Thank you to Althea Draper (Power) for providing permission to reproduce the text below, which is about how Ladywood was previously turned into a wasteland by Birmingham City Council in the 1960s. History is set to repeat itself.
| The Forgotten People: A Challenge To A Caring Community Norman Sandiford Power 1965 |
Contents:
- Prologue 1938
- Introduction
- Chapter III: Ladywood
- Chapter IV: The Waste Land
- Chapter V: The New Flats
Published c1965 by Arthur James Limited, The Drift, Evesham, Worcestershire. 119 pages with illustrations; 19 cm.
Library of Congress Card Number 66005769.
Birmingham Central Library, not for loan:
- Level 5 shelf no L 41.89; and
- Level 4 shelf no 41.89 POW
University of Birmingham:
- main library shelf mark HN 389 P in zone 2A
- Selly Oak library shelf mark 307.76 POW barcode 51146975
Sutton Coldfield Library: Dewey class SH91.1, but not for loan
Newman University Library (Bartley Green B32 3NT) two copies, refs 942.4963 POW and 363.5 POW
Elsewhere: worldcat.org/title/8719610
Biographies of Norman Power:
- desturmobed.blogspot.com/2016/03/norman-power.html
- www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/reunion-to-remember-canon-norman-power-219143
The text includes quotations from T. S. Eliot.
Prologue 1938
There is no life that is not in community and no community not lived in praise of God. — T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, 1934.
“HERE,” said the Planner to the students, “you see a typical block of slum property. Now, we propose to do this.” He moved out the whole block and replaced the back-to-backs with tall, white, aseptic-looking flats, green lawns between. He looked so pleased that we clapped politely. But I had an uneasy feeling that something had been forgotten.
I lay awake that night, worried in an odd way about the scene and the talk. But it was no good. Try as I might, I could not think what had been left out.
I know now. We had forgotten the people.
Introduction
THIS BOOK is based on personal experience — on fourteen years in a redevelopment area. It is going to be misunderstood. I shall be told I am ungrateful to our city’s benefactors; that I am against slum clearance.
I am not.
I honour and respect the work of our planners, benefactors indeed. I prefer the new flats to back-to-back slums. The flats are not perfect, but there is simply no comparison. What I am doing is to point out the bad aspects of a good deed. I am saying, “Doctor, you did a magnificent job; you saved the patient’s life and restored his sanity. I congratulate you. I honour you. But need you have cut off his nose?”
It will be an unpopular effort, but it is important, for great areas of every city in Britain are to have the same treatment. This is of nation-wide and world-wide concern.
Perhaps, especially, the point I shall make about one-class areas is important.
Public Schools are under fire because they foster class division but what is the point of mixing up “The Classes” in our schools if for the rest of their lives they are going to live segregated in one-class areas? Soon, except in country towns and villages, there will be no social contact at all between people of different classes, to the great loss of them all.
It is significant that in all this redevelopment, during which I saw a living community torn to pieces by the bulldozers and scattered to the four corners of the city, there was no consultation with the people most affected and concerned.
Neither was any opinion sought from local teachers, social workers, organisation-leaders or clergy. Our representatives or the Council may or may not have been consulted. They may or may not have had some “say” in the whole plan, but, excellent as is their work on our behalf in many ways, and however splendid they may be in their dedication to our interests — and indeed they are — not one of them lives in the district. To them it is bound to be to some extent an academic problem. To us, it is deeply personal.
This book is written in the hope that it may have some effect on the redevelopment of other slum clearance areas before it is too late, before the same grim mistakes in good work are repeated all over the country and all over the world.
N.S.P.
Ladywood Vicarage, Birmingham, B16.
Chapter III: Ladywood
When the stranger says, “What is the meaning of this city?” Do you huddle close together because you love each other? What will you answer? “We all dwell together to make money from each other”? Or, ”This is a community”? — T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, 1934.
OF THE five great issues the task that could be tackled immediately and with the most hope of success, if only its urgency is realised, is the task of re-establishing stable community life among the nations of the world, This, however, will not be achieved unless people as individuals are aware of the need. True community must exist in the mind of the planner before it becomes actuality. What I have lived through, seen and experienced in the destruction of a community and the convergence of a monochrome district, is my authority for the theme of this book.
