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.