Take a look at History By Bus and see Nottingham a little differently

Click on the poster to enlarge and see it at its best.

More of my time is going to be taken up with my other blog: historybybus.blogspot.comhttp://historybybus.blogspot.com.

The blog tells its own story, so I won't repeat it here, other than to say that I have worked with local groups and Nottingham City Transport since 2014 promoting the 35 bus route as the city's 'History Bus' and a couple of weeks ago NCT published their version of my guide, for which I thank them wholeheartedly.

There are eleven 35 branded buses and all now carry this roundel on their sides to the back of the bus. Seeing it gives me a buzz.

Each of the eleven buses has different history panels on the lower and upper decks. Here is a copy of the one for Wollaton Vale and its link to Trowell.

Reproduced with thanks to Nottingham City Transport who own the copyright, designed and created the panel using my text.

I hope you'll go and have a look at my History By Bus blog. Over the coming months I am planning to walk the entire 35 History Bus route recording the different styles of council and charitable housing along its length with a view to creating a 'Nottingham 35 History Bus A–Z of council and charitable housing' and it will include parts of Beeston Fields, so watch this space.

Municipal Dreams must hear podcast about council housing

I am, at heart, a municipal socialist. I believe that local government is responsible, both historically and in terms of provision, for almost everything we like about public service. Centralising post-war governments since 1945 have been progressively weakening local government at every opportunity and council housing is a prime example of this fact.

A view of the now demolished Lenton flats from Church Square, which I knew well during the 35 years we lived in Lenton. In 2006, I received a £5,000 grant fro The Guardian, which I doubled to £10,000 with the help of local charities and Nottingham City Council. It is one the most enjoyable things I have ever done. I persuaded The Guardian to let me give the money away without paperwork in amounts up £500 to people living in Lenton Flats or involved in some way. Some of the projects started during the year I ran the project were still going when we left Lenton at the end of 2014. The five high-rise blocks were popular until the day the last one came down, because of their location. Nottingham City Council has replaced them with new council housing, including a scheme for flat residents who did not want to leave Lenton. It is a development the City Council can be proud of and is a great example of why council housing has a future. 

Council housing is a topic I have referred to on several occasions in the two years I have been doing this blog. Here is a link to a post about the history of Nottingham council housing.

The local historian in me ranks local authority housing above the NHS when it comes to the contribution it has made to public health and wellbeing, nor does the Labour Party 'own' these issues. Like it or not, it is a heritage it has to share with Liberals and progressive Conservatives. Once upon time the municipal ownership of transport and utilities was a shared vision, as was the provision of healthcare and housing for those who could not afford to buy their own home.

One of my favourite blogs is Municipal Dreams by the social historian John Boughton. His latest post links to a 50 minute interview he had on the Londonist radio station. For anyone interested in council/public housing this is really a 'must listen to' podcast. Whilst the focus is on council housing in London, John talks about council housing in a way which makes what he says relevant to listeners wherever they live in England.

If you would like to learn more about the history of council housing, you can buy the Historical Association booklet Local Authority Housing: Origins and development by Colin Pooley from Amazon. Before Susan and me retired in 2006 we published Local History Magazine and got hold of HA copies of the book when they decided to stop selling it. We've been selling the occasional copy on online ever since for £2.50 plus £2.80 p&p. It is a useful starting point for anyone who wants to learn more about council housing and its history.

Nottingham council housing gets its own history with the publication of Homes and Places

I bought Homes and Places from the Five Leaves Bookshop stall at the Angel Row Historyfest on Saturday. It is a history of Nottingham council housing.

By chance I have a photograph of Matt on the Five Leaves Bookshop stall selling me Homes and Places, along with Ten Poems about Nottingham, which has also just been published.

Now, where was I? Ah yes. I have just finished reading Homes and Places and happen to know Chris Matthews and Dan Lucas, who were closely involved in writing and publishing the book. It is such a work of reference, that I will have to create myself an index and chronology. 

The book contains a full-colour map from 1932 showing the extent of Nottingham's council housing at the time and next Tuesday, by chance, I am hoping to see the map when I visit the Special Collections Library at Kings Meadow with the WEA Beeston mapping class I am a member of. I did not expect to have Homes and Places with me.

I look forward to reading extracts on the Municipal Dreams blog/website (which posted a contribution in May 2014 by City Councillor Alex Ball about the city's first council housing and is my favourite website). 

Also congratulations to Chris on the book's layout. I love the white space and a gutter which didn't break whilst I read the book (a real failing with many books today!).

Homes and Places has seven chapters which chart the history of council housing in Nottingham, beginning with 'The Old Problem' and ending with 'To Build Again 2005–2015'. From what knowledge I have of council housing (I was a regional and national supported housing officer with a housing association for twenty years) and from my twenty-two years working as Reviews Editor for Local History Magazine, I know a good local history when I read one and, I promise you, this is good!