In 1952 I had been vicar of a parish called Highter’s Heath for seven years. It was a happy lively parish in which the Parish Church was a centre of much of the life of the community. It consisted mainly of young families eager to make the best of life; it was a well balanced community, with a large municipal housing estate (Warstock) and an area of small privately owned houses. There were also, over the county border in Worcestershire, two charming rural areas called Hollywood and Trueman’s Heath. There was a good mixture of occupations and interests, to the great benefit of the cultural life of the district.
One thing that could be criticised, perhaps, was the layout of the Warstock Estate; there were too many roads that did not lead anywhere except back to each other; there was no natural centre. Especially there was too distinct a break between this area and the private housing, making it hard for the people to mix and get to know each other.
I was only the second vicar; we were still establishing our own traditions with no one to say that any particular policy was not the right way to do things. One thing that struck me, after having worked in a city centre parish, was how healthy everyone looked. Everyone could see the sky! This was a real joy after the narrow streets I had been used to.
After this happy experience the invitation to come to Ladywood, which had had no vicar for a year, was something of a challenge, It had been good to breathe fresh air and see the sky for a while. But I knew the church fellowship in Ladywood had a fine history and tradition of service, that it was a well-mixed and balanced community despite the preponderance of back-to-back houses, and that the nucleus of church members made up in quality what they lacked in numbers. I believed, and still believe, that it was a great opportunity to see what a city centre church could do at a time when many round about were being closed.
I would like to say there that, despite all the difficulties that must be described as a result of the upheaval of redevelopment, my family and I have been as happy here as we were at Highter’s Heath. This is due to the wonderful friendliness of the great majority of the people in the parish, many of whom put up a magnificent fight against their difficulties of environment, and to the warm affection- of hundreds of children and other young people. There is also the feeling of being needed; even more, here, perhaps, than in an outer suburb.
For ten years now, Ladywood has been a redevelopment area. This has given me, living in the heart of it all, a unique opportunity to observe in detail what is good and what is not so good in the way things have been done. I would like, as it were, to put Ladywood under the microscope and use what we see to illustrate in depth the theme of this book.
Ladywood had a population, I estimate, of about 20,000 people. Three parishes were combined in one, but they were a real unity and amazingly small to house so many people. There is a Parish Church, St. John’s, 111 years old. It is “Victorian Gothic” but not without nobility. It had — and has — a strong fellowship and flourishing organisations for all age-groups. There are two Church day schools which have served the district for over 100 years.
There are a Methodist Church, a Gospel Hall, a good Community Centre and many useful organisations. There are two big Secondary Modern Schools and the Roman Catholic (Oratory) School. Morale in all schools was extremely good; they had good records, too, in music and sport. Devoted teachers had built up choirs, sports teams and dramatic groups. There were well-attended Junior Churches and Sunday schools.
In the main residential part of the parish there were about a dozen streets of three-floor houses. They were back-to-back houses, but they were not slums. They sometimes had small gardens, often beautifully kept, and they had running water and individual lavatories. I knew these houses well. Many of them were well furnished. In some there was an odd Victorian charm. The families had lived side by side for 100 years. They knew each other, helped each other in times of trouble and shopped at little local shops where the shop keepers were personal and family friends.
To these little shops I would like to pay a tribute. In bad times they helped many a family over a difficult period with generous credit or even gifts. To them, the redevelopment brought near ruin. Sometimes they were left standing amid acres of devastation, their customers gone.
In this area, there was a good deal of healthy self respect. The neighbours had known each other for generations. Young people had family repute to maintain. There were even a few teachers and retired teachers living, mirabile dictu, among their pupils, seen by them at weekends and taking a part in local affairs. There were a few bigger houses of Georgian design. Here, doctors actually lived among their patients, and nurses and midwives had their homes. The effect was considerable. Young and old respected them and valued their good opinions. There was very little vandalism — even street lights were left to burn in peace.
