Edge Lane wins again!

Another great victory for the campaigners in Edge Lane! Read about it here. A friend who I know from summer cycling evenings lives in the area and will be very happy. It is a bit worrying that the demolisher lobby still wants to press ahead, and just will try again to get the area CPO'ed. For those who don't know: Edge Lane is one of the main routes into Liverpool, for example coming by car from the M62 and heading for the centre you would drive along Edge Lane. Some fools think that by widening this road, traffic could flow quicker into the city. But you don't have to be a transport scientist to understand that wider roads will just attract more traffic, and you end up with the same problem of clogged up roads after a short time. In Edge Lane the plan was not just to widen the road, but to knock down houses to a far greater extent than widening the road would have required.
Somebody told me that there is a study which says: All you have to do for the traffic problems is to open a left turn lane somehwere along Edge Lane, can't remember where.
Btw, traffic jams always remind me of a hand written sign I used to see cycling to university in Berlin, Germany in the 1980's. The sign was near Potsdamer Platz and it addressed the jam that developed there in the morning rush hour. It said: Du stehst nicht im Stau, Du bist der Stau! - It means: You are not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam.

DC8

Granby Residents Association where allowed to give a presentation to the DC8(Is that all there is on the web about this committee?) Board meeting this evening. Barbara presented the same very good power point presentation as she did to the 3 parks committee. Quite a few of us were there to show our support, and Cairns Street residents were out in force, four of us. After the presentation we had a lively debate, but nobody took the position of a supporter for Lovell's plans. Elaine Stewart told us that her report is still in a draft stage, and that she would like to use some (or all?) of Barbara's presentation in it. She assured the meeting that her report will fully reflect the resident's views and will give the LCC (Liverpool City Council) a full view of the picture. Some on the meeting then wondered, that when reports to elected councillors done by officers are reflecting the views of local people, why is the will of these people not respected? Are flawed reports responsible? I also think: Lovell's proposals are not popular, to say the least. But what makes Lovell think that these proposals will be approved? The reports, briefs and data they used mostly comes from council officers. If the brief would have said: In the end you got to give local people a realistic opportunity to stay in the area then how do they come up with what is on the table now, which is: local people are bullied to sell up, tennants are evicted, and then vacant houses are demolished or refurbished, then sold on the open market. If local people have the money to buy one of the new houses (and they won't) they can do so. Yeah, right...

Braces won't do says 20/20

Last week while I was away on business in Birmingham and then on to London for the Climate Change demo 20/20 put a letter trough the door. (On the demo Stella gave an interview to the BBC (!) in London, here is the article.) 20/20 don't like our structural engineers suggestion to use steel braces to secure the bay windows of 3 houses in my street. The bay windows are slowly peeling away from the houses, and could fall down. 20/20 want to demolish, and at best build plywood pretend bay windows. Our engineer says that it might be better and even safer for the workers to use braces instead of taking the structures apart, bit by bit. 20/20 does the work of the outsourced former department of 'estates' of the council.
Did they really consider our requests? What should we do? We'll have a meeting tomorrow at Eleanor's house and will discuss it.

You and Yours

Listen to this BBC Radio 4 programme You and Yours about the Pathfinder scheme.

Long time

Haven't written here for a long time, too long. I still have to adapt my routine to write stuff up as, or just after, it happens.
Quick summary of what I missed to write about until now:

• Granby Residents association meeting
• Evening at Des McConaghy's house
• Lantern Parade in the Park
• Another house tinned up

