Neighbourhoods

Remember the welfare system?

What can politicians do about their own lack of popularity? Quite reasonably the BBC is taking a look at political cynicism, but it's a bit of a struggle when the leader of the UK opposition reveals the thinking to which he is prepared to commit the Labour Party. According a PA press release this morning, Mr Miliband will say in his party conference speech that

'councils should give priority in allocating scarce social housing to people who work and contribute to their communities over benefit claimants and trouble tenants.'

'Benefit claimants?' You mean, there are people who have needs and the state is supporting them? How did that happen?

Listen, Ed, if you have a problem with people claiming benefit, why not just go the whole way and say you'll scrap the welfare system?

Believe it or not, there are many people claiming benefits who make huge contributions to local quality of life, through community action, caring, neighbourliness and informal support as well as volunteering, which would put the efforts of most politicians to shame.

 

Running on the roof

'This particular interviewee explains in detail her love of running, and describes the geography of her neighbourhood, distinguished by a letterbox at the end of the road. Such are the gendered and social constraints imposed by other residents of the refugee camp, however, in a place where there is little privacy, that she is forced to run round and round the flat roof of her building instead of down the road, with her husband measuring out the distance in recognisable terms. 'Have I reached the post-box yet?' she reports herself asking, imagining that she is in fact running along the road outside her house, an activity forbidden to her because she is a woman.'

K.H.Adler, in 'Gendering histories of homes and homecomings', in this volume, referring to a video art project by Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal called Roofs: public private open spaces in the camp. According to this note the project was 'produced in a refugee camp in Hebron on the West Bank in cooperation with UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency] and the University of Stuttgart.'

The image is from the Occupied Palestine blog.

 

Talking over the palings

I was in a community centre the other day chatting with residents about some of the images they had brought for the local website they are developing. As soon as this one came up they all said: 'talking over the palings'.

The picture seems to have encapsulated a historically intense neighbourliness, and the phrase was its widely-accepted shorthand.

One of the residents said: the man in the background, that's Mr Bernard, he was from London, such a nice man.

The picture dates from about 1950. I was born a few years later and grew up in the sixties, and I remember a lot of fences like this and, later, chain link fences. In many cases these would have replaced iron fences and gates, where the iron had been taken and used for armaments during the war.

 

'Don't knock my door. Call the council'

It's new year's eve, past midnight, a neighbour's music is blasting on way beyond reasonable levels. You step down to tap at the door and have a word, as our culture and present government policies would expect you to do.

There's a chance you might get stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors, as happened in this very sad case reported in a case in Watford recently.

"He was very aggressive. He said: 'New Year.' I said 'I know this is New Year. This is a residential area. You have to show respect.'

"He replied: 'Don't knock my door. Call the police. Call the council.'"

Meaning, you are my neighbour, I only expect to have to deal with you through an official intermediary.

In mitigation, the defendent's barrister said 'He was not the one who left the flat to confront his neighbour.'

 

On holiday with the neighbours

Apparently 49 people from a single street, Coronation Avenue in Haverfordwest, all went on holiday together to Ibiza recently. Rob Greenland reported a similar story a few years ago about an entire street in Liverpool doing something similar.

Bryony Gordon in yesterday's Telegraph offers a light-hearted reality check on spending downtime with people you may depend on, if you don't already get on with them really well.

When we got to the hotel last night, the family at No 10 complained that their room was smaller than the one allocated to the family at No 12, “which is just what we need after they got planning permission to build that monstrous extension that blocks out all the light in our garden”.

I think it's great if people get on so well with their neighbours that they do not regard going away together as a risk to their relationships. It makes me think of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century annual migration of east London residents to the hop fields of Kent for temporary rural employment. As Gordon's piece suggests, there might be a fascinating sociological study to be done of the extent to which established behaviours were reproduced, or not, in the different temporary environment.

I hope there wasn't undue pressure put on any of the hesitant or reluctant to sign up. I hope they rewarded those who stayed behind to feed the cats and water the gardens. And I hope there weren't too many burglaries while they were away. I have no comment to offer on the choice of Ibiza as a holiday destination, but the people I'd be most curious to hear about are the ones, if there were any, who went away at the same time but chose somewhere else.