Wednesday, 14 November 2012

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First international convention of neighbourhoods bloggers Well, two of us anyway, sometimes you gotta start small. Canadian Diane Dyson, who blogs at Belonging Community, was passing through London and it was a great pleasure to meet up for a coffee and a conversational wander round parts of the City of London. I’ve long admired Diane’s thoroughness in her blogging and the determined linking of community development practice to policy options. I’m also a fan of the way she combines informed insights into a range of different themes – education, crime, health, housing, planning and so on. What chance the residents and practitioners of Toronto value what she offers? We talked about settlements and housing and private-public space; the attitudes of media and politicians to poverty, about philanthropy and the need to reassert poverty issues in the income inequalities agenda. We talked about the notion of ‘social claustrophobia’ – apparently a new and ill-chosen term for social detachment, which I’ve commented on often enough; and the need for policy to appreciate the importance of recognition as much as engagement at neighbourhood level. At one point we came round a corner to discover this scene: a London bus draped with the banner of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, which as I’m sure you already know has been serving the City churches since 1274. Don’t call it a beadle-bus – there is honour in a civic group that can trace its history to the fraternities and guilds of late medieval England. For my overseas guest, this was a wonderful, coincidental example of civic tradition, mutual support and collective enterprise, and eccentricity in the English establishment. We had stumbled on back markers during the last preparations for the parade of the Lord Mayor’s show. As if our conversation needed any prompting.

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