Everyone knew his local history. The parish is the bulk of the Parliamentary Ward of Ladywood. A former vicar, the Rev. A. R. Runnells-Moss, had been an outstanding personality. He was remembered from First World War days with affection and respect, as were the whole line of strong holders of the incumbency. The Rev. A. R. Runnells-Moss, by the way, was an Along-West Indian, who brought to Ladywood something of the exotic warmth of a more salubrious climate. He drew huge congregations from all over the city by his emotional and evangelistic fire.
A hundred years ago most of these families boasted a uniformed maid, who inhabited the “dormer” third floor. On Sundays most of the families attended some church, while at 3 p.m. the streets were filled with well-dressed children on their way to Sunday school or Junior Church. Aged residents have often described these days to me across the aspidistra.
The average IQ was good. Devoted teachers in day and Sunday schools built up a strong tradition to which the secondary schools paid tribute. But there were many grammar school entries. Recently a Doctor of Philosophy returned to St. John’s School to express gratitude for early training; also a distinguished missionary priest. It is a fallacy of our day that a good school consists of new buildings. This is not true. The tradition of staff and school counts far more, and so does a decent pride in the standards and achievements of the school. Even this year, the old schools standing in mud and rubble have a better record of eleven-plus passes than a brand new school for which the children from the new flats were “creamed off”.
In these streets, there was strong fellowship. Old people, of whom there were many, had old friends of a lifetime all round them. There was much social mingling to chew over old times together. The local pubs had a good social life — darts and dominoes teams — and good neighbourliness prevailed. There was very little rowdyism because everybody knew everybody else. There was, it is true, a desperate shortage of space, but the children played traditional street games without damage to themselves or property. Some of these games brought out poems and songs from some buried folk-lore or of new composition, songs which had a curious charm.
Until 1954 much of all this remained. When, in 1954, our church celebrated its Centenary, our Bishop, Dr. J. L. Wilson, was our special preacher. I think he was impressed. Here was a working-class industrial district, the most difficult type of area of all from the Church point of view, indeed, from the point of view of any effort to build community and worthwhile activities. Yet our huge church was packed. Over 1,000 people filled its vastness.
It is true that it was a unique occasion, that the Bishop himself was a great draw, and that a tremendous effort had been made to publicise the event. Even so, as I looked on these hard-working people in their parish church, I felt, as vicar, that I had a goodly heritage. When I gave thanks for the work of past worthies, I knew I was speaking of old friends known and loved. Of such intangibles is a community made; it takes generations of love and service. But I knew even then what we were in for. To keep what can be kept, to begin the re-building of a Christian community from the ashes, is my only remaining ambition. But first the years of endurance had to be faced. For, all too soon, the voice of the bulldozer was heard in the land.
Chapter IV: The Waste Land
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922.
EIGHT YEARS ago the demolition began. I know this had to be. But on the west side of Monument Road there is some really bad housing. There are some splendid families and individuals making the best of bad homes, but there are also some real slums — back alleys where the tiny, damp, huddled dwellings are unfit for habitation. They are insanitary and dirty.
Farther down Monument Road, on both sides of it, in the Anderton Street area, is some of the worst property I have ever seen. (And I knew Hockley — Hospital Street — well, as a boy.) The houses remain. In one “court”, over thirty people have to use the same lavatory!
Why, then, was all the better property destroyed first? Why cut the heart out of a patient and leave his filthy fingernails till last? Probably the need to clear a space for the new Inner Circle Road was one motive, but was it good enough?
In fact, I only know that the heart of our community was destroyed. A living, corporate personality was crushed by the bulldozers. There were some extraordinary and inexplicable side-effects. The new Waste Land was left waste for seven years. But it was not cleared. It was left a wilderness of brick-ends, tin cans, broken bottles and even half-demolished buildings.
The young, so starved of space, now had space in abundance. But all it encouraged was the smashing of anything left to smash — with ammunition provided free. Soon there was not a street-lamp left whole in the area. It was the best school of vandalism I have ever seen. In one short period, over £1,000 worth of damage was done to our parish church. It was not malicious — just idle destruction, often by toddlers.
For seven years, great areas were left like this. Teenagers at a “loose end” wander over these spaces. They “let off steam” by throwing the ammunition so generously provided — either at each other or at half-demolished buildings. From this it is a small step to demolishing houses, churches, streetlamps and other targets.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that young people in the new flats have been uprooted and do not know each other’s families, while many older houses scheduled for demolition are used to accommodate “problem families”. With the policeman on the beat so rarely seen, law and order are at a discount.
