Is old fashioned anti-workingclass prejudicealive and well? Answer – make your own mind up… Adrian Hart reports from a series of fractious ‘Resident Liaison’ meetings at Millwood Community Centre.
For nearly 2 years council tenants living just metres from a giant construction site have suffered noise, dust and fumes. Across the summer of 2018 shift workers, pensioners and mothers with small children have felt trapped inside sweltering, airless flats obliged to close windows trying to block the dust, the smell, the sudden outbreaks of severe noise late in the evening and on weekends. At night if construction site lights and humming generators weren’t bad enough, strange goings on at the site (even a live band) have confirmed to these tenants that their lives really don’t matter.
Disregarded for 16 months by developer, builder and by the council’s environmental ‘team’ it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that patience eventually snapped.
Living on the council estate comprising Milner/Kingswood flats, the smaller blocks along Nelson Way and Ivory Place must feel like some kind of endurance test right now. As Brighton witnesses yet another juggernaut development wedge itself into a space too small (this time in the site of the old Circus Street market) tenants might have hoped this ‘public private partnership’ (PPP) would at least entail their council landlord extending them some kind of ‘duty of care’.
It seems the Circus Street development shows us how easy it is to casually ignore agreements on working hours. All the usual measures to mitigate the effects of the works appear not to have mattered very much: failures to fix dust barrier plastic sheeting to the scaffold, lines of lorries idling with diesel engines running, walkways strewn with site debris – 16 months in the list goes on and on.
When confronted by unhappy residents it became routine for men on the site to scoff. ‘It seems they don’t listen to us, they laughat us’ said one resident. ‘It’s like their policy is to deny everything we say’ said another.
At the forefront of tenant efforts to confront issues were five women. These women were reporting some particularly nasty abuse from the site. It seemed that a view of this estate and its inhabitants had taken root. They were seen as an underclass (‘you’re a load of down and outs’ was one jibe emanating from the site), the estate mocked as a dumping ground for ‘scummy types’.
In some ways the behaviour of senior levels of the council is more shocking. By the time the first of 2019s monthly liaisonmeetings took place the council knew full well that dozens of tenants had complained to them. It knew about the site parties and the abuse and of course it knew that it was landlord to a disproportionate number of vulnerable tenants with physical, mental health and learning difficulties. And yet not one ward councillor or environmental health officer came to any of the liaison meetings since they began in August 2017. All the more incredible when you consider that for Queen’s Park ward nothing comes close to the sheer scale of the Circus Street development and its proximity to an estate.
At the meeting on January 29th the frustrations boiled over. One of the women told me, ‘It’s like we all went mad all at once’. During Christmas and New Year noise from the site had been occurring after hours including on Sundays and the estate was starting to wit-ness how debris from the site was encouraging fly-tipping and drug dealing. Trucks were now regularly driving up Morley Street and turning. Diesel fumes and other acrid smells seemed always to hang in the air on the west and north sides of the flats.
At the meeting four men formed themselves, as always, behind tables at the far end of the room. One from developer U+I, one from the council’s ‘major projects team’, two from builders Henry Construction. They seemed like they wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else.
The polite and well spoken man from U+I was writing notes while the Henry men, still in site clothes, periodically interrupted the women to say things like ‘that can’t be right’ or ‘it’s just a bit of dust’. Every so often U+I turned to Henry to say ‘can that be right?’ or ‘could you look in to this please?’ The lone council official from the ’major works team’ seemed affable enough. But there was ahalf funny/half tragic aspect to the number of times this official responded to tenant complaints by effectively advising they contact the council. He was trying to say ‘you’ll stand a better chance if you go direct to the correct department’. In the tragi-comic screenplay it would run…
‘For choking air its Environmental; black diesel clouds rising up from the trucks? that’s also Environmental… unless they’re trucks associated with the nearby Valley Garden’s road works in which case its probably Highways too; (what? someone nicked the new ‘no-thru road to Circus Street’ sign causing 100 cars per hour to enter then find they had to turn back? That’s Transportation!)
Of course one council ‘team’ that comes to mind (turns out it doesn’t exist) is ‘THE COUNCIL’
Despite all the nods and reassurances handed out at this meeting the following Sunday tenants awoke to excessive construction noise. A tenant called The Argus and arranged a meeting. The next day, Saturday 9th February, their story became news.
