An update on the evaluation of DBI

Following discussions in recent months, the board of DBI Ltd has taken the decision to review its approach to the evaluation of the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative. 
Since this blog was part of the original evaluation plan, it will no longer be updated, but the material produced so far will be retained as a resource for those interested in the story of DBI.
If you would like further information about DBI, please contact Andi Briggs at mail@dbilimited.org

Sport and more: working with young people

Throughout the history of DBI local people have been concerned to provide activities for young people in the area and help them feel proud of where they live.

Sport has always been at the heart of the community -
but today's young people need more than football

Many of those activities have revolved around sports. Almost as soon as the renewal programme was underway, local residents came together to form Deighton Sports Council.

Its first objective was to support a bid to the Sport England lottery panel for money to build a new sports centre. The bid was accepted in 2000 and in November 2001 the Deighton Community Sports Arena opened to the public.

A second successful bid to the Sports Lottery funded two development workers for the arena, who set up the Deighton Into Sport Project (DISP), building links with local schools and starting clubs for football, athletics and basketball. Over the last four years DBI has ploughed around £95,000 from the community dividend into DISP’s activities.

DISP can claim to have had a profound effect on the lives of many young people from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. It is particularly proud of the fact that several children who became involved with the junior football club at the age of five were still active in sport as young men. Some have gone on to train as coaches and have found jobs in local schools.

But not everybody enjoys sport or feels able to participate. This is a particular concern for Daneeka Simpson, who runs the Youth on the Hill project, based at the Chestnut Centre.

‘A lot of what’s available is sports related. There’s nothing for young girls to do and if you don’t like sports there’s nothing to get involved in, which is why we’re trying to switch - we’re doing some gardening stuff with kids and going out and playing some activities in their community rather than them feeling they need to be really good at football or really good at basketball.’

Youth on the Hill works with groups who are often seen as hard to engage, particularly those who are not involved in education, employment or training.

It runs a volunteering scheme which helps young people to identify with the community around them. Volunteers are asked to commit to a certain number of hours and offered opportunities such as working in the community café, planning Deighton Carnival, caring for elderly people and mentoring young people. There are also opportunities to undertake practical DIY work with Fresh Horizons projects such as the empty property and home security schemes.

A new look for Sheepridge

Demolishing the old 'Catholic shops' has removed an eyesore

Sheepridge village is on the main road from Huddersfield into the DBI area. For years it was blighted by derelict shops and a burnt-out Co-op building and residents felt it was a major contributor to the area’s negative image.

Sheepridge resident Helen Chatterton says: ‘You drove through and you just assumed the whole area was the same. It was a real mess.’

This year DBI has arranged a £500,000 revamp of the eyesore with the aim of creating a place where businesses can thrive and residents feel proud. The Co-op and a former betting shop have been demolished and a shoppers’ car park constructed in their place.

Shops have been given new doors, windows and matching signs, and stone houses and walls have been renovated and cleaned. A derelict shopping parade behind Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church was also demolished and the church received a fresh coat of paint.

DBI has also bought the old Gaukrodgers bakery and reopened it as a sandwich shop, providing jobs for local people.

It is hoped that local residents will now feel more inclined to use the village shops, rather than travel to Asda or the centre of Huddersfield.

Mrs Chatterton says the change has been dramatic. ‘I live opposite where the little lane is that goes down, and it didn’t matter what time of day or night I went to my window, there was always somebody down there drug dealing. It’s very rare now that I ever see anybody.’

A second phase of works is planned to improve the other side of the village centre, from the working men’s club to the turning onto Brackenhall Road. This will again include improvements to buildings, and there are also plans to renovate a neglected area of land in the middle and turn it into a communal area for public use.

A new heart for Brackenhall

Time for change: the current church and community centre

While the Chestnut Centre is impressive, there’s a need for a centre closer to the heart of Brackenhall. A second centre is now being built which will replace the existing Brackenhall church and community centre with a £2m, purpose built facility in a more central location on Holt Avenue.

Inside the new centre there will be a hall, café, church, meeting space, IT suite and changing rooms. Outside, there are plans for two football pitches and a multi-use games area.

