Thursday 09 April 2009
Standing in the path of Prescott's bulldozers
By Charles Clover, Environment Editor
Last Updated: 1:09AM BST 06 Aug 2005
In a move led by Ray Mallon, the mayor of Middlesbrough, 1,500 Victorian homes in the town's Gresham ward are to be demolished - an unabashed return to planning policies that many believe were shown to have failed 40 years ago.
The executive's approval of the scheme on July 20 sparked the largest spontaneous outcry yet seen against the Government's 10-year, £3 billion programme of "housing market renewal" in the Midlands and the North.
More than 100 residents marched on the town hall - they say there was no time to organise a legal demonstration - to call for the decision to be revoked.
Ken Walker, the council's former Labour leader and councillor for Gresham, pleaded unsuccessfully this week for the plans to be withdrawn.
Mr Walker called on Tony Blair to visit the area, which he said was an excellent example of the harmonious multi-cultural communities the Prime Minister wanted to achieve.
And he condemned the council's scheme as "a multi-million windfall for speculators and the council at the expense of local residents".
Mr Walker and Mr Mallon go back a long way: Mr Walker was the chairman of the police authority that suspended Mr Mallon for "Robocop" tactics when he was a detective superintendent with Cleveland CID.
The Labour group on the council is split, with only some supporting the mayor, an independent.
Mr Mallon rounded on Mr Walker later, likening Gresham to a "cancer" that needed to be cut out for the town to survive.
There are many parts of the Teesside steel town that now appear to need invasive surgery. But to the visitor's eye, Gresham, where floral baskets hang outside a high proportion of front doors, is not obviously one of them.
There are few, if any, boarded up properties and the back alleys, magnets for litter and vandalism in places such as Liverpool or Hull, have been closed off with neat wire gates to which only residents have a key. People leave their front doors open and put chairs on the street in summer.
Gresham is five minutes' walk from the centre of town, across the road from the university, and a minute's walk away from Psyche, the fashionable store featured in a reality television programme on BBC Three. The area contains several flourishing businesses, Asian grocers, Chinese takeaways, an African health food shop and the Italian barber who cuts Mr Mallon's hair.
Ashley Marron has spent 20 years as a good-governance database specialist for bodies such as the European Union and World Bank, returning every time to his home in Pelham Street - now due to come down.
Mr Marron returned from Egypt in April, with his Cambodian wife Linda, to discover that his house was on maps of areas proposed for demolition.
Mr Marron, and his ally and fellow resident "Madge" Aslan, an IT worker, believe that the strength of the public reaction has taken the council by surprise. "There is no housing market failure here, only economic failure," says Mr Marron.
He believes that the demolition plans are nothing to do with housing market failure but part of the mayor's broader ambition to expand the economic success of the town centre and make Middlesbrough a city. In the process, he says, they will cut out the cultural heart of the town, its brick Victorian terraces.
Mr Marron cast a critical eye over the consultation conducted by the mayor's office in April, headlined "Listening to your views".
He found that only half a per cent of the total sample voted for Option 4 - the one that included demolition of Gresham. In Gresham itself, a majority of people who responded were against.
He and other residents cling to the hope that John Prescott's department has said it will not support schemes that do not have the broad support of the local community.
Mr Marron takes me to St Hilda's, a run-down ward with a view of the great transporter bridge over the Tees to show me the fate he believes lies in wait for residents of Gresham.
A friend, David Edwards, owns a house there on a pleasant 1980s estate with gardens, now marred by several burnt-out homes. The 19-year-old estate is to be demolished - even though he says the families who caused the trouble are long gone - because the council says the regeneration scheme there has failed.
Mr Edwards has been offered £21,000 for his semi-detached two-bedroom house with its 30ft by 50ft garden, independently valued at £55,000.
The council's head of regeneration, Tim White, admits that Gresham's terraces contain a close knit, thriving, multi-racial community.
But he says Middlesbrough has no choice but to proceed with its plan because "compelling evidence", put together by consultants, shows that demand for the town's 11,500 older, terrace properties is declining, and that people are moving away.
In order to re-balance supply with demand, 1,500 of the properties need to be knocked down. They will be replaced with 750 homes of varying size - at lower densities than national planning guidance requires - together with some car parking and expansion of the town's shopping centre.
No one knows what the result will look like because the council has yet to have time to draw up a master plan. The council is in a hurry. Mr White says that if they miss the £23 million initially on offer from the Government over the next two years, there is no sign there will be any more.
"I live in the real world of an industrial town with severe problems," he said.
And what if there is insufficient money to offer residents a realistic price for their homes? He replies: "Ray has made very public undertakings that people will be treated fairly. We will not take people's homes from them at less than market value."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1495627/Standing-in-the-path-of-Prescotts-bulldozers.html