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/17420901.circus-street-buildingsite-is-a-living-nightmare-for-residents/
In a comment below the Argus piece there was this:
‘…I’ve worked on the site. There will also be Saturday, Sunday and evening work there for the foreseeable as they are months behind. Easily the most unsafe site I’ve been on in over 30 years…’
After the Argus piece it seemed like the site rules were being carefully observed – the weekends went quiet for a while.
Send in the Clowns.
As a I write two more monthly ’resident liaison’ meetings have come and gone. Meetings are now suddenly ’be there’ events for a host of officials and senior employees. A council environmental health officer attends and Henry Construction have deployed an actual ’Liaison Officer’ as well as a new ’Project Director’.
If this was an attempt at damage limitation or calming angry residents with ‘ok, mistakes were made but things are going to be different now we’re here’ then it went badly wrong. How did they think residents wouldn’t see through that? Was the news that environmental ’team’ air quality site checks had never been conducted because complaints had not been received using the correct procedures supposed to cheer everyone up? Did they think the anger and frustration would just vanish? When it didn’t vanish the officials resorted to characterising the anger as abuse directed at them! Sixteen months of council and developer failure; of complaints ignored; of false promises; of rising distress and now residents are the abusers?
In fairness to one Henry site manager he admitted ‘we have made mistakes’. With the mistakes taking centre stage his plea was for some balance, ’we’ve done a lot of good as well’.
Simon Burgess from MP Lloyd Russel-Moyle’s team was in attendance and, to his credit, his message to developer U+I was waffle-free and to the point:
‘[people here] don’t just expect these failures to be rectified there’s also some making-up to be done. You’ve really got to push the boat out…’
Class Prejudice
The Argus gamble had paid off. But you can’t help feeling there’s an issue right at the centre of this being carefully avoided. For me, it’s that our council – ever vigilant on various other categories of prejudice and discrimination are unable to admit that it’s class operating at the root of all this. If that sounds a bit extreme then go visit a residents liaison meeting for a development underway in a middle class neighbourhood. You’ll likely see ward councillors there… and an environmental health officer. Residents will be properly advised. From Day Onethey’ll put everything in writing. And unlike the Circus Street experience their complaints will be taken seriously.
But there’s another, creepier side to this. UK local authorities have been caught out on this. It’s the moment when councils inadvertently reveal that a certain contempt for stroppy council housed residents actually drives their policy aims. When reporter Aditya Chakrabortty interviewed a senior council official in London out popped this statement:
‘the thing is, what we find on council estates, a lot of people who live on them, [ ] a lot of them are benefits claimants, or on drugs, or worse’.
I might be wrong but it feels like the policy aim is to approve the kind of regeneration which hastens a future many at the top of the council endlessly day dream about. For them the 2019 fad for stereotyping large numbers of decent people, few of whom they’ve ever met, as (whisper it) ‘the scummy types’ hasn’t exactly helped. Given the council’s dual role as landlord and as co-developer of Circus Street, it’s pretty clear the council has some explaining to do.
Lets hope that from May 3rd the three newly elected Queens Park councillors can demand that les-sons be quickly learned. In doing so they might help reinstate a councillor role worth voting for: fierce advocates for the communi-ties they’ve been elected to represent.
Beware the placemakers
There’s at least five months to go before completion of Circus Street’s £130m ‘mixed-use innovation quarter’. How urgent the need is for 450 student bedrooms, 142 new homes (with 28 so-called ‘affordable’ units), 50,000 sq ft of workspace (although good to see a studio for South East Dance) is, perhaps, a question for another The Little Globe. However, social class surfaces again when you look at the ‘vision’ both developer and council have for Circus Street. Take a look at the U+I webpage for Circus Street. In this vision for a ’healthy model of city life’ a concept they love to call “placemaking” will, we’re told, deliver ‘a real sense of community’. ‘…the public realm will’, says the blub, be ‘given a unique and attractive character’.
I reckon the place being made matches that cleaned up city centre future where those that don’t fit the vision are airbrushed from the picture.