As the slow years of desolation passed, I found myself beginning to hate the Waste Land with an almost personal hatred. I read again T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and found in it a strange beauty but nought for my comfort. I thought of the friends, church members and good neighbours I had visited there. I wondered more and more why the demolition had not been delayed so that the re-building could keep pace with it. The children in the area began to play odd games derived, I suppose, from stories of the first world war. They made or found improvised trenches and, before “going over the top” in yelling advance, bombarded each other with stones and bottles of dusty earth which burst realistically. Catapults became popular for this “game”, where football and cricket might have been played. After each battle minor casualties would drift along to the vicarage for first aid, while all the windows around suffered, not least the stained glass of the church, which it was now impossible to leave open.
During these years we were planning for the future, for the time when again there would be a settled population round us. Ladywood had never had a really good hall for the organisations for youth or the social and cultural life of adults. We were surrounded by the desolate acres, but we dreamed of the time when St. John’s, strategically placed in the new Middle Ring Road (not yet built at the time of writing), with a big population near at hand, would again be a strong centre of Christian fellowship, worship and witness, all as outward-going as we could make it. We built a hall. With the levelling of land it cost £10,000, of which no less than half was given by members and friends of St. John’s and people in the half-demolished parish. The rest was the gift of other church people in Birmingham through the Bishop’s Appeal. But even while this new hall was being built, it was damaged again and again by the battles on the Waste Land, as were the shops and the houses nearby.
Some people were forced away by the endless smashing of their windows. For elderly people, or women living alone, it was a frightening experience. I am surprised that some held on as gamely as they did for so long. When they were forced out there was no compensation as the move was “voluntary”. Some were local leaders we could ill afford to lose, a side effect which could have been avoided if the demolition had begun in the worst streets.
Perhaps the most tragic victims of all this upheaval were the problem-family children brought up on the perimeter of the desolation. As though they had survived some atomic catastrophe, they drifted without roots, spiritual, natural or social. Even the furniture of their world was crumbling and shifting. Lost souls in a Godless universe, deprived of love at home and stability in environment, theirs was the ultimate insecurity. No wonder they steal and smash. Better to pity them now than punish them later!
Even while this book is being written, evidence accumulates which bears out our main contention. Houses in Ladywood Road have just been demolished and the old people who lived there moved away. One sad result has been the closing of what was, in a way, “the parish garage”. This establishment will be greatly missed, not only for its professional services but because of the exceptional kindness of its staff and because its manager was the most amusing raconteur in Ladywood. This may seem a trivial moan, but it does mean that one more piece of our “social cement” and neighbourhood, in the real sense, has gone — and something of the sparkle of life too.
This garage has found a new home in a back street a mile outside Ladywood. The back street happens to back on to some of the Waste Land. When the garage was moved, one of the first things that had to be done was to build toilet facilities for the staff. In a few hours, the new lavatory had been smashed open, the cistern stolen and all the copper pipes ripped out. Observation of the area was now more than casual. While not suspecting children of the actual thefts, the staff of the garage discovered an amazing fact; small children had seen so much demolition and so little else that made a comparable impression, that they had become demolition experts themselves. I was told, “You would never think toddlers of three could knock a wall down! They can — and they are up to using swinging weights and other methods they have watched the demolition men use!”
It probably would not be so grave if this were an incident in a life in which positive and constructive things predominated; but these children do not have such a life. It is a small step from wall-wrecking to train-wrecking. The evil does not arise from malice; it is just doing something that they have seen too much of. As children, we sometimes put a tin on a rock and tried to knock it off from twenty yards. These toddlers (who can throw before they can talk) will destroy a stained-glass window with about as much sense of purpose. This is not denying that, at a later stage, when the indifference of the parents has finished its evil work, when the attitude of society has hardened and the children begin to see “them” as the enemy, deliberate and malicious damage is done by older children and young hooligans. But this is how it all starts.