Granby Residents Association Meeting
These meetings take place roughly once a month in the office of GRA (Granby Residents Association), on Granby Street. We have an agenda we try to stick to, and go through it. GRA might be interested to set up a website and Edward asked me to give him some prices on how much it would be. I did that from websites of companies I have used in the past, and it works out very affordable in my opinion: you can have a domain, a host and web space that allows CGI scripts in PHP for less than £50 per year. The only thing you have to add then is content.
Unfortunately I failed to get support from the GRA for some events for the following week (which I will blog about here) in which the Welsh Street Home Group were getting involved in. WSHG are fighting a similar fight to us. They are trying to save their houses in the Welsh Street area of Toxteth. Nina Edge is their most prominent campaigner, fighting with amazing efficiency and passion to keep her home. She is an artist in her day job, and also has a piece in the current Liverpool Biennial. It's really good, I like it. I know Nina through my allotment, when I signed the lease I had to go to Nina's house because she was in the committee of our allotment society at the time, and organised the lettings. She said I will also have to sign her petition to save the houses in her area, at the same time. I happily obliged.
Evening at Des McConaghy's house
I met Des first at a meeting Nina had organised to discuss the possibilities to make old houses like the one's we want to save more eco friendly. He has worked in Toxteth way back in the 70s and built up an organisation called SNAP. Not sure what SNAP stands for, but it was an experiment in community driven organisation. They ran an office for people to get their advice on housing and welfare issues, I imagine a bit like Citizen's Advice Bureau and the council's one stop shops rolled into one. I have to get and read the final report on the project from the city library. He used photos in his report that I can only decribe as in the tradition of photographers like Jacob Riis or maybe August Sander. I can't remember the photographer's name fully, only the first name, Derek. I will look it up and update the post.
Des has an encyclopedic knowledge of political history. We talked about more things that I have space to mention here, from the problems with building 'new towns' in the 1960's in Northern Ireland to aspects of the Freedom of Information Act. I liked his phrase, that there should not just be a 'Right to Know' but also a 'Duty to Publish'.
Des has been to Berlin many times. What a surprise to hear that our paths might have crossed on the Alexander Haig visit to West Berlin in 1981. That was my first year in Berlin, where I went to Uni. Berlin was a radical place, and the visit of a US Foreign Secretary and former NATO commander was bringing out the masses, and at the time demonstrations could be quite violent. Des wanted to demonstrate against Haig's vist but somehow got arrested in East Berlin!
I can't remember if I went to that demo or not. But it was one of the occasions West Berlin established it's reputation as the capital of anarchists, or as the press called them 'Chaoten'. Lot's to write about, but that would digress too far from this blog. I also met Des' wife, who is originally from Germany. We chatted a bit about Berlin. I had a nice evening and got lot's of inspiration from Des and his wife.
Lantern Parade
And with this we are arriving at the event yesterday evening, the Lantern Parade through Sefton Park. Why do I write about this, you may ask. Welsh Street people had the really good idea to leaflet this event, or better: To get people to sign a petition against demolition. I wanted to get more involvement from the Granby Residents Association, but could not convince them of the potential of this event to rally support for our cause. Nevertheless I volunteered to help the WSHG in their effort, and also recruited Becka, Julian and Stella to help on the day. Nina and Barbara had a leaflet prepared and we put the finishing touches to it on Sunday evening. Eventually I want to scan the leaflet and give a link for people to download, print it, and get their friends to sign it and send back to us. Save Britain's Heritage (look at my links column) gave us money for the photocopies, and I had 2800 made, which I am proud to tell you I transported back from the copy shop on my bicycle in my panniers. No problem, and why do people use cars? I don't get it. I prepared volunteer's packs, a piece of card board as a surface to write on, a few pencils to be used in the case of rain, a pen, a map of the park with contact phone numbers, and two keys on strings to put round the neck to recognize other volunteers by. And of course a stack of leaflets, but I stuck those in a rush into the packs on Tuesday, in Nina's front room. Then back home where I met Becka, Stella and Julian to go to the meeting point with Barbara and to meet the rest of the volunteers. In the park we tried to get as many signatures as possible. That meant I missed most of the action and could not really admire all the lanterns and side shows. Walking up to people you never met before and starting up a conversation is not everybody's thing, but soon I lost all self respect and managed to get a good number of leaflets filled in. Most people where sympathetic and happily filled the paper in, only one young mother tried to argue that my leafleting had nothing to do with Hallowe'en and that the houses we live in are horrible and should be knocked down. Not sure, I think she wanted to pick a verbal fight, and I just walked off. Becka and I moved with the crowd to the final performance on the south end of the park. There we met Barbara, and all of us were very cold at that stage. We decided to relax and watch at least the grand finale of the firework without worrying about signatures.
Another House tinned up
This house is in my street, on the opposite side to my house. I have a good view of it from my desk. Now this view of a cheerfully painted door, some lovely planters with fuchsias and a neat net curtain in the front bay is destroyed. The council people were never sure in the past if this house was theirs and therefore should be boarded up or if it was still lived in. For a long time I also thought that it was lived in but I had never seen the occupiers. Well, today the gang around the neighbourhood management team decided to find out, and they broke in. Whatever they found in there, it had to be hidden: A white van was summoned from nowhere, appearing miraculously in the street. The tinning up squad, in an unmarked white van, fully equipped with a generator and all sorts of tools to cut the sheets of tin set to work immediately. Tin with a grid of little square holes is the current fashion for empty houses. I could not resist and went out to talk to the house busters, to show that they were noticed. People I have met before: the woman who interviewed me for the consultation, a stage in the process to approve Lovell's plan for world domination; the slightly scared officer who had been send out to assure the residents of their good intentions after the recent visit by a demolition squad in the street we managed to send packing. "All the copper has been taken out, the ceilings have collapsed, and we need to secure the house. Bonfire night is coming up and kids might torch it if we don't do anything." Which year's bonfire night? Maybe we were just lucky last year that the whole street did not go up in smoke? They really care for us, these council people, not. The occasion prompted Julian to start a FOI (Freedom of Information) request for the contract between Liverpool Enterprise and the Council. (Liverpool Enterprise was written on the marked van whose driver we saw effortlessly breaking the lock of the house in presence of the council people.)