The chair of the Brackenhall Community Trust, which is overseeing the development of the centre, is 79-year-old Joan Mallinson, who has been attending Brackenhall church since she was seven. ‘The current centre is full most days,’ she says. ‘There isn’t the space to develop it as we’d like.’

The current centre was built as a church in 1939. In the 1980s it was taken over by Kirklees Council to be run as a community centre, with the church retaining a small room to worship in. Joan is looking forward to the extra space the church will have in the new centre.

‘The church and the work we do there mean a lot to me,’ she says. ‘We’ve done a lot of work, particularly with young people. We’ve had a Boys’ Brigade since 1947 and it’s still running.’

Work on the Brackenhall Centre started in July and DBI is putting up 75 per cent of the funding. Joan was full of praise for the organisation. ‘Without their input it would never have got built,’ she says.

But she isn’t relying on DBI to make the project succeed, or on Fresh Horizons, which will manage the new centre. ‘It belongs to the community and it’s up to us as the community to see that it works,’ she says.

Arts at the heart: ten years of Deighton Carnival

The first Deighton Carnival was planned as a one-off celebration. However, it was such a success that people clamoured for it to become an annual event.

In 2011, the carnival celebrated its tenth anniversary. It has grown over the years and now features all the ingredients of a traditional carnival, such as a procession, cheerleaders, a fun fair and lots of music and dancing. It aims to bring together all the different sections of the area’s multiicultural community and to make sure that people coming in from outside, whether they’re stallholders or the public, feel welcome.

Organiser Howard Belafonte, who was Fresh Horizons’ first employee, believes it has played a crucial role in improving the area’s reputation.

‘A lot of people only ever come to Deighton for the carnival and they can’t believe that a place that has got this stigma has got this positive, relaxed family event,’ he says.

He believes the carnival has helped to forge and strengthen links between people in the community. Each year it has a different theme aimed at celebrating the diversity of the area. These have included ‘Deighton in action’, ‘Deighton through the ages’ and ‘Deighton – community of culture’.

‘The carnival is what everyone looks forward to,’ he says, adding that it has often been a way for newcomers to start finding their feet in the area. ‘The majority of the community get involved and feel ownership of it and part of it.’

Arts and creativity of all kinds have always featured in DBI’s approach to regeneration, with Kirklees’ Council’s arts organisation LOCA being involved in some of the early consultation work.

The Laurence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield has been involved in numerous local outreach and community projects. They have been involved with residents of all ages, running everything from adult training workshops through school holiday circus training to activities with the Playmates nursery.

The recent You Live and You Learn Theatre Project aims to help people overcome barriers to education and employment by taking real life stories from the local community and turning them into theatre. It recently won a national award for excellence for its innovatory and inspirational qualities.

Outreach arts worker Maggie O’Keefe says the DBI funding has made a big difference as it has enabled the theatre to deliver projects over the long term.

The local effect: Darren’s story

When Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker first drove into Brackenhall, he thought: ‘Bloody hell, it’s all boarded up.’

At the time much of the estate was about to be demolished. Since then, he has witnessed a ‘radical transformation’ of the area. The transformation might be most obvious in the buildings and environment, but for Mike there has also been a dramatic change in opportunities for local people.

It wasn’t just the negative things that struck him. The other thing that leapt out was the strong sense of community. ‘You’re driving down the road, there’s a car in front of you, all of a sudden he sees someone he knows driving the other way, so they stop, wind down the windows and have a chat,’ he said. ‘There is constant beeping as people see people they know even if they’ve seen each other 20 times that day.’

The community was far more close-knit than any Mike had experienced previously and it strengthened his determination that Fresh Horizons should make a genuine difference in people’s lives. ‘This isn’t playing around, this is local people,’ he said. ‘If we can get local people to identify local issues and address them, then that’s something really powerful.’

A friendly space: the Chestnut Centre library

As described in this post, Fresh Horizons has gone from employing two people in 2002 to a staff of almost 70. Nearly all these employees live locally: 85 per cent of them even live and work in the same postcode.

The result is that people in Deighton and Brackenhall are getting the opportunity not just to work, but also to develop and move on in their jobs. A case in point is Darren Thomas, whose career at the Fresh Horizons base in the Chestnut Centre parallels an important change in attitude among council employees from outside the area.

