Thursday 7 June 2012

London loves, part three

I was completely and unexpectedly captivated last night by the first in a new BBC2 series, ‘The Secret History Of Our Streets’

It presented some quite touching personal stories of the inevitable way that a community changed in the early 1960s when a new breed of idealistic town planners were inspired by the concept of rebuilding our capital city ‘as a machine’.  According to location and associated affluence (or lack of it), big changes to London's urban landscape were proposed.  Compulsory purchase orders were issued on many houses and entire streets of Victorian terraces declared as slums, leading to their demolition and the relocation of residents to modern estates and new towns.  For some this may have been a very good thing, but for others it clearly wasn’t.  Whatever your political views and opinions, or perhaps personal experiences of such situations, there is no doubt that such extensive measures had a massive impact on close-knit communities, where many families had lived and worked together for generations and then found themselves split up and moved into different areas. 

Archive footage showed young and no doubt ambition-driven representatives from the council being sent to inspect houses and report back on the state of them.  I can’t imagine how humiliating, imposing and surely intimidating that must have been for most residents – to have a judgement cast on the condition of your home by an officious stranger who didn’t live in the area, and for that judgement to have such a potentially irreversible effect on your future.

I expect that, for several families, the opportunity to move out of damp, cramped and insanitary homes into brand new apartments was very welcome, but it seems it wasn’t always the case. The kick in the teeth for some one-time residents of Reginald Road in Deptford, who were surprised when their homes were considered to be slums, is that fifty years later original papers have been unearthed in which the houses were noted as being perfectly fit for human habitation and that any remedial work could have been easily and cheaply done.   But, at the time, these reports and recommendations were ignored.  It was a poignant revelation and a reminder that, in the face of an authority that has already decided its intentions, the ordinary man in the street barely stands a chance.

My parents were born and brought up in East London and were children at the time of World War II, experiencing the trauma of being evacuated during the Blitz and then returning to streets damaged by bombs. I have difficulty relating to how life must have seemed for them - and particularly for my grandparents - with such destruction going on around, so close.  Perhaps, even if only to a very small degree, it was those thoughts that  resonated as I watched last night's programme, particularly the scenes in which the bulldozers turned family homes on Reginald Road into dusty piles of rubble (even when some occupants still refused to leave) - and I felt quite moved by it all.

Anyway, it was a very promising start to the series and I’ll be watching the remaining five episodes with great interest.


Well, it's just such a good song....

13 comments:

  1. Thanks for the heads-up C, i'll certainly being checking this one out on the i-player. I have an 83 year-old aunt who has lived on the same street in Bethnal Green all her life. The original terraced house where she spent her formative years was demolished for redevelopment in the 1960s and she was re-housed in a new block of flats just yards away, where she remains to this day. I'll be interested to find out if this programme rings any bells for her.

    Top tune by the way!

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    1. Thanks - it would be interesting to know how your aunt felt about it all at the time as well as now - was she happy/excited to move, or sad to see her old house demolished?
      Hope you catch it on i-player and enjoy the programme - I'm looking forward to the rest of the series too.

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  2. My mum was also a Deptford girl, although moved by the Blitz rather than the planners. I haven't even seen the programme yet (but will) but your post and the song almost reduced me to tears - and I'd almost forgotten Bobby Bland, so thanks for bringing him back to me....now its off to dig out the vinyl, slap Shoes on the turntable and dance to keep from crying !

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    1. Oh I certainly didn't want to make you feel sad - so sorry! But the programme does have plenty of humour in it as well as the poignant bits, full of real characters you just couldn't make up (or maybe YOU could!)
      Perhaps some of the archive shots of Deptford would show it still much as it was when your mum lived there too.
      Glad it gave you a reason to dig out some Bobby Bland, I do love that song and can just about manage NOT to think about Whitesnake when I hear it...!

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  3. This was was done before I think...in the 19th century. Slum clearing...road widening. Done with the same clumsiness too if I recall.

    There were similar efforts being carried out in Egypt and other cities under imperial influence. These instances are used by post-colonialists to show a tendency by Westerners to force their notions of "order" on the world...but these same Westerners were doing it to their own "natives."

    I hate this kinda thing...we have eminent domain...bad law easily abused to clear people out so a mall or an interchange can be built.

    Bobby Blue Bland. For years he was a mainstay..the main man..at Malaco Records here in town.

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    1. Thanks - and interesting points, e.f. An eternal problem I'm sure - what is ok and what isn't ok to do in the name of 'progress'? There were a lot of class issues in this particular example too, which I found quite jaw-dropping - the differences between the people who make the decisions and the people who are affected by the decisions. Sadly I don't suppose there are any easy answers...

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  4. Fantastic bit of telly, wasn't it? I'm very much looking forward to the next one about Camberwell, as me and hubby did a lot of our 'courting' in The Grove pub.

    I would have loved to know more about the 'glitch' that meant certain streets got pulled down while other identical ones were spared and are still standing (and going for a packet now.). What was the full back-story?

    Great how they managed to find a particularly sickening couple of speculative 'buyers' as counterpoint to the original inhabitants - those two were a producer's dream!

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    1. Ah, glad you saw it too, Kolley!
      Yes that was intriguing about the particular street that was saved - I saw somewhere that it *may* have been something to do with either the fact that there were some historic carvings on the facades when they were built for wealthy seafarers, which perhaps some forward thinking planner considered worth preserving, OR that it was because they were located on the side of Deptford that was closest to the affluent areas that they were also saving... Either way it does all seem a bit contrived.
      Re. that sickening couple of speculative buyers - oh yes they were like a parody weren't they? - all that talk about "steak dining rooms" etc. Hmmm!

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    2. PS - and I'll be looking out for the Grove pub in the Camberwell episode!

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    3. 'The Grove'! Haha ... I spent more than a few evenings in there myself in the eighties - I think I read recently it's a gastro-thing now isn't it?

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    4. You two should compare notes! I'll be watching out for the Grove with even more interest now. Assuming it was near the art school?

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  5. Sad to say I missed this programme - perhaps your 'review' has made it sound much more interesting than BBC publicity. My family were all from East London, but the story sounds v. familiar. One set of my grandparents were moved out of their quaint but slightly tumbledown little house in Forest Gate onto a newbuild complex of low-rise flats. To be honest, I think they liked it - nice bathrooms and kitchen etc - and for a while the sense of old society did hold sway for a couple of years. But pretty soon the older community died off and things began to unravel. My grandparents are no longer there, but if anyone is curious about how it turned out - look no further than Plan B's 'Ill Manors' film.... :-(

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    1. Thanks, A - must be a very familiar story for a lot of people I guess. Good when it works out on an individual basis - but the community thing is so sad, so galling - the programme goes into more detail about the knock-on effects and the shifting inhabitants - the unravelling, as you say. It seems so obvious when you look at it from our current perspective that that would happen, and yet was never taken into account at the time. I'll be checking out that Plan B film now, too.

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