street fighters

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]

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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:

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Street fighters #11 – Broughton, Salford

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Guy Griffiths and his brother Jimmy were physically evicted from the terraced properties they both owned in the Broughton area of Salford after the council obtained a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to make way for a regeneration scheme. At the time they were offered £21,000 for their properties – despite the fact the new “affordable homes” built to replace the demolished streets started at £115,000, rising to £138,000. Taking the issue to a land tribunal meant the brothers were offered more money but five years on Guy remains in conflict with the local authority over compensation. His original home has been demolished but here he is photographed in front of another house he owned and rented out, the valuation of which he is also disputing. The background noises in the recording by the way are the squeaks of his leather jacket…

Street fighters #10 – Liverpool Granby

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What can you do about it if your neighbourhood is four-fifths empty and boarded up – earmarked for demolition at some future, undisclosed point – and some of the houses look like this?

In truth your options for serious change would be pretty limited, and so it is for the people left behind in the Granby Triangle – a corner of Liverpool’s Toxteth district.

I first visited residents of Cairns Street shortly after I went freelance in 2006 and they became my second feature on urban regeneration. They contacted me after spotting a piece I’d written about a similar situation across the city in Guardian Society. On that occasion I visited Granby on a dark winter night. Although the streets were desolate and empty, I was struck by the white fairy lights that adorned the outside of the home where people had gathered to meet me. It looked magical.

It was only really when I returned to Granby for this project that I realised the true extent of blight in this area. This is a potentially beautiful neighbourhood – the houses are built from lovely brick, have bay windows and the streets are lined with trees.

But many of the houses have been empty since the 80s, when the streets were apparently taken out of a previous regeneration or demolition scheme – locals seem hazy on the details. What some believe, however, is that their community has been wilfully neglected by the city council as a punishment for the Toxteth Riots – an event that some still refer to as ‘the uprising’. Whether or not that’s the case, the effect is clear. Some of the vacant properties are dangerous – with frontages that have collapsed onto the street.

The irony here is that the people left in the Granby Triangle are a fantastic community. Fed up with the state of their area, they have made efforts to clear up the streets as best they can and to instill a bit of pride in the neighbourhood. It’s not nice to live among dreary vacant properties, with big security signs stuck onto the shutters and ‘gas off’, ‘elec off’ and ‘all materials of value have been removed’ scrawled onto every wall, so they have brightened up the empty buildings with paint.

They actually won a Britain in Bloom competition a couple of years back for their efforts. The runner beans, tomato plants and sweetcorn that they plant in their hanging baskets and tubs are a talking point in the area – kids, hoodies on bikes, old men and everyone in between stop to have a chat. It’s a small thing but I love the idea of people wrestling control of their surroundings from the faceless local authority like this – even if they ultminately may not win.

HEAR IT IN RESIDENT MARTIN DUNSCHEN’S OWN WORDS

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Streetfighters #9 – eviction trauma

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This open letter was passed on to me a while back by residents of one of the many areas of the north of England currently undergoing regeneration under the government’s Housing Market Renewal programme. It was written by one of their friends and neighbours, who lost their family home in an earlier phase of the scheme.

I have spoken to the letter-writer and asked if I could pay them a visit to record their experience as part of my Street Fighters series. They said no, because the whole experience was so traumatic that they just want to put the whole thing behind them. I tried all the journalistic persuasion tricks in the book but unfortunately they stood firm. It’s a shame because this is one of the worst experiences I have heard of, but of course I can understand the way they feel.

So to at least mark their story in some minor, anonymous way, I’ve typed their original handwritten letter – changing nothing except to anonymise any details that can identify them or where they lived. I don’t think any of that really matters anyway. What they went through was an abuse which shouldn’t have happened.

While many people are no doubt very sorry to leave their homes under this and other regeneration schemes, I hope everyone else gets treated with more respect. When I hear stories like this I have to keep reminding myself that not everyone is a regeneration loser…I really think that on balance they are probably in the minority. I hope that’s the case.

Street fighters #8 – Stoke

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Glenn Fowler’s oatcake shop on Waterloo Road in Hanley looks set to fall victim to Stoke’s regeneration programme. Once these traditional ‘through the window’ kiosks were a common sight in this part of the Potteries but Fowler’s is the only one left. He is happy to compromise with the regeneration officials and says he won’t oppose a Compulsory Purchase Order if they find him an alternative premises for his business, which has suffered hugely as a result of the demolition going on around him. I highly recommend trying their oatcakes, by the way.

Street fighters #7 – Middlesbrough

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Barbara Yafano’s family had lived for generations in St Hilda’s, Middlesbrough’s former industrial hub – known locally as ‘over the border’. But six years ago city mayor Ray Mallon, who hit the headlines in the ’90s as the zero-tolerance police chief known as Robocop, kicked off a major regeneration process that has decimated the area. Few houses are still standing and even fewer people are left. No one seems sure what – other than a new homeless hostel – will take their place. The Yafanos and a neighbour fought hard for a fairer compensation deal and eventually got something they were happy with. In January they moved to a property in another part of Middlesbrough. Barbara was sad to leave St Hilda’s but relieved her five years of hell were over.

Street Fighters #6 – Seedley South

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The people of Salford’s Seedley South neighbourhood had been promised regeneration since the mid-90s but never for a moment did they realise the price they would pay for it. As chair of the local residents association, Jim Parker was one of those who really engaged with the process – giving up countless evenings over a number of years to take part in consultations and steering groups. But when the time came for something to happen – after years when the community had been left to rot – his hopes were dashed and Jim and others were left bitter. None of their input was incorporated into the plans. Instead, 350 homes have been bulldozed, including those belonging to some of the Parkers’ closest friends. A primary school is currently being built on part of the site – and is already said to be too small for expected pupil numbers – but the rest has simply been cleared and grassed over.

street fighters #5 – Hull

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Ada Lombardi bought an end-of-terrace property in Hull in late 2006 but on the day she was completing on the sale, the local authority was signing off a different kind of deal – the demolition of her new house and hundreds of others in the immediate area. The area progressively emptied, until – in January 2009 – Ada was the last occupier on her row. To say she is unhappy would be an understatement. She and her daughter Camilla – who dropped out of university in Brighton because she was so worried about her mum – feel unable to leave their house unguarded for any length of time. They say there is constant vandalism and fear that one day their home could be burned to the ground. As if that’s not enough, the demolitions which are going on around them are adding to the stress. Ada’s health is fragile and she says she is only prepared to move for what she feels is a fair compensation settlement. She was recently told that the homes directly opposite hers in this photo will be demolished next month.

street fighters #4 – Derker again

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I had a heartbreaking encounter yesterday that is still weighing heavily on my mind a day and a half later.  Widower and war veteran Elijah Debnam will be 90 years old in June and has lived in his home in Derker, Oldham, for the best part of six decades. There is now a Compulsory Purchase Order on his terraced property under the town’s Housing Market Renewal regeneration scheme and he is being pressured to move out. Not one brick has been laid under the scheme so far in Derker. The one thing Eli – as his friends call him – dreads more than anything is ending up in an old people’s home. I am sure there are many other very elderly people around the region who share his sentiments, but many are afraid to speak out.