Darren is now the senior customer information adviser at the Chestnut Centre and manages all the front of house staff. However, he started out as what Mike calls ‘basically a bouncer’.

He was taken on when Kirklees Council’s neighbourhood housing office moved into the centre. ‘They’d come from a fortress and wanted to try to replicate that fortress but that didn’t fit with the ethos of the building,’ says Mike.

‘So we said no, you can’t have bulletproof screens, no you can’t have wire cages, you’re just going to work out of an office because no-one will shame themselves in front of kids and neighbours, you’ll have a different experience here.

‘However Unison argued that they wanted some security so we had poor old Darren, bored out of his brain waiting for nothing to happen, until it clocked with them that this was an expense they didn’t need, and Darren moved to be a customer information adviser, went through all the training, then took on a deputy role.

‘So you have a local person, in a relatively short time, moving into a management role and on the management team of Fresh Horizons. And everyone knows who Darren is, knows his background and where he’s come from, and I think that sends a powerful message to local people.’

And as Darren points out, the effects extend beyond the walls of the Chestnut Centre. ‘When I was younger places like this wouldn’t have existed because they would have got broken into and vandalised,’ he says. ‘When I was younger strangers wouldn’t be able to walk up and down. It’s a lot safer than it was when I was growing up.’

Fresh Horizons - a case of local empathy

Men in black: Fresh Horizons makes a point of employing locals

Allowing local social enterprise Fresh Horizons to run the Chestnut Centre has been a crucial factor in changing Deighton and Brackenhall for the better.

Not everybody was happy with the idea in the early days. There was an assumption that public services would and should be delivered directly by Kirklees Council.

DBI chief officer Andi Briggs remembers the challenge of changing people’s opinions. ‘At the time it was very difficult to get the wider political approval because it was seen as a big risk,’ he says. ‘There were also some issues with unions and others – it was seen as the slippery slope to undermining public sector jobs.’

The fact that European money was being used to fund the centre’s construction gave DBI some leverage and when it opened in 2005 Fresh Horizons took on the management of the facility. Fresh Horizons has a wide remit but its key role is to provide sustainable employment, mainly through contracts to deliver public services. It achieves this by working in partnership with Kirklees Council and other voluntary and private sector organisations.

Andi Briggs believes this commitment to giving responsibility to local people is crucial to the long term success of a regeneration initiative. ‘There has to be real engagement and investment in local people,’ he says. ‘You have to give them real, proper assets and buildings to manage that are of significant value and status so they’re not the fringe things – they are real empowerment.

‘At the same time you have to support them in such a way that they stand or fall independently of us. In that sense they are not part of the programme directly because otherwise the risk is they go when the programme ends.’

When it was launched in 2002, Fresh Horizons had just two employees. The credibility it has gained through successfully running the Chestnut Centre has enabled it to expand to the point where it employs almost 70 local people and last year had a turnover of £1.3m.

One of Fresh Horizons’ first ventures, which still continues today, was to recruit and train local people to deliver research projects for the public sector. The approach has been cited by Ofsted as an example of best practice in using adult education to boost community renewal.

Fresh Horizons also runs a building maintenance company, covering all aspects of the building trade, from repairs to refurbishment, and is recognised by industry accreditation bodies to help experienced workers gain recognised qualifications in their trades.

It has won Ministry of Justice funding for a project to reduce the number of burglaries against vulnerable people, and is working with the police, Kirklees Council and Victim Support to fit security equipment to 1,000 houses and flats across the area each year.

In recent years Fresh Horizons has extended its work to focus on empty private properties, seeking to bring clusters of empty homes back into use to prevent areas falling into decline and turning problem properties into opportunities for housing, employment and training.

As Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker says, though, this is more than just a series of projects.

‘If you take the library and information centre that’s a contracted service from the local authority. But if you look at the way we deliver it, it’s local people delivering a service to other local people. It’s about the empathy you get.’

A new approach: The Chestnut Centre

From carnivals to community centres, the range of benefits that have sprung from the community dividend and DBI’s work in attracting investment are impressive.

If anything could be said to embody those benefits, it is probably the Chestnut Centre. Built with capital grants from the European Union and the Government, it opened in 2005 on the site of the former Christchurch Woodhouse school and is home to a range of facilities whose benefits ripple out into the surrounding community.

