‘GHOST’ STREETS GET NEW LEASE OF LIFE
JUST A HANDFUL OF RESIDENTS REMAINED – NOW ‘FORGOTTEN’ NEIGHBOURHOOD IN DECLINE FOR TWO DECADES IS BEING DONE UP
PETE Clayfield sits on a couch in a neatly-kept living room, with just enough space for us to face each other and have a proper chat.
Pictures of beaming grandchildren and family portraits cover almost every inch of wall behind him.
From the inside, this is like many terrace homes in east Manchester.
But the domestic tranquillity of this house at Heather Street, Clayton, stands in stark contrast to what is happening outside the front door.
Pete’s home is one of only three or four others on the street that are occupied. The rest are boarded up in brutal fashion. Windows and doors are covered with imposing metal grates or wooden plyboard covered in graffiti, with the occasional heavy-duty padlock added for good measure.
And it’s not just on Heather Street. Both the next one along - Ben Street and behind - Midlothian Street - are the same.
Blighted by dozens and dozens of vacant properties, this is a neighbourhood that was at death’s door.
But residents fought to save it. And now, finally, after 20 years, Manchester council has bought up dozens of these voided properties - investing millions in fixing them up.
It is expected that by the end of the year these houses will be ready to be let by housing provider One Manchester. They will be made available to local people using the city’s affordability criteria - that rent must be no more than a third of the average household income for the city.
But how is it that these streets were allowed to turn into slums in the first place? And why has it taken decades to turn them into homes again?
It’s a story of inner city decline, neglect, paralysis - and finally rebirth.
“When we were children, you won’t believe when I’m talking about 50,00080,000 people coming out of them works... to get the buses and trains home. It was unbelievable. That was 50s and 60s,” Bill Booth, 77, of Ben Street, says.
The works where Bill was employed, dye company Clayton Aniline, is gone. So too are the other big employers of east Manchester’s 20th century industrial base: Bradford colliery, Gorton Works, Bayer Peacock, Johnson and Nephew, Manchester Steel, English Steel and Stuart Street power station.
With so many of the big employers kaput by the 90s, east Manchester became one of Britain’s most deprived areas. So the city’s leaders conceived a massive regeneration scheme to turn things around - centring on building sporting venues on post-industrial land.
Could this policy, intended to revive the area, have sent Pete and Bill’s community into a downward spiral?
This part of Clayton, which has been labelled the Ben Street Regeneration Area, is in the shadow of the velodrome, which would have been used if the 2000 Olympics had come to Manchester.
Locally it is believed that that bid, and the subsequent, successful, 2002 Commonwealth Games bid, left landlords thinking that their properties would be bought up by the council and demolished for associated development, and so they failed to seek new tenants when residents moved on or died.
The pub, the off-licence, the bank and the old Droylsden Co-op which
It sickens me that it was allowed to happen - it should never have been like this. Bank Street resident and shop owner Jackie Robinson
once served this grid of streets have all closed.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” Pete Clayfield, a 77-year-old novelist and publisher, tells the Manchester Evening News. “You’d be walking down the street one day and you’d think ‘oh, that place is boarded up.’ And then the next week it’d be another, and another. Now there’s only a few of us left.”
Seven of the abandoned houses are privately owned. Six are owned by the council. The vast majority, 62, were owned by social landlord the Guinness Partnership, until they sold them to the council last year.
Despite owning so many of these properties, the Guinness Partnership has not provided an explanation for the cause and scale of the decline.
We put a page of questions to them, and they came back to us with two lines which confirmed what we already knew - that they’ve now ‘transferred’ the properties they owned to the council - while adding they were ‘pleased’ to see them being brought back into use. As for Manchester council, it says it could not undertake the wider refurbishment of the Ben Street area until it acquired the empty properties, which was finally made possible in 2015 following funding approval by the council’s executive.
By that time, locals had been living alongside the voided properties for nearly two decades.
Some of the terraces are so rundown that nature has claimed them - trees sprout from lintels, feral cats have taken shelter, and mice multiply in the gloom.
The turnaround has come about as wider market conditions have changed. Manchester’s population has grown - leaping 28 per cent between 2001 and 2011.
House prices are up 32.5pc in the last five years, according to Land Registry data - and younger workers want to live close to town, and are increasingly priced out of the suburbs and the city centre.
With homelessness and the housing crisis topping headlines, having rows of empty terraces cannot be justified.
Against that background, the council has paid £15,000 each for them, investing another £61,000 in doing them up. The total cost of the regeneration scheme will be £15.6m.
Contractor Wates is refurbishing 62 of these terraces and another five will be refurbished by One Manchester, while the council says it is in contact with the owners of five others to ‘ensure their reuse,’ while trying to track down the owners of two others.
It’s a far cry from 2001, when it was feared this part of Clayton would be demolished. Residents believed the scale of the deterioration would have forced them to sell up on the cheap under a compulsory purchase order (CPO). It wasn’t a fear without justification, as other terrace streets in Clayton have decayed so badly they’ve been levelled and rebuilt.
