Eastsiders. Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group, 2002.
Thursday, July 26th, 2007This is a slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek piece I co-wrote in 2002, to coincide with the publication by Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group of Sustainable Eastside, to which I contributed.
Eastsiders.
Ultimately, the only purpose of plans, standards and policies is to enable people to live a certain quality of life. That lived quality is the measure of how good the policies are. Our document Sustainable Eastside contains a lot of recommended standards and policies. But instead of repeating them, we have chosen to illustrate what kind of life they might enable for an ordinary family living and working in Eastside ten years from now – let’s call them Eastsiders.
April 12th 2012 starts sunny, and Jessica is first up, at 6.30. She pulls on her track suit, and is down the back garden and through the allotments to the river. She runs, skirting around the balancing pool, looking out for the kingfishers that live there, and then jogs along the riverside path towards the Custard Factory. The willow trees along the Rea are beginning to come into fresh green leaf.
While she is out, her mother and stepfather, June and Eric, get going. The electricity generated by yesterday’s sunshine and stored in the batteries in the basement is warming up the house. June cooks eggs from yesterday’s Digbeth Farmer’s Market, while Eric goes to buy bread and the newspapers from the corner shop. Returning, he encourages his son Wayne out of bed.
Jessica runs in through the back door, showers quickly in the ground floor shower room, and almost before the water is in the greywater recycling tank, joins the others at breakfast in the conservatory. The family moved to this new low-energy three-storey house in a development off Curzon Street five years ago, when June got a new job as design engineer in Bordesley Electronics in Adderley Street. Tired of commuting from Bartley Green, they decided to sell their car and move into the city. Eric was already working for a printer’s in Sandy Lane, so it made sense for them to take advantage of June’s relocation allowance and move into Eastside. With the new locally-built trams, and all the facilities they needed within a few minutes walk, they could borrow a car from the Economy Car scheme on the few occasions when they needed to.
On her fifteen minute walk to work, June has to call into the office of the Community Development Trust to pick up the key to the street’s guest suite. Her mother is coming from Sheffield to stay for a few days, so they are renting the suite for her. Mother is a wheelchair user, and the guest suite, like all the other new buildings and public spaces in the district, is totally accessible. The streets are busy at this early hour, with people coming and going. Not many cars, because of the local traffic restrictions. Four thousand people have moved into Digbeth and Deritend in the last few years, families as well as young single and retired people. Some industry has given way to residential development, but much remains. In Allcock Street, June passes the plant which recycles bits of end-of-life vehicles. It’s basically scrap, but they have a comical King Kong figure in front made from recycled metal, and the workers have their lunch hour in a wonderful garden on top of the adjacent disused railway viaduct.
June’s company really took off when it won the contract for all the energy controls in the new Library on Curzon Street, thanks to the local purchasing policy in the City Council’s contracts. June is now working on a new heat exchange device which can use the cooling capacity from water in canals and rivers. Her boss, who lives in a topfloor flat in Typhoo Wharf, is currently Chair of the Digbeth Business Forum, which has been very successful in reducing energy consumption and pollution from local businesses.
Eric reminds Wayne to bring in the red, green and white boxes, and the empty compost bin, from the street, and then they get their bikes out from the garden store. Wayne is renting a bike from the CDT bike pool, until he has saved up half the cost of a new bike for his birthday. He takes his clarinet, because he is going straight from school to a rehearsal of the local Youth Band at Digbeth Civic Hall. They follow the River Rea cycle route, cross into the Irish Quarter by the new Kennedy Square, and ride up Bradford Street to Wayne’s school. It’s a broad, tree-lined street, lined by apartments and offices, and now quite a fashionable place to live.
After dropping Wayne off at St Anne’s School, Eric crosses the Middleway by the cycle underpass, and reaches Camp Hill Printing. He has got a 9 oclock meeting with the rep from the paper recycling business in Lawley Middleway that they get a lot of their paper from. After that, he has got some work to do on the catalogue for next month’s open air sculpture show in the canalside arts centre at Warwick Bar.