The Chestnut Centre houses a library and information centre, a neighbourhood housing office, an IT centre, a credit union, a children’s centre, a nursery and a café. There are health clinics and training courses, meeting rooms to hire and secure, affordable units for new businesses to rent. Staff from different organisations work together under the same roof, so local people are no longer pushed from pillar to post to sort out problems.

These tangible features are vital, but perhaps even more important is the sense of ownership and trust that has built up around the centre. DBI chief officer Andi Briggs describes this as ‘the bedrock of the DBI achievements’.

Prior to the initiative, there was a strong sense of hostility and resentment towards public services in the area. Housing officers, for example, dealt with the public behind reinforced screens, making it obvious that local people were regarded with fear and suspicion.

Much of that has changed now. Darren Thomas, the Chestnut Centre’s senior customer information officer, says: ‘This building is seven years old and it still looks brand new. I’ve told the children in the library, if you’re smashing up the library you’re smashing up your library... They understand that and they look after the books and the library.’

Andi Briggs says the need to bring in services that were accessible and appropriate was identified very early on. The key factor was to make sure local people were engaged and involved at every level of provision.

For this reason, the building is managed not by the council but by the social enterprise Fresh Horizons, which makes a point of employing local people wherever possible. ‘This sent a very clear message,’ says Andi. ‘It said, we’re investing in local people. It wasn’t a shiny new council building where we bussed everyone in from the leafy suburbs to run it.’

The community dividend: how did it work?

New homes helped to finance the community dividend

For some, the demolition of homes on the Brackenhall estate was a traumatic experience, involving the loss of neighbours and memories. For others, it was a chance for a new start.


Essential to that new start in Deighton and Brackenhall was a pot of money known as the community dividend. Instead of putting the money from the land deal with Southdale Homes back into Kirklees Council’s coffers, the value of the land would be earmarked for the local community. On top of that, if the sales values on each phase of the development were higher than forecast, half the additional profits would go into the community pot.


When the original deal was done in 2002, it was expected that the community dividend would amount to £4m over the lifetime of the development. In the end, because the development was mainly done at a time of rising property prices, DBI gained nearly twice that.


Chris Harris, chairman and former managing director of Southdale Homes, explains, ‘We did the development in four stages and every time we went to acquire a piece of land from the council the valuations were based on the prices we’d achieved in the previous phase, so over time the price of the land was staircasing upwards. 


‘If we did better than the sales forecast the council gained 50% and we gained 50% on an “overage agreement”, so there was an incentive for all parties to do the best we could in terms of sales value.’


At the start there was no guarantee the new homes would sell. Southdale insisted on selling the first homes, built near the Asda superstore at the entrance to the site, at low prices - only £70,000 each. That created the momentum for the rest of the scheme.


The community dividend was a novel idea at the time, but was approved by central government ‘on the understanding that the focus is firmly on providing the community the opportunity to become involved in the regeneration of their communities and neighbourhoods’. Guidelines were drawn up by Kirklees Council to ensure the dividend was matched by funds from other sources.


The dividend helped fund activities such as Deighton Carnival and the creation of the Chestnut Centre in Sheepridge. But DBI and the council recognised it would never be enough to change the area on its own.


As DBI chief officer Andi Briggs, says: ‘We haven’t just sat on that pot, we’ve used it to bring in other investment into the neighbourhood. We’ve been very clear it should always be enhancing mainstream provision, not replacing it.’

Addressing local concerns

Once the demolition plans were agreed, there was no going back, as far as the council was concerned. As neighbourhood housing manager Peter Beck put it: ‘We had a vision of the estate being radically different to what it was then. The only way we could see of doing that was to go forward with the plans.’

That was the bottom line, but everything else could be negotiated. Local councillor Jean Calvert asked that every resident could have an ‘individual care package’. Whatever they wanted in terms of making the move easier should, as far as possible, be done.

Despite the huge opposition to the plans, in the end not one tenant was served with an eviction notice. In fact, Mr Beck remembers writing just one warning letter – something that he puts down to letting every individual have their say and then responding.