So, the people of Ben Street, Heather Street, Midlothian Street and Bank Street joined forces, forming BESSARA, Ben Street and Surrounding Area Residents Association, to try to pressure the authorities to put regeneration money into saving the neighbourhood.
“I thought, there’s no point moaning unless you get involved, and I became the chairman [of the residents association],” Bill Booth says. “I went to Parliament with two prime ministers.”
In 2001, the council gave BESSARA and other locals four options to vote on. One was to refurbish the area, one was to partly refurbish and partly demolish, another was to totally demolish, which would have involved a CPO. The fourth was to ‘do nothing,’ Jackie Robinson recalls.
“A CPO would have left us in negative equity,” Jackie adds. “I still had £15k to pay off on the mortgage and I was only being offered £3-5k. I was a single mum with two kids, I couldn’t rent a house in a new place and have that debt.”
Jackie has lived on Bank Street for 28 years, in a home she bought for £35,000. She runs the corner shop. It’s one of the few amenities that has maintained the sense of a normal, functioning area. She explains that residents believed there wasn’t really any money for refurbishment - and that any other vote but ‘do nothing’ would be a back door to demolition. So they voted to ‘do nothing’ - in the hope circumstances would change, and money would eventually emerge for refurbishment.
‘Do nothing’ was taken literally. No money emerged. The area fell into further decline.
In 2006, the council drew up a plan to regenerate the area. But then came the financial crash, and then a change in government, and so access to the type of funding that would have been needed dried up.
Some residents, like Jackie Robinson, remain convinced they had stood in the way of a conspiracy to let the area go to seed, and then demolish it and replace it with flats attracting higher rate taxpayers.
With no evidence to confirm this, the council completely deny there was ever any plan to level the area and start again. They blame years of difficulties in obtaining regeneration funding - difficulties they have finally managed to overcome.
But Jackie cannot understand the glacial pace of change.
“It sickens me that it was allowed to happen. They’ve lost 20 years of council tax - it should never have been like this,” she says. “They wouldn’t let that happen in Didsbury.
“My girls have been brought up in a boarded-up area - worse than the slums of the 60s apart from we’ve got inside toilets. And it was deliberate.”
In spite of the decay, a trickle of new residents moved into the area before the work began.
“I like having no neighbours,” one local told the M.E.N. when we knocked on. “Me breakfast is getting cold,” he added, when we tried to ask a second question.
Another local who likes it here is Jenny Sullivan, who moved here because of the waiting list for council housing. When shows are on at the Ethiad, she sits on her step and listens to the music. There’s Margie too, who goes around the streets sweeping and picking up litter. Others who’ve been drawn to the area are less civic-minded. The empty properties have been a magnet for addicts and thieves looking for copper. And Dale Cregan was rumoured to have hidden out here during the manhunt that followed his 2012 murder spree.
Alan Shaw, 57, of Ben Street, says: “After a while, you just get used to [the dereliction]. It becomes the background and the people become the foreground. It shouldn’t have taken 20 years [for something to be done] I’m glad that it’s finally started. [Ben Street] looks like something from World War Two!”
But not for long. As you read this, the roofs of properties are being repaired, and energy-efficient systems installed. New kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, heating, lighting, windows and electrics are being fitted, and fire and burglar alarms are being installed. Guttering is being fixed, and brickwork cleaned up.
“Acquiring long-term empties is a real opportunity for us to make a difference and although acquiring them and restoring them can be tricky and time consuming, these homes will provide high-quality family homes and make a big difference for the local community”, Coun Suzanne Richards, Manchester council’s executive member for housing and regeneration, told the M.E.N., adding that she understood the frustration about how long it has taken to get here.
“Renewing and improving our current housing stock is a key element of our housing strategy and we have done a lot of work in the past few years to drastically reduce the amount of empties and ensure they can be reused to meet demand. With brilliant facilities close by, the Ben Street area can be a great neighbourhood.”
Suddenly this area, close to town, on the tram network, and a stone’s throw from SportCity’s attractions, has potential again. “Wanna buy a house?” a man asked us, within a few minutes of arriving in the area.
While the empty houses are being brought up to a fine standard, the occupied houses will benefit from ‘facelift works,’ and improvements to communal areas, the council says.
But for owner-occupiers like Bill Booth, it’s inadequate compensation for having to live surrounded by dereliction for years. The promised ‘facelift’ won’t cover repairs to his roof - expensive work he delayed in the face of years of uncertainty about the neighbourhood’s future.
“These are our homes and we’re happy with our homes and we welcome the new innovation that’s coming in... with open heart,” Bill says.
“But we’ve lived here in all this mire and muck for all these years, and in that sense I’ve let my home deteriorate, because from one day to another you never knew if we were going to be living here or not. So I thought why waste hard-earned wages doing my property any more?”
While they feel shortchanged, one thing locals are agreed on is that it will be good to have their community back.
“We welcome the new people”, Bill adds.
“We only hope and pray that we get more and more decent neighbours into the area. For me, that’s top and bottom of it.”