THE OTHER VICTIMS OF RED DOOR APARTHEID
Asylum seekers are angry at their homes having distinctive red doors. But locals who’ve seen their town lose its soul (AND been branded racist) are just as bitter
Geoff Palmer is 48 and unemployed. He has much to be frustrated about, but this week’s events have given him new cause. ‘This isn’t a racist town,’ he protests. ‘We’ve got more to worry about here than the colour of somebody’s skin. ‘The steelworks has closed, which affects people from all over Teesside, and adds to the feeling in a bloke like me that things are a bit hopeless. So having a few asylum seekers in the area doesn’t seem a big deal.
‘The problem is that we have too many. The Government are sending them to Teesside because housing them is cheap here. It’s about cost, and it’s unfair.’
mr Palmer lives in the middlesbrough district of Gresham. No one would choose to live in Gresham any more. It is the place of last resort. Pay a visit and it’s not hard to understand why.
The great financier Sir Thomas Gresham founded the City of london’s royal exchange. But today this namesake district is a monument to industrial england’s slide into an economic abyss.
The grid of terraced cottages in streets bearing aristocratic, or other, similarly aspirational, names was built in the 19th century to house the workers in booming Teesside.
one by one, those heavy industries have collapsed. among the last to go was the SSI steelworks in next door redcar, which closed three months ago. But what success and good fortune that ever existed in Gresham, had died long before that.
There are various indicators of this on a bleak winter afternoon; the scores of derelict houses, the gaunt drunks and addicts, and the demolition team tearing down what is left of the ill-titled Pearl Street.
But the most compelling sign that Gresham has become the pariah district, perhaps not only in middlesbrough but the entire country, is the proliferation of properties with red doors.
for they are a signifier that while this half square mile of misery has one of the very highest unemployment rates in the UK, it also has the highest concentration of asylum seekers in the UK. There is one for every 173 people.
This has much to do with G4S, the multinational giant which made such a mess of the london olympic security in 2012. In the same year, G4S was awarded the government’s asylum housing contract for the North east region. G4S had no experience of this role, so it sub-contracted the work to a firm called Jomast, which is owned by a local tycoon called Stuart monk, estimated to be worth £175 million.
It goes without saying mr monk does not live in Gresham — a mansion 11 miles away is Chez monk — but he does own many of the houses in the district and elsewhere across Teesside.
ASIGNIfICaNT proportion of mr monk’s property portfolio is used to house asylum seekers. This week, it emerged that the vast majority of these homes have had their front doors painted red. as you can imagine, this has proved a problem for their residents and it has been a troubling issue for four years.
The distinctive colour has made the homes easily recognisable for what they are, it is claimed. as a consequence they had become a target for racists. a number have been attacked, some repeatedly. Concerns were raised to officialdom some time ago — but to no avail.
Were the red doors ‘a secret apartheid policy’, as has been claimed — and denied by G4S and its contractor? Comparisons with the ‘yellow star houses’ of Budapest, branded properties into which Jews were packed prior to deportation to Nazi death camps, have also been made.
In recent days, many of the residents of these homes, who fled war and persecution, have spoken out. They could do nothing about being in middlesbrough — the geographical location of their accommodation is not an asylum seeker’s choice — but they wanted their doors painted any colour other than red.
What, though, of the Gresham locals who, by inference, have been portrayed as being at best unwelcoming and at worst neo-Nazis? They are deeply unhappy, too. Not only at the Press coverage in recent days, but the way G4S and mr monk have changed the character of their community.
In Parliament road, locally-owned businesses have all but disappeared, replaced by shops from a number of countries around the world. The Polski Sklep (Polish shop) is popular with the locals and newly placed asylum seekers because in an area of low employment it is, crucially, cheap. elsewhere, say residents, the system is creaking at the seams.
‘The schools are now full (of the children of asylum seekers) and it means families whose children have gone to the same school for generations have to try to get their kids in elsewhere,’ says Geoff Palmer.
‘You can’t get a doctor’s appointment, the surgeries are full. I had a chest infection last year and couldn’t get in to my own doctor so I went to a walk-in centre across town and it was heaving with people — there was a queue of asylum seekers that reached the door all registering their details.
‘That’s a massive strain on services. We don’t mind the asylum seekers, but we could do with some other towns taking them in as well.’
emma Walker, 24, a mother-of-one, says: ‘I’ve got asylum seekers two doors down and they’re canny, they’ve had no trouble from anyone at all and I don’t like this idea that everybody in middlesbrough is a thug with a grudge.
‘It’s right that the firm should repaint their doors for them so they’re not red, it’s like having a neon sign saying “foreigner” when they’re all painted like that.
‘But I grew up round here, and it’s so different now. I miss how it was when everybody used to speak to each other because they all knew each other. Now, I can walk to the shop from home and back again and not hear one single english voice. It makes it feel like we’re the foreigners actually.’
arthur Thompson, 66, owner of The Hardware Shop, says: ‘There are only three locally-owned businesses left on the whole street, when once it was a thriving place.
‘We have Polish, Turkish, romanian, middle eastern, every race under the sun, it’s changed the area completely and not for the better.
‘a lot of people have moved in, but they’ve brought nothing with them, they have no spending power. It’s sad for me to see a lot of nice people leave this area, and a lot of people move in who have no link to it.
‘The old community feeling has gone. There are nice people among the asylum seekers and immigrants, of course, but their arrival has taken away what this place once was.’
ON THe other side of the road at fishmonger Catch of The Day, owner Paul Harrison, 51, says: ‘I have no complaints, in fact for me business has been good. ‘People eat fresh fish regardless of their race and culture, it’s a staple diet for most of the people who come here from other countries.
‘There’s a strong argument that it’s made the town more cosmopolitan, there’s a big mix of cultures and on one level that’s a really good thing. But of course there is a downside. my wife’s mum is 80, and she now has to wait ten days for a doctor’s appointment, when not long ago she’d have been seen the same day.
‘Despite that, I don’t see any trouble between the locals and asylum seekers. Those people who are apparently attacking their homes are a minority, and I don’t think they’re local people.’
Pamela Harvey, 61, says: ‘No one I know is racist. We’re used to asian people in this town, they speak the same as we do and if you’re Boro you’re Boro, skin colour doesn’t
matter. But in Gresham we’re the minority, it feels like that anyhow. Things have swung too far the other way. It’s not the asylum seekers at fault, it’s the government. It’s typical that Middlesbrough is the dumping ground because no one outside this town gives a damn about us.’
After spending some time in this troubled corner of England, my feeling is the row over doors is something of a red herring. Would the incomers have been targeted by racists if their front doors had been painted random hues? Probably. What mattered most was the colour of their skin and the perception that they were getting some kind of preference in being given homes. Ignorance and hardship breed xenophobia. Big business making money out of misery, and profit margins trumping common sense, only add to the problems.
Yesterday, there was neither sign of the firm Jomast’s promised repainting of front doors, nor of the Home Office inspection team that was supposed to be coming to Gresham. The asylum seekers are used to such neglect and broken promises. Jagjeet Singh has lived behind a red door with his wife and four children for four years. He comes from India but sought asylum here after he made a ‘love marriage’. His in-laws threatened to kill them both. And then there are the racists. ‘They throw dog mess over my back wall, and bang on my doors and shout abuse,’ he says. ‘People don’t like the red door, it makes us a target, we live here like animals behind that door. It is a clear sign to everyone that we are asylum seekers, and here they don’t like that. It frightens me and frightens my children. The stress of doing nothing while we wait for the asylum decision. Sometimes I think about killing myself.’
Death or life in Gresham? It is not such a clear-cut choice as you might imagine.