Liverpool residents fight to save Ringo Starr estate from wrecking ball
The little Victorian terraced house in which Ringo Starr was born still stands – just. Empty, windows filled with steel sheeting upon which are written tributes from all over the world, it was exempted from a vast demolition plan after a visit from then housing minister, Grant Shapps, last June.
But walk a few doors along Madryn Street in Liverpool and you feel like you are in a cemetery of what were once people’s homes – street after street, desolate, bricked or boarded up, but for the few who remain, doggedly, despite being condemned. Teeming with life six years ago, these are Liverpool’s “Welsh streets”, named after the towns and villages which supplied those who built and lived in them in the late 19th century. They are also the latest in line as the city forges ahead with mass demolition of Victorian housing, despite a dramatic recent U-turn in government thinking.
The Liverpool mayor’s cabinet on Friday approved progress on what the council calls “exciting and ambitious plans to deliver the comprehensive transformational regeneration” of the area, by agreeing to accept the lowest bid to destroy about 440 houses, according to protesters, though planning permission has yet to be formally granted. The scheme, to replace these with a little more than 150 new houses, has been submitted to the council by one of the city’s housing associations, Plus Dane, using at least £15m in taxpayers’ money.
“I’ve put all I ever had into this house,” says Stan Allen, a painter and decorator who recently finished work on his gable-end at the foot of Gwydir Street. “I’ve lived here 27 years, and after 12 years I bought it. My children were born here … it’s the only real home I’ve ever had.”
“It was a shell when I moved in, but the structure of these things has stood the test of time. I’ve got no problems, no subsidence or damp, and I just want things to be left the way they were. If they do pull it all down, I won’t be moving into one of them prefab boxes. I mean, once the houses have gone, the city’s gone, isn’t it? It looks like a ghost town”.
The top end of Gwydir Street is still mostly occupied, and adjacent Treborth Street almost entirely so – houses in good condition but doomed. Two doors from Allen, young mother Kelly says that after a year her family is “settled now”. She adds: “We want to stay. It’d be sad to leave, and if we do, we’ll try and stay in a row of neighbours.”
Gladys, who has lived next door for 15 years, says: “I’d like a nice new house, but I don’t understand why, if they’re pulling them all down, the council spent all that money on our new windows last year.”
On Ringo’s Madryn Street, the housing conservation group “Save” bought a condemned house to prove the viability of demand for Victorian terraces; Chris and Leah are tenants there, alone on the now deserted street. “Even when it’s empty, history feel nicer,” says Chris.
Some who remain on other streets put “No to Demolition” posters in the windows. Other flyposts on the sepulchral breeze-blocks of empty houses are – approproately in Ringo Starr’s street — song lyrics: We Shall Not Be Moved, This Land is Your Land.
The demolitions in the Welsh streets are one of many such schemes in Liverpool, even now. What began as slum clearance in the 1960s continued into the 1980s as what Sir Geoffrey Howe, in a famous memo to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, called “managed decline” of the city. It continued after the Toxteth riots of 1981, in Granby Street, now a mix of empty, boarded streets and some new houses – in order, residents insist, to break up the restless black community. The destruction accelerated under Labour’s national “Pathfinder” plan, which made £2.2bn available to local authorities for demolition.
And on Merseyside it surges on: swaths of the Victorian Klondyke area of Bootle have gone, streets around the Anfield football ground are boarded up and condemned, while an entire main thoroughfare of Victorian terracing was recently eradicated to facilitate a road-widening scheme. This is despite a dramatic shift in government policy in November 2011, which tried to stop demolitions, so now even George Clarke, the government’s adviser on empty homes, is among the hundreds of objectors. Clarke called it a “poorly conceived scheme” involving “too much demolition”, which will cause “unnecessary blight” after a “substantial loss of housing stock”.
Jonathan Brown, a town planner who runs Share the City, a group trying to protect civic treasures and terraced housing, said: “Ringo’s house was saved on condition that hundreds of other viable and solid Victorian houses should be demolished. I was with the consultants when this was done, drawing red lines on a laptop, talking about site values. Who would stay and who would go, at the stroke of a laptop.
“I’ve done the calculations. They can refurbish a house for up to £30,000, and there’s a good market for them to sell at £80,000.
“And if you add up all the taxpayer’s grants and acquisition costs, never mind the loss in council tax, lost spending of the community and all, you’re talking about £230,000 of public money per house rebuilt, with a loss of 280 homes. Where’s the sense in that during a housing crisis and while public spending is squeezed?
“The thing is we don’t want or need managed decline in Liverpool any more, as if we ever did. Our population has risen over the last census period for the first time since 1931, by 6%. The problem is that property development has become an extraction industry – asset-stripping, to profit from poverty”.
The enactors accused by both Brown and the residents are usually large housing associations like Plus Dane. They are accountable to the council – but there is overlap in terms of personnel: the deputy chairman of Liverpool council, for example, is also the chairman of a large association, Riverside; and the leader of the Liberal Democrat group that ran the city until the last election, Richard Kemp, was until recently the chairman of Plus Dane. Many councillors sit on the housing association boards.
Plus Dane claims in a press release that “under the plans, 280 homes will be demolished”, but Brown says this figure is the number that will be the final net loss – with about 440 houses destroyed, and a little more than 150 built in their place. The housing association puts the cost at £15m, but Brown says that “this is the cost of the rebuilding. If you add together all the national and local grants, the costs of buying the houses and demolishing them, that amounts to £35m of taxpayer’s money.”
Plus Dane chief executive Ken Perry was unavailable for comment. A spokeswoman for the company referred the Observer to a press release, which says that “the submission of proposals for the Welsh streets follows extensive work with the local community over the last 10 years and rigorous independent analysis to develop the strongest possible plans to drive the area’s regeneration”. The statement says 70% of residents in the area support the scheme.
Liverpool city council spokesman Damian Richards-Clarke said: “It makes economic sense to demolish, though it is council policy to refurbish whenever possible.” He admitted the scheme was “controversial and sensitive”, but added: “You get the ideology of refurbishment from groups from outside Liverpool, but we listen to real people in the area, who want new homes.”
A few decades down the line, over the main road in Granby, residents remaining on Cairns Street have been living among boarded-up empty houses for so long now, they have tried to make the best of things: flowers along the pavements, street tables and chairs, murals on the cold sheet metal. “It’s the economy of stockings and light bulbs,” says Hazel Tilley. “They know perfectly well how to make stockings last for ever, but they have to make them crap, so they’ll fall apart and the money can keep going round. Same with light bulbs. These houses took time to build and they’d last for ever if they’re looked after. The new stuff they’re building round here will fall down in the blink of an eye.”
Source: The Guardian
