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