To blog or not to blog

As I write this I have the eager attendance of two strange men who are currently gauging the size of my flu, with the intention of giving my pipework a good seeing to, for, after three years of saving, we are finally getting our central heating system replaced.  Of course our old boiler just scraped through as being ineligible for the government scrappage scheme (it is rated F and would have to be G to qualify). Goodness knows what a G rated system must be – an open camp-fire maybe, a candle over a pan of water, or perhaps just sitting round an exposed kettle element. I thought the deal sounded too good to be true, and Mr Brown didn’t let me down.  This was all supposed to happen a few weeks ago, plumber booked, loft cleared, but the country was at the time crippled and helpless under a blanket of white unpreparedness.

I read an interesting article the other day that echoed my thoughts on the scaremongering prevalent during the snow – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8460245.stm – It questions the mathematics behind claims that the bad weather cost the economy hundreds of millions of pounds, and takes a somewhat more balanced view noting a few key points:

• Some businesses will have suffered, but others will have benefited. Our plumber says he was rushed off his feet with call-outs to burst pipes and broken boilers. Ditto panel beaters and the supermarkets who’s shelves were stripped in a frenzy of panic buying.
• Some businesses will simply have deferred work and whilst they had a lean time a few weeks ago, they will be doubly busy catching up with a backlog. People who, for example, didn’t get their hair cut then will need a cut and blow job eventually. The industry didn’t loose out – there is no less hair to cut in total. Manufacturing orders won’t have been cancelled – just delayed.  After all, the whole country was frozen so cancelling an order for Blivets from one company and placing it with another would have gained nothing.
• Other sales will have rocketed – warm clothes, anti-freeze, road salt (which probably had a higher street value than cocaine!) and of course fuel.

So whilst yes, there will have been individual losses and hardship, I doubt that this will show as more than a minor blip in terms of impact on the GDP. I can’t help thinking that there is something very English about making things out to be far worse than they really are. I have always thought that there is an inherent optimism in being pessimistic; if you expect the worse then you will be prepared for it, and if it doesn’t happen you will be pleasantly surprised. Maybe that is the English way. A stiff upper lip is only any good in a crisis. That said, you’d have thought the apocalypse were upon us with all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, prophets of lost profits and every news broadcast pre-empting the end of the world as we know it. Scares were mongered and the gloom of doom was upon us.  Yet we survived against the odds and life returns to its routines.

Over the past few weeks a bit of a row has broken out in our little local community. All the houses, along with two blocks of flats More about them in a minute), in our estate are tied in to a contractual relationship with our Management Company. The land is all leasehold (contractually we have to pay a peppercorn a year to the estate) and is administered by the Riverdale Management Company which is also responsible for upkeep of common ground plus the Leisure Centre. Last summer, the pool developed some problems and it transpired that many of the pipes had to be dug up and replaced. The upshot of this was a bill for £39,000, shared between all the properties (over £150 each) and demanded by the Management Company before the work would be completed.  Obviously this was a lot of money to find just before Christmas and resulted in an eruption of emotive reaction from the residents. We now see a community divided. Forget Northern Ireland, forget Iraq or Afghanistan – it is quite likely that WWIII will be fought in the hinterlands of Kersal Dale.

This seems to be a battle being fought by about four different factions: the management company and their legal representatives, the people who refuse to pay, the people who have already paid and are furious about any further delays and the resident busybody who is whipping it all into a frenzy yet refusing to show her hand. In among all this are demands that the company books be reviewed, accusations of skulduggery, insider dealing and extortion. People are up in arms and spitting blood. Families in one email distribution list are forbidden to speak with neighbours in another list. False personas abound, as people fear to reveal their true identities. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else amid accusations of being a spy for the management company or a blackleg who has broken the unofficial picket line. Of course, every niggle going back 20 years is now being raised, above and beyond the pool repairs, and we see added into the mix issues about parking, television reception in the flats, key fobs and the hours worked by the caretaker. Why do the residents of the flats pay the same as those in houses, when their upkeep is clearly more costly? Why has the intercom not been fixed?  Who are the members of the residents committee and why have they not been arguing the cause? Is Iris Robinson involved? If not, why not?