For many years the children of Mr. and Mrs. “X” have been a worry to our schools. They are always dirty and ragged, sometimes verminous, and all, one after the other, backward. They are, however, desperate for affection. In the evenings they are shut out until 10 or 10.30 p.m.; both parents are heavy drinkers. The children are thin and often very cold. When they do get home, there is no electric light — only candles. (We have of course reported all this; and I have been told, “It is not such a bad case as so many others!”) The children have — or had — one hope. The kindness of a neighbour and the affection of an understanding teacher.
Now, over the past six years these children have seen more demolition than many of us saw during the air raids. But the new flats are not for them. They are to be moved away to another back street in Winson Green.
Is it not likely that they will live in Winson Green until it, too, becomes an area of demolition? Then, again, they will see the Waste Land creep nearer and nearer and new flats emerge. (Let us hope, this time, without a gap of six years between the two events.) And again they will be whisked away to some other back street, if they are still at large. But by then they are likely to be accomplished vandals or anti-social hooligans, absorbing in Borstal or one of Her Majesty’s Prisons far more money, time, thought and expert attention than was ever given them in early childhood, when it might not have been too late.
Readers will ask, “Why don’t you do something about them?” We have tried. The amount that we can do is limited. To help such a family will take a lot of time for some years. We have always more families who are willing to be helped than we can cope with. The family I have referred to is not willing to be helped by us, except by accepting gifts, because the parents have a mistaken feeling that we would judge them; they do not want to change their drinking habits and they resent any “interference” which might lead to their being shamed. They prefer to go on making life a drab hell for their children. And no one can force them to accept help.
It is obvious that the main themes of this book interact so closely that it is difficult to separate them. It is clear that the Waste Land has its own peculiar effects on the lives of children from bad homes who live on its perimeter. This is the region of tottering walls, of eyeless staring houses, the windows like empty sockets. Here a piano lies dying while toddlers kick it to pieces.
Half-demolished buildings (one shop — still there — has been half-demolished for eight years) become centres of petty crime. Here tramps and vagrants sleep. Here gangs of youths and girls come and go. Here stolen property is dumped for convenient collection later. The whole district has deteriorated. There is a law against leaving litter in Birmingham streets. We sometimes think the law must require it to be collected from other areas and dumped in Ladywood.
Again and again I have appealed in vain for the Waste Land to be levelled for play; for football and cricket. I offered to run an inter-street football league, as I had in my former parish. Nothing was done. The vandalism grew worse.
When a new school was built, a playing field was provided, the first field in Ladywood in living memory. It was fenced and trees were planted round it.
I appealed:
(1) For the use of the Waste Land for sport, recreation and the like.
(2) For permission for our church schools to play football on the new playing field. After a hundred years of service, I didn’t see why they should be deprived of the new amenity in favour of a brand new school.
There was no response to (1). As for (2) I was told that we might damage the grass if it were too much used. You should see it now!
It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I saw the local children and youths invade the new field night after night, tear up the fence, uproot the trees and reduce the grass to dust. No effort has yet been made to prevent this devastation. Well, it is all on the rates! Eventually I was given a piece of land to use — just too small for football. It was levelled by a friend, a Birmingham industrialist, and I obtained a grant for goal posts; but without further assistance it will be difficult to make it fit for games.
Incidentally, a great deal of trouble in our cities comes from desperation. The young long for some open space in which to play informal games between four coats as goal posts, or using a bucket as wicket. We may deplore this, but it is a fact that they will not go very far afield. Every district should have what is, after all, a traditional birthright of English children, a village green. It is noticeable how different these children are at our annual camps, where they have space to let off steam and adventure without law-breaking. At camp, too, we are a community — a family — a microcosm of what a parish should be. Everyone there is an individual, known and loved and with a contribution to make.
For the families disrupted, all this was personal and tragic. Old friends and neighbours were scattered to widely separated new areas in outer suburbs. Children were parted from their playmates. Old age pensioners went to districts where they knew nobody and mattered to nobody, to areas where the shopkeepers were strangers, and where no familiar faces were to be seen in the “local”.