‘We moved people to Wales, to Barnsley and to Bridlington,’ he said. ‘We even had one person saying he didn’t want to move because he didn’t want grass in his front garden, so I flagged it for him.’

A key character in the success of this scheme was caretaker Mick Lockwood. So impressed were the tenants with his willingness to help them that they gave him a special ‘thank you’ present of £100 in gift vouchers.

A report in the Huddersfield Examiner in August 2003 sung Mr Lockwood’s praises. ‘He helps tenants on the day they move out of their old homes and into their new ones,’ wrote reporter Jane Yelland. ‘He takes off internal doors if they belong to the tenants, digs up plants they want to take with them and makes sure plumbers, electricians and joiners are there when needed.’

The idea for the gift had come from a group of elderly people who had had to move as a result of the plans. Mostly in their 90s, they had been rehoused in purpose-built bungalows and were overwhelmed by Mr Lockwood’s exceptional helpfulness.

Looking back at the days of demolition, Cllr Calvert believes this kind of responsiveness was what ensured the scheme’s success. ‘We have worked with tenants rather than at them and I think that’s been the beauty of it all,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t about dumping people - it was about giving people what they wanted as much as possible.’

Read the Huddersfield Examiner report here

Some of the new bungalows built for elderly Brackenhall residents

A campaign of opposition

Demolition underway

Once tenants began to realise the scale of the proposed demolition, they were quick to react. They formed a group called Brackenhall Community Action Group and carried out their own survey of residents. This, they claimed, showed that the majority of people who would lose their homes in phase one of the demolition plans actually wanted to stay there. 

The group called a public meeting and more than 200 people squeezed into Brackenhall Community Centre, where representatives of Southdale Homes and Kirklees Council were repeatedly booed and heckled.

When the plans came up for approval at Kirklees council, more than 100 protestors marched to the town hall and packed into the council meeting room.

Action group members handed a petition to the housing chair, Graham Simpson, calling for the demolition to be scrapped, but the plans were approved unanimously.

Much of the opposition to the plans focused on the fact that some of the most popular homes were due to be demolished, rather than just the vacant houses. However, Southdale Homes said this approach was necessary in order to build houses that would be attractive to private buyers. 

Peter Beck, the council's neighbourhood housing regeneration manager, has vivid memories of the opposition. ‘They actually used to hang effigies of me from lampposts,’ he said.

The bulldozers moved onto the estate in October 2002, after months of delays. They were met by angry residents waving placards. The anger was fuelled by the number of times some tenants had had to move while waiting for permanent rehousing. Others were furious at the poor condition of their temporary housing, and there was particular concern for elderly residents, some of whom had lived on the estate for decades.

‘It wasn’t what they were doing but the way they were doing it,’ said Margaret Lees, who led the action group. Mrs Lees claims the council was not clear about the number of homes they were planning to demolish. She had thought it was only the empty homes that would come down, not ones that people were still living in. ‘We didn’t want to lose our homes just so they could build posh houses,’ she said.

In total, 600 houses came down. Peter Beck is adamant that this large-scale demolition was the only way to enable DBI to achieve what it did. Without the deal with Southdale Homes, there would have been no money for the improvements the estate desperately needed.

‘I can still walk round Brackenhall and no-one gobs me because we were determined to get the best results for the local people,’ he says. ‘ I can hold my head up high because I know we’ve done a bloody good job here.’

Despite the strength of feeling on the estate, in the end not one person had to be evicted. This may have been due to the very careful attention that was given to each individual tenant.

A drastic proposal

Bleak outlook: the estate before demolition

With the action plan in place, DBI faced its biggest challenge: how to redevelop the area’s housing stock. Meeting the challenge would lead to a massive and controversial programme of demolition.

The Brackenhall estate had a huge over-supply of two-bedroom houses which were even more difficult to let than the rest. In addition, the council wanted to create a greater mix of tenures, with more homes for private ownership. At the end of the 1990s, only 17 homes had been bought by their tenants, a figure well below the national average.

In 1999, a development brief was produced and potential development partners were invited to submit proposals for a partnership arrangement to ‘remodel areas of void housing, develop land sites, carry out environmental improvements and provide some of the community facilities’.

