Victims Of Redevelopment Schemes

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 4

Victims Of Redevelopment Schemes

The Forgotten People: By Norman S. Power. Arthur James Press. 119 pp.

Canon Power has lived as the Vicar of a working class district of Birmingham for a number of years. Of recent years he has been able to notice from close quarters the results of redevelopment schemes in highly populated areas. In such schemes he asserts that better class dwellings are destroyed prior to the poorer type of houses and

that in the centre of this cleared area, cheek by jowl with the parish church and the school, is a veritable waste-land. This area is symbolical, because of its confusion and disorder, of the subsequent chaotic condition of the community previously housed therein.

The author pleads for consideration of the needs of those who previously lived in a close knit society. The bulldozers have been instrumental in smashing this

fellowship and casting forth the members to new housing areas where they live only to exist. He tells of those who have suffered, returning to buy their weekly goods from the little corner shop, where they know they are still accepted as persons. As though this in itself was not bad enough, Canon Power adds fuel to the fire when he describes the lives of those remaining. The three-year-old boy, he instances, crying outside the hotel for a father who will not come home. The young vandals smash the Church windows or demolish houses left half standing, as a preparation for an adolescent life of delinquency. Even representations to local authorities to provide sporting amenities meet with an indifferent response. Home life under these influences is joyless.

Even those professional people who previously had lived with those they served, now lived elsewhere. Indeed the residents are “the forgotten people,” and appear to be less important than the architects’ multi-storey flats. What positive steps does the author recommend? First, he suggests that town planners ought to bear in mind the type of community housed in the area under examination. Actually they ought to seek factual information from the local doctor, parson, schoolteacher, etc. Then he suggests that demolition should pro. ceed in short stages with the destruction of the worst buildings being followed by immediate replacement. Thus the community relationship will be preserved in the change and the professional people who remain will ensure that it is not of the one class structure.

This book is a timely reminder that in the concrete cities of today live people who have much the same needs as those of bygone eras. It would appear that it is social suicide to forget this fact.