Some old folk were left in isolation among new families, using condemned houses as temporary accommodation. No longer were friendly neighbours in and out all day. The first grim cases of old people dying unknown were reported, despite all our efforts — in which all our church members helped — to keep contact with them in our big parish. Small shopkeepers were severely hit. I remember one little shop, the only building left occupied in an empty, half-demolished street. For years many old people made amazing journeys to shop in the back streets here.
“It’s too unfriendly out there. Here, as soon as I comes into the shop they say, ‘Allo, Love! How’s your rheumatics?’ and they ask after gran and little Linda. We knows each other — ’ave done for years. But out there nobody knows and nobody cares whether you’re there or not. ’Er mother knew my gran — I’m welcome here. Where I am now, they don’t want to know who you are. I’ll come back ’ere as long as I can.”
Some still “come back” after eight years.
Only this week one elderly lady, crippled with arthritis and isolated on a noisy new estate, told me in despair of her desperate efforts to effect an exchange with a house, room or flat in Ladywood so that she can spend her remaining years, not in loneliness, but among old friends who love and care about her.
The existence for seven years of the Waste Land, the disruption of community, combine to destroy respect for law and order. It also adds to children’s insecurity and spoils the efforts of those who try to serve a district. But here is another menace! Nearby the worst property is not yet destroyed. Increasingly, it is used as “temporary accommodation” for problem families. In overwhelming numbers such families cannot be helped. They make life horrible for many decent families left behind, and there are many wonderful people still struggling to maintain vestiges of civilisation in streets like this. Later, we shall be having a closer look at problem families; before we do so, let us examine the new world growing in the wake of the bulldozer.
Chapter V: The New Flats
SEGREGATION
Level them off, level them off —
A street for the worker, a road for the toff:
Separate parishes, separate streets
So never the Fitter the Manager meets.
Stratify Britain, the nobs and the masses —
Split em all up into separate classes;
Build an estate for the workers, and then
A Dormit’ry suburb for Grammar School men.
Teachers and Doctors in Village and Town,
In old City areas before they came down,
In Club-rooms or Churches — or somewhere between —
Part of humanity, part of the scene,
Used to rub shoulders with Bert and his mate;
Stroll home together: “Goodnight” at the gate.
England was merry; it’s hardly hilarious
Stratified, flatified, less than gregarious.
Enemy arsenals may not be jolly
But God save our land from our idiot folly!
England, our England, a nation were you.
Watch our development split you in two!
Hasn’t our industry daily provided
All the effects of a Nation divided?
“Bees in his bonnet . . . an earwig or two…”
Yes. But I’m warning you! Brother, it’s true!
Kratos.
With grateful acknowledgement to The Birmingham Post, ”Rhymes for the Times”.
MEANWHILE, though the Waste Land remained, the new flats began to appear. I have nothing against the flats, if we must have flats, except that there is little space for traditional children’s games, for prams, or for toddlers. For teenagers there is nothing at all. There have been many complaints about dampness, poor fittings and the lifts being too small for stretchers or coffins, Even so, as homes, they are a great improvement on the “back-to-backs”.
But here, too, people have been uprooted. Insecure, they fall back on their new homes as refuges; they go out little, the “telly” dominates their home lives. They show their carpets, curtains and furniture with great pride, but there is little social life, and less cultural or spiritual life. There is much loneliness, especially among old people.
Perhaps the worst feature is the limitation of a new-flat area to one social class.
Instead of the doctor’s house and family set among the people he serves, we have a clean, splendid, modern clinic. But the people will never again feel he is one of their community, respected and setting a standard of behaviour, taking his traditional place as a local leader. Once local doctors were churchwardens or council members. Now, the doctor lives in a residential suburb and attends surgery or clinic on a rota. A missionary living in the jungle is now less rare than a local teacher living in Ladywood among the people he serves.
At present, when the bell goes on Friday at 4pm, the teachers vanish to their suburbs. Their part, too, in a real community, goes by default, save for a dedicated few who return at the weekend to run clubs or teach on Sunday.
These I honour. Our councillors, too, live far away. The combination of this breakdown of community and the uprooting of the new flat dwellers from their home districts, has resulted in a strange and evil social phenomenon. The young see nobody whose opinion and respect they value. Even nearby families are strangers. If you smash a street-lamp or an old person’s window, nobody will know who you are, even if you are seen. And in place of the “bobby” on his beat, we have, too often, the squad car, which sails past while dim figures merge with the shadows of half-demolished buildings. This I have seen many times.
