steve Ord’s former family home in Picton, an area in Liverpool’s Wavertree neighbourhood, was taken from him after his opposition group lost a public inquiry into a Compulsory Purchase Order. The property, which he was renting out to students – accounting for 45 per cent of his total income -may well have been demolished by now. Along with most of his childhood landmarks.


Please listen to it in Steve’s own words:

TRANSCRIPT

staying centred

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I can feel myself getting quite attached to some of the characters I’m meeting during my time at the Booth Centre, a drop in centre for homeless and ex-homeless people where I’ve been spending two to three days a week since Easter. I haven’t ended up using my camera every day, but the vast majority of users have made me feel incredibly welcome and are being really cool about me being a fly-on-the-wall during their sessions. There is a hard core of regulars who attend the various classes but new faces are always appearing at the drop-in sessions where people can turn up for a cup of tea and some food. Those have been the times when I’ve felt a bit out of my comfort zone – overwhelmed by the attention and occasionally gruff comments and questions of strangers  – but I feel like I’m starting to break through.

I started this project after reading somewhere in the MA course literature that we would be asked to find a location where we could get sustained and repeated access. Something made me think of the Booth Centre, which I’d heard of somewhere along the line, and I fired off an email to the manager, Amanda. As always it came down to a combination of timing, luck and the right approach. They apparently get constant requests to help people with projects – from people like me as well as academics and students – and the answer is usually no. But this year is the centre’s 15th anniversary and Amanda felt this might be a good time to document some of the work they are doing. My pitch to her was that I have a long-term interest in issues around social exclusion, but am keen not to paint users of the centre as victims or any other kind of negative stereotype often attached to people who have experienced homelessness. This approach hit a nerve. She said yes and I decided to seize the moment and get started even though the assignment hadn’t been set. It may well not end up being my first assessed project as I have other irons in the fire. Time will tell.

I’ve written before here how I often wrestle with the fact that the niche I find myself in as a writer-journalist seems to me to be one of the major cliches of documentary photography. I’m trying to think how my skills can bring ‘added value’ to the story I’m trying to tell and I suppose the depth I’m trying to achieve in really getting to know some of the Booth Centre regulars as individuals in their own right is one way I’m doing this. I’ve taken a little ambient sound this week already and am planning to start doing some audio interviewing and hopefully some proper portraits over the coming week or two.  People are already offering up some really fascinating information about their lives as we get to know each other better…whether that will be the case when the audio recorder is running, I don’t know.

What is actually quite liberating about doing this project is that for the first time in my career I am working on a story with no final destination in mind. I have stepped off the editorial treadmill with this and am doing it entirely in my own time and am trying to approach it in an organic and open-minded kind of way. For a print journalist used to writing six stories a day while working on regional papers, taking my foot off the pedal in this manner does not feel natural and I continue to get pangs of anxiety and to feel the lure of other stories. I may not operate with anywhere near that ridiculous turnover today but my attention span sometimes feels damaged beyond repair by those early years. I am painfully aware that patience is one of the most important attributes for a great photographer, so this kind of practice is valuable.

Having no ulterior motive, editorially speaking, is actually turning out to a blessing because I am being honest with people who attend the centre when I say I’m doing this purely for myself and also so the Booth Centre can use the images. Leaving my journalist hat at home has helped me win people’s trust, while helping me to stay centred, to coin a terrible pun. That one really deserves a smack.

journey #2 – foureyes

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Ok, so journey number two was more about me being a flaneur really, and trying out a toy camera I picked up recently. I never got into the Holga/Lomo craze and shooting film almost completely passed me by because I’ve only got into photography in the past two or three years. But I’ve recently picked up a couple of low-fi film camreas (including an underwater one in the pound store yesterday…I’m sure that one will work well) and am also planning to start shooting a bit of medium format here and there, where money allows. I’m interested to see the effect of mixing it up a bit on my photography and also I’m hoping that shooting film once in a while will help me become more thoughtful about what I do. That’s the theory, anyhow.

Anyway, so these are just some rather random snaps from a walk yesterday from the city centre up the A6 to Levenshulme, the area of Manchester where I live. It’s a gimmicky little camera and won’t be to everyone’s taste. Not having a viewfinder at all means lots of shooting from the hip, guesswork and crooked horizons. I don’t think Homer (tutor) would approve.

journey #1

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Because I’ve been shooting almost every day for several weeks I decided to try to be really loose in my approach to our latest mini MA assignment of ‘journey’. I ended up having two cracks at it actually because I enjoyed it so much – both extremely mundane journeys but fun to do. This first was shot using my iphone camera, which I enjoy mucking around with because you can get some really random angles and attract no attention whatsoever. I didn’t engage with anyone on the journey…have been doing rather a lot of that lately, at the Booth Centre and with the young carers.

It’s just a tram ride to Salford Quays, where I attended Redeye’s Conflict & The Camera discussion, with Sean Sutton, Simon Norfolk, John Levy of Foto8 and Professor David Campbell.