Eventually, Kirklees council struck a deal with developer Southdale Homes, whereby much of the Brackenhall estate would be demolished and the land used to build new private housing. The land would be transferred to Southdale and as homes were sold, a portion of the profits would be kept to reinvest in the local area - a ‘community dividend’ that would eventually be worth £8m.

Once again local people were asked for their views. In October 2000, Kirklees Housing Services carried out a house to house survey of the Brackenhall estate. They interviewed 393 residents out of a possible 500, asking them how they felt about the possible demolition of some of the houses.

The result was overwhelmingly in favour of some level of demolition. Only 7 per cent thought things should stay as they were, while 48 per cent thought at least half the estate should be knocked down.

Southdale Homes, on the other hand, wanted something more radical. Their original proposal was to demolish the entire estate, replacing it with a mix of private homes and commercial premises. The eventual agreement, signed in December 2001, was to demolish 600 homes, beginning with those nearest the upmarket area of Fixby on the other side of Bradford Road. The idea, Southdale said, was to ‘borrow value’ from more affluent areas to attract private buyers.

But even at this stage it was clear that a substantial number of local residents wanted to stay put. So Southdale dropped its plans for commercial premises, leaving an enclave of 180 council homes in the new development.

This wasn’t enough for the scheme’s opponents. ‘People said we should knock some houses down but they didn’t like it when it was their house,’ recalls Peter Beck, neighbourhood housing regeneration manager.

How did it start?

By the end of the 1990s, Deighton and Brackenhall were labouring under a massive stigma. Two hundred council homes stood empty and, says Peter Beck, the neighbourhood housing manager, ‘We couldn’t rent them for love nor money.’

Jean Calvert, who has represented the area since 1992, recalls holding surgeries where people would tell her they were desperate for a council house but there was no way they would move to Brackenhall.

The council was haemorrhaging money in lost rents. Something had to change and the first step on the long road to a new Deighton and Brackenhall was to talk with local people.

Two meetings sparked what would become the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative. The first was held in September 1997 and involved representatives from council services and other agencies such as the police and the NHS. The Deighton ward ‘Getting There’ conference followed at the end of the month, with representation from a wide range of community organisations. Many of them gave presentations on the work they were doing in and around the area.

People attending the conference were invited to give their opinions on what should happen in the area. The word cloud above was created from the notes made during these feedback sessions and gives a sense of the main areas of concern.

Following these two meetings, the DBI was launched. It comprised 10 action groups:

· housing and environment

· multi-agency building projects (including welfare benefits)

· childcare

· employment and training

· crime and drugs

· health

· education

· sport and leisure

· youth

· older people

These groups set up meetings and consultation exercises in order to prepare individual action plans. All the plans were then combined to form the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative Summary Action Plan.

Interestingly, the word 'houses' is only just visible on the word cloud. But it was the issue of what to do about the area's empty homes that prompted the most drastic action.

The last place you'd want to live in?

If one word could sum up the documentary that the BBC made about the Riddings estate in 1990, that word would be ‘hopelessness’.


Not even a wedding can lift the mood: after capturing a downbeat meal of chicken sandwiches and canned lager, the excerpt finishes with a shot of two little bridesmaids dancing in front of a dilapidated semi, their pink sashes whirling behind them. The message seems clear: when the party’s over and the girls get older, they’ll soon see there’s nothing to celebrate here.


Children feature prominently in the film. Children with cockroach bites, toddlers who eat more chips than green vegetables, a little girl whose heart condition is made worse by the lack of central heating in her house. The viewer feels these are children with bleak lives and worse futures.


Just what those futures might be is suggested by the interviews with older people on the estate. A mother with two small boys, a survivor of domestic abuse, talks of her experiences of prostitution. She’d always go back to it if she needed cash, she says, because ‘the money is just so easy’.


In another interview, a grieving widow describes the difficulty of raising her sons after their father died. We see one of her boys talking to a probation officer about how he has spent five consecutive Christmases in prison. He has a method for ensuring that burglaries go smoothly: throw a brick through the window and if nobody comes to the door you can be sure that everyone’s out.


The issue of money and how to get more of it comes up again and again. ‘If you’ve got no money you’ve got to steal,’ says another young burglar, declaring that it’s not worth getting a job because he’d only earn £10 a week more than he is getting on the dole.


