Neighbourliness in Devonport

I’ve been spending some time talking to a few people in Devonport about the transformations that have occurred there over the past 10-15 years. I’ve heard plenty about the desperate conditions and the social disorder that characterised the area in the 1980s. The routine was for kids to nick cars from the town centre, drive them back to Pembroke Street, race them round the neighbourhood a bit and then set them on fire. When the fire brigade came they were stoned. When the council official came to tow away the burned out cars, he was intimidated. Antisocial and violent behaviour flourished in this context, until a few people decided to get together and change things.

One of the messages that comes across is that people don’t mind poverty half as much as they mind being abandoned by society – being isolated in an area that was treated by the housing department as a dumping ground for problem individuals and families, in a neglected townscape which was a no-go area for taxis and deliveries, and in a harsh and unforgiving economic and welfare environment – all in a city somewhat marginalised from urban policy generally anyway.

Out of such a context the Pembroke Street Estate Management Board came into being, and their reputation as a model of community-based regeneration has been hard-earned and well-justified. As one interviewee said to me today, “It works and there should be more of it.” But what’s striking me in the work I’m doing for them is how little recognition is given to the context of their origins.

Let me put it like this. To espouse resident empowerment, tenant management, estate-based repair and maintenance run by residents, long-term youth work with a constant flow of children at risk of exclusion from school, etc etc, and make it all work sustainably, is pretty difficult. It takes huge reserves of commitment; patience and a sense of injustice; vision and persuasion and energy. But within the context of today’s new Labour administration, it’s frankly a doddle compared with the political context in which Christine Watts and her allies began the Pembroke Street story back in 1987.

What’s magical about their achievement is the natural evolution of neighbourliness and social support as a component in the character of the EMB’s role: people from all quarters keep feeding me information about this as a side-dish to the community involvement and estate management that has earned widespread praise.

This is by no means necessarily to be expected: people in low-income areas do not always express the need for, or receive, informal social support. Deborah Ghate and Neal Hazel, in their major study of parenting in poor environments, found that a whopping 20% of all parents reported that they had received no support at all – emotional or practical – from family and household members, friends or neighbours, in the four weeks preceding their survey. (Ghate and Hazel, Parenting in poor environments, 2002, p238). That’s scary.

Now it gets interesting. I had the chance to interview Beryl Austin who is chair of the residents’ association for Mount Wise Towers, a set of three blocks in Devonport, up the road from Pembroke Street. The association is about to take on TMO status any minute now and they’ve been inspired (and warmly supported) by Christine Watts and her colleagues.

But Pembroke Street is, well, a street, with 160 units in four-storey blocks, and some well-designed community space. Mount Wise Towers comprises, well, towers – something like 270 units in three blocks, no families, plenty of people with mental health difficulties, uninviting semi-private space within, no green space around them, and almost no community facilities to speak of.

How do the residents of the towers – keen for tenant management and ready to run with it - replicate in their vertical gated communities the sense of neighbourliness, care, support and informal social control that pervades Pembroke Street? One can see how repair and maintenance, training and employment can be components in their strategy, but what are the transferable ingredients that make so many people in Pembroke Street come forward to say how much they like living there? It’s a remarkable challenge for Mount Wise, whatever the political context.