More about the old man on the canal.
Last year I wrote an Endpiece about Fred Grove, the man in his late 70s upon whom Birmingham City Council has served a CPO. He owns and lives in an old canal cottage in a conservation area. There is no intention to demolish his house; but every property within the development area is covered by the indiscriminate CPO. They want a tabula rasa; Fred has to go. The public inquiry starts in February, so will be over when this column appears; it should be interesting. I’ve just been writing evidence for the opposition.One of the main planks in the Council’s case is the principle of comprehensive development. Now to me, as I imagine to anyone who lived through the 1960s period of city rebuilding, that phrase is pretty discredited. It evokes elitist planning, a blindness to the merits of mixed, complicated, organic neighbourhoods, and an uncaring attitude to the invisible network of community relationships which created them, and which were destroyed in the redevelopment. I find it extraordinary that it can be used in the 21st century as a positive aspiration, apparently without shame.Our suspicion that the principle of comprehensive development is essentially there for the convenience of the future developers was confirmed in a meeting which we had with the City Council and the regional development agency. In response to our critique of comprehensive development, the representative of the RDA said “People want a comprehensive approach”. “Which people?” I asked him. “The development fraternity” was his answer. It’s striking that in his frankness he didn’t realise he was giving anything away.Apart from Fred’s house, we are also objecting to the CPO on Rosa’s café and the Los Canarios restaurant. These are both long-established businesses, both unfortunately in the way of the new City Centre Park. Rosa’s is run by a family descended from Italian immigrants, now in its fourth generation. The Spanish restaurant has also been there as long as I can remember. They are both the kind of places – bars, cafes, restaurants - which the City Council explicitly states it wants facing the new park. Yet if they are demolished, it is likely they will go out of business. Instead of local businesses with their roots in local history, we are likely to get global corporations such as Pizza Hut and Starbucks.One of the themes of our evidence objecting to the CPO is social justice. People receive financial compensation when CPO’ed of course, at the current market value. But when a neglected, rundown inner city area is subsequently redeveloped with new apartments, workplaces and restaurants, that value goes up, maybe several times over. Yet the people who have invested many years - several generations in the case of Rosa’s - of their lives in the neighbourhood are forcibly excluded from enjoying the benefits of the new prosperity and environmental quality. These will instead be enjoyed by newcomers who buy in post-development. This is fundamentally unjust.A friend and ally from Friends of the Earth put it succinctly. When the area is unvalued and overlooked, as it has been for decades, local residents like Fred and local businesses like the café and restaurant are ignored by authority. They persist and manage as well as they can. When a new plan is made, big investment is prepared, and a new prosperity is on the horizon – then they get rejected.Stop press: The City Council has backed down over Fred’s house.