This suggestion that people on the estate are workshy is taken up by a working family who insist they would always prefer to know they had earned their cash and are angry with people who ‘get up at two or three o’clock’ because they don’t have jobs. They are shown eating home-grown vegetables and complain that people call them ‘posh’ because they look after their garden.


Yet even they feel trapped by the system, unable to leave the estate where nobody would live ‘unless you forced them’. The council won’t rehouse them because they don’t have enough points, but getting a mortgage is beyond their wildest dreams.


The documentary closes with a woman surveying the wreckage of her living room. She has come home to find it trashed by burglars. ‘They must have done it for a laugh,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got nowt worth stealing.’


Even now local people remember that documentary as unfair and offensive. What isn’t disputed, though, is that it contributed to a reputation of the area as the worst part of Kirklees - as one local resident told us, a ‘dumping ground’.


That reputation for crime and poverty contrasts with longstanding residents’ memories of Riddings and Brackenhall as close-knit communities. But even the area’s greatest defenders accept that crime was widespread.


In the years after that documentary life got worse rather than better - Brackenhall hit the headlines for disturbances in July 1992 and September 1993, and in 1995 the infamous Maypole pub - already closed once and reopened as the Phoenix - shut for good.


By the time DBI came on the scene, 200 homes in Brackenhall were boarded up and people were leaving the area as fast as they were being housed there. It was clear something drastic needed to happen.

Thirteen years ago: the way we were

Thirteen years ago, more than a third of the residents of the Deighton and Brackenhall area had been burgled. Over 70 per cent of households had nobody with a full time job and a similar number had no car.


Yet despite these apparently gloomy statistics, the people responding to a household survey carried out in July 1998 were by and large a satisfied bunch. Seventy-five per cent described themselves as very or fairly satisfied with the area, with many saying it was quiet and peaceful and had a good community spirit. Eighty per cent were very or fairly satisfied with their home.


So why was a regeneration initiative needed? Well, closer examination of the statistics suggests that life on the estate couldn’t go on as it was. More than half the respondents were afraid of being burgled, while drug dealing, poor environment and unemployment problems came high on list of issues that concerned local people.


In addition, there was a widespread feeling that not enough was being done to help children and young people. When asked to choose from a list of things that would improve the area, ‘having more activities for children’ came top (62%), even ahead of reducing the level of crime (61%). ‘More or better play areas for children’ came third (59%), closely followed by ‘having more activities for teenagers’ (58%).


Also, more than a fifth of respondents said that lack of affordable childcare was stopping them from getting a job or accessing training. In fact, only 15 per cent of all respondents had undertaken any training in the previous year and just 18 per cent said they were certain or very likely to enrol for training over the next two years.


And although the residents of the estate were largely happy to be there, according to a Daily Telegraph article in 2006,

‘the estate carried a stigma as a grim trouble spot, dating, rather unfairly, back to the 1960s, when some former residents of Huddersfield's slum areas were cleared into Brackenhall. By 1997, out of 1,050 once proud, mostly grey pebble-dashed homes, nearly a fifth were unoccupied. Kirklees Metropolitan Council, which owned them all, could not find tenants willing to move in.’

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at what has happened since 1998, what has changed, what has been learned, and how people feel about it now. Bookmark this page and come back soon to find out more. And if you have any views, stories, memories or pictures you’d like to contribute, please get in touch with us - email joanna[AT]urbanpollinators.co.uk

Welcome

Welcome to this blog. Whether you came here by intention or just stumbled across it, we should say a few words of introduction.

This blog is part of an evaluation of the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative in Kirklees, West Yorkshire. Deighton and Brackenhall are on the eastern edge of Huddersfield. For more than ten years the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative has been seeking to improve the area, tackling crime and poor housing and creating new opportunities for local people.

The evaluation aims to find out how well this has worked - to tell the story of the project, examine what difference has been made and find out what has been learned, and how it might be applied elsewhere.

The evaluation is being undertaken by Urban Pollinators, a consultancy specialising in placemaking and regeneration. Urban Pollinators seeks to learn from what works well and from new ideas and to find creative ways to share and apply that learning.

During the summer we'll add material to this site as the evaluation progresses. Come back soon for more details.