Jessica, by contrast, is taking it easy. She doesn’t have any classes at South Birmingham College until noon, so she decides to walk through the park, and then through Masshouse, to Selfridges. Birds are singing in the trees as she strolls up Curzon Street past the Job Centre, the gymnasium, and the block of flats with the electric car charging point. In the park, overlooked by the zero-emissions and district-heated office buildings, she sees some friends playing tennis, which reminds her that she hasn’t voted yet on the Eastside Youth Council sports budget. She gets the display up on her mobile phone, and votes in favour of the new volleyball equipment and the cycle maintenance tools. Then she emails her friend Alex, who is in the Rockface in AB Row, to remind her to meet in the Black Redstart Youth Cafe in Latif Square that evening, before she goes to work behind the bar at the Spotted Dog.
Coming out of the park by the community orchard, she waves to old Mrs Demetrios who is getting a lift on the electric home delivery waggon, which reminds her that she said she would do some shopping. She uses the local shops as she enjoys seeing people she knows, and she can use her loyalty card to build up some credits. The shops are a quirky mix, helped by the low local-residency business rates. As well as the traditional grocery in Fazeley Street, there is Sarah’s home-made cake and pie shop, Sima’s delicatessen, and Mr Singh’s hardware shop, which seems to sell everything along with lots of free advice. There is also a local Swap Shop containing the bizarre along with the mundane, and retired Mr Carter who sells jewellery and clocks out of his kitchen made from old machine parts from the surrounding factories.
After lunch at the Camp Hill Diner, Eric takes a proof copy of the new catalogue along to the Arts Centre in his bicycle pannier. Eric really likes the Arts Centre, colourfully covered in aerosol art, and open to anyone who simply wants to have a go at creating something. He is learning to do mosaics there, and has already covered an old table, but he really enjoys showing off his carpentry skills to the young people who are trying to make some benches for the community garden in order to earn some pocket money. On his way back he cycles past the gardens which are looking good. They are mainly run by Charlie Soames and the Patels, but a few kids are having a go at growing vegetables to sell, and some of the mums have made a willow house.
It’s evening, and after his rehearsal Wayne cycles to the Wharf community centre where the family plans to have dinner, stopping off with some friends on the way to take some boxes of aluminium they had collected to the scrapyard in exchange for a Mars bar each.
The Wharf Community Centre is a friendly place containing an inexpensive café bar and creche, information boards, meeting rooms and even a tiny laundrette. It had been a lot of fun converting the old pub and setting the place up two years ago. Eric had helped paint the murals, and the local kids had all enjoyed making nuisances of themselves. Now there are two paid staff, but people still give a hand when needed, and some of the retired people seem to live there as they are always doing something to the place. If you really want to find out what’s going on in the area, the Wharf is where you would come.
The café overlooks the canal and a number of families have decided to eat here tonight. Families take it in turns to cook for each other, but tonight is someone else’s turn, so June and Eric can relax and get waited on. June enjoys meeting her friends and catching up on the gossip. People are discussing the merits of the new pool cars which the Neighbourhood Council has decided to buy. With little through traffic, the streets are green and pleasant for walking and cycling. Even some of the elderly residents say they feel safe even at night, as there are always people walking around.
After dinner Wayne goes off to the canal to do some fishing with his friends, leaving his parents relaxing over coffee. The canal is busy with boats and people out enjoying the spring evening, and they manage to catch two fish. Unfortunately, they are too small to take home so they reluctantly put them back, and decide to build a den under the black poplars instead.
Jessica has decided to miss the family meal in favour of a snack at Manic Organic with some friends, mainly because it is loud and fashionable and has boys there with weird haircuts and trendy trainers. Afterwards they wander over to Latif Square, where a group of Afro-Caribbeans has set up an impromptu steel band. Alex and others are dancing but Jessica has to go to work. The sun has gone down, and the corner pubs are filling up.
Joe Holyoak and Tracey Fletcher, Eastside Sustainability Advisory Group, 2002.