To re-build a sense of community will take a generation or more. A mixed community, in the old sense, it will never be. One result of this is a new sort of local leadership. I admire these local leaders very much. They have a great sense of service. But it is limited by the nature of the district. We have betting shops, enough and to spare, in Ladywood, but one main social activity run by the new generation of leaders is a “sweep” and a “tote”. Every block of new flats is canvassed and on every notice board “tote” results have a prominent place. I am not condemning this, or standing in judgement, but I do say this should be balanced, in a healthy community, by other interests.
In the new-flat community huts Bingo flourishes. It provides sports-equipment and transport for youngsters without any effort on their part. Again, I am not writing in condemnation; but it is a pity that they are being taught that this is the only way you get what you want. The intentions are so good, the work put in so unselfish, that it seems churlish to mention it. Those responsible are splendid people. They would not see the point I am trying to make. The club programmes under the new leadership are the clearest examples of the limitations of social life in our new, segregated Britain.
I cannot for the life of me understand why things have to be done in this way. Why was the waste land left waste so long? Why must half-demolished buildings be left in that state for years? Why should the worst property not be demolished first? Why should the building not keep some pace with the demolition? Why should neighbourhoods not be kept in being as living communities? Why not build some houses or flats for teachers and doctors and other professional servants of the people? Why not allow limited private enterprise to introduce variety, taking steps at the same time to prevent overcrowding and exploitation?
There are, I know, very good answers to all these questions. Some of them are spelt with the letters £, s and d. I am not sure that we should accept these answers. As I write, two little boys lie in the accident hospital. They dropped a match into the petrol tank of a car abandoned on waste land. Surely our planners could have avoided leaving waste land for so long in a condition that made it the finest training-ground for vandalism ever devised by the wit of man? Surely, it should have been imaginatively laid out as a playing area with goal posts, and similar aids to creative and healthy activities? Surely the children might have been spared the long years of demolition without any constructive work? For too long there was nothing but smash-and-bash to supplement their favourite TV programmes!
And, surely a living community should be spared this appallingly slow process of being torn to pieces? Surely the people could have been kept together? It becomes increasingly obvious as experience grows that we must vary the social monotony of new-flat areas. I am told that West Germany has now understood this lesson, that the suburbs there have a variety and charm as yet achieved nowhere in this country. It is probably, after all, that many teachers, doctors, councillors and MPs would live among the people if there were suitable accommodation.
It would be a good thing if in each block there were a social centre — rooms for older people to have meetings; a place where music could be played without annoying neighbours; a place where anyone willing to give children an enthusiasm could do so in peace. Why not? I have seen people trying to run a ballet class, give music lessons, start a chess club in situations of difficulty. There people did not live in the new flats, but given such people and a suitable place for their activities, we have a tremendous addition to a barren social wilderness, in which one important ingredient is the love shown to the children concerned, This illustrates what I mean by “local leadership”.
American churches are developing social-centre building. Among activities they make possible is a town–country link-up such as a good Women’s Institute sometimes achieves. At the moment, children in town and country are living in worlds more separate than at any other time in history. I know from my own experience that a good camp can be organised without more capital than gifts from a few friends. Good local leadership might result in a revival of the old hopfield atmosphere, if not for affluent adults at least for children under some guidance and discipline — but no: too much! And what a chance that would give to the right leaders. Cannot Government and local government help the churches fulfil their role as builders of Christian Community?
Since I began this book, we have been delighted to hear that a Methodist minister has been allowed to live in one of the new flats. This is a most welcome move. The officials concerned are to be congratulated. It is important that they know that the day when there was denominational jealousy in these matters has long, long passed away.
It may be that we can learn from and recover from past mistakes, that we can ask what we mean by Community all over again. But we shall have to move very rapidly indeed if we are to save a generation of those most affected by the past mistakes — the children!
This, then, is the place for consideration of constructive slum-clearance, a new approach which can offer ideas and suggestions. It is important that it should quickly become a subject for intensive study on an international scale.
Ladywood Unite 
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