There is a meeting scheduled next week between the residents and the solicitors. I expect there will be blood. And it is all pointless posturing anyway. The terms of the contract (which you have to sign to live here) give Riverdale the right to charge “any sum they deem to be reasonable” to cover “any repairs they deem to be appropriate”, so I expect their legal position is significantly more watertight than the actual pool itself! I agree that we have a right to know how the management fee is being spent and why provision was not made for repairs but, like with the snow, this is a massive over-reaction. Don’t mention the pool. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. People speak in code, not willing to reveal on which side of the barricades they wish to hang their flag. “What do you think about the pool?” – “What do YOU think?” – “Well, I can see both sides.” – “Me too, I’m glad it is all out in the open.”

All this prompted me to look back through our deeds, to check the details of the contract and also to try to understand how Riverdale came into being. It seems Riverdale Management Company (in various previous guises) took over the Kersal Way estate when our houses were built. When we moved in we knew that this area had been flats but I had no idea of quite what had been here. My curiosity took me to a number of resources including a website chronicling the history of this estate – http://www.kersalflats.co.uk/index.html from which I have stolen some photos.

This area was wasteland until the late 1950s, prone to flooding and little more than marsh bog, overlooking the old racecourse and nestling in the vale created by the crook of the river. Following a boom in manufacturing in the city and as a response to the post-war housing crisis, the government hatched a plan to provide high-rise housing in what turned out to be a massive experiment in social engineering. In what was one of the largest developments of its kind in the country (and a “model for future living”), twelve blocks of flats were commissioned along with a parade of shops, community and health centre, pub and play area. Building work took place from 1958 through to the late 60s. As they rose, the flats became a major part of the skyline, visible from miles around. The land was cheap as it sat in the flood plain of the river Irwell so was thought to be unsuitable for development, but needs must and the flats were raised on stilts, a double-edged solution which meant that when the river broke its banks in 1980 the flats remained dry but each was surrounded by its own moat.

At its height, the estate housed 3000 people, but declined from the mid 80s and became “A dumping ground for problematic persons, criminally orientated individuals, and the socially and economically dispossessed”.  Families were relocated and crime flourished.  The thrill and promise of living in these new modern homes, with hot water and ‘space age’ lifts brought together a community, but it was not sustainable, investment dwindled, neglect set in like the mildew on the walls. Kersal Dale moved from des-res to dump, its reputation plummeted and in October 1990 eight of the twelve blocks were demolished amid much media attention.

At the time the controlled destruction represented the largest explosive demolition ever undertaken and made national news. I have a vague recollection of seeing footage at the time, and copies of the videos are still available on the website. The intention was to refurbish the remaining four blocks which were passed into the hands of a development company, but even that plan was ill fated and a further two buildings were later demolished. All that remains are two of the twelve blocks, originally called Shakespeare and Shelly (they all took names of poets, as Byron was born and lived in Kersal), re-skinned, refurbished, revitalised and renamed.

You can see from these two photographs how the flats sat in the landscape. I have marked the remaining buildings on both the old and new images, plus the location of our house. We would have occupied the ‘green’ area in the middle of the development.

When we were looking for properties in Salford I remember checking the Google satellite image for here and remarking how green and undeveloped it looked, never realising that until a few years previously it had been such a ‘metropolis’- not so far distant from Fritz Lang’s futuristic “city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners.”

Whilst I can easily map the old onto the new, see evidence of where the flats once stood, relate to the buildings on an academic level, I find it impossible to stand in our back garden and really feel what it would have been like to be surrounded by touring concrete skyscrapers. I can look at comparison photos and understand the layout, but I just can’t relate on an emotional level.

This place was once the home of thousands of people, a community, families with lives and stories and experiences. They lived in flats which had open fires (no central heating) and windows that in winter were an inch thick in ice (a far cry from the minor inconveniences we suffered a few weeks ago).  Here I am getting a boiler fitted, where they had to lug sacks of coal up the stairs when the lifts were broken. They will have had a very different relationship to this piece of land than the one that David and I now court.

Much of the land remains vacant, decisions to redevelop now retracted following the current economic depression. Plans made a few years ago are no longer viable, and parts of Kersal are being reclaimed by nature, returning to the way they were only 45 years ago, with nothing but fading photographs to show the high-rises were ever here, but at least we have our leisure centre with its empty, leaky pool. I just hope that history is not repeated where someone decides it is not worth the effort or money to fix and it, like the flats, will fall into ruin.

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