I have led a few walks around Lenton looking at public and charitable housing and on my old Parkviews blog, I document several of Chris Matthews's TravelRight walks around Aspley, Bilborough, the Broxtowe and Strelley estates (both in the city — not the Borough of Broxtowe). No person in Nottingham is better qualified than Chris to have written this history, and with Dan backing him, the result is an exceptional local history, for that is what it is — local history.

Homes and Places offers a great focus for further research and, perhaps, the creation of a local history group devoted to promoting the Nottingham's great garden city heritage (which I hope will cover the conurbation, as Beeston Fields, where I live, is very much in the Nottingham style in terms of layout and architecture).

Council housing needs its champions and in Chris and Dan Nottingham has two champions it can be proud of. You have to believe to write local history like Homes and Places.

In a couple of weeks I will read it again and see what sticks in my head when read a second time.

Truly wonderful stuff which swells the heart and puffs out the chest.

I plan to write a longer post about the book and council housing sometime in the next few weeks. Right now I simply want to draw attention to Homes and Places. At £9.99 from Five leaves Bookshop in the city centre, it is a bargain, worth its weight in gold. 

Five Leaves is the best bookshop we have in the conurbation and it deserves our support. To access the bookshop at 14A Long Row, opposite the City Centre Tourist Information Office, you need to walk down the narrow passage leading to the Coral betting shop (there is a sign pointing the way to Five Leaves, but smokers can block it from view). I will also do a post about Five Leave, so watch this space...

A FOOTNOTE.

From the back of our Lenton home on Devonshire Promenade, where we lived for thirty-five years, until we moved to Beeston last November, you could see the New Lenton high-rise flats. The photograph below is from 2008 and I have never used it before. It does not do Lenton's five high-rise tower blocks justice, for they were coloured pink by the setting sun, but you can glimpse every tower and I have to admit to being sad that four have been demolished, with the final tower (Newgate Court) about to go. I understand why. I believe they were a great achievement and were loved by many until their very end. Other high-rise flats were not so lucky and with good reason.

Susan grew up in a council house in Tipton, in the heart of the Black Country, and my parents lived in a council flat in Eastbourne until they died a few years ago. My aunt and uncle in Harlow, both Labour Party councillors, never bought their council house because they opposed the sale of council houses, so I am sure you can understand why I welcome Homes and Places with a passion, added to which we now lived in a former Beeston Fields council house.

Will Beeston councillors be the architects of their own demise?

Just over two weeks ago (25 February 2015) I posted a blog about the distribution and location of council tax exempt properties in Broxtowe Borough Council area (http://beestonweek.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/council-tax-exempt-student-properties.html). At the same time I posted a separate page of tables showing the properties street by street across the Borough (which you can still see in the column to the right of this text).

I said that I would return to the topic. I have already said that local councillors and the Council are in danger of 'sleepwalking' into a situation whereby they wake up one morning and find that they have lost the majority of Beeston's housing stock to student housing.

Having lived in Lenton for thirty-five years (1979–2014) and been actively involved in the local community I have, right now, a real sense of déjà vu. Already, a few local councillors have said to me 'There isn't a problem' or 'There is nothing we can do about it'. To be fair, some councillors recognise that there is a potential problem, but are unsure of how to address the problem.

As at February 2015, there are 519 council tax exempt properties with Beeston addresses and 'To let' signs are becoming permanent fixtures around the town, as witnessed by the four signs I photographed on Broadgate this morning.

For now I just want to say a quick word about houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). Only 55 of the 519 council tax exempt properties in Beeston are HMOs, which seems a very low number. There is a myth in the minds of local councillors, seemingly given substance by council officers, that for a house to be a HMO it has to have at least five unrelated occupants and cover at least three floors. Not so. Nottingham requires all properties with three or more unrelated occupants to be registered as HMOs and Broxtowe Borough Council could do the same. It is a topic I intend to write about in a future post. Just click on the following link to learn more about HMOs in Nottingham.

There are now numerous studies about the student housing market in and around Nottingham, including Beeston. Here is a link to a UNIPOL report from 2008 at: www.unipol.leeds.ac.uk/nottingham/IFS/accomodation_choices.asp.

The uncontrolled growth of student properties in Lenton spawned the Nottingham Action Group, better known to many as 'NAG'. It was much more vocal and single-minded than the Dunkirk and Lenton Partnership Forum, which was founded in 1996 by local individuals and groups to try and address local concerns about a wide range of issues, including the growth of students lets. I was one of the founders and the Forum's first Chair, later doing a second stint. Our 'softly softly' approach, trying to reason with Nottingham City Council and Nottingham University did not work and with the arrival of NAG, who took a far tougher line, the city council was slowly beaten into submission. NAG's strident approach was not one I was happy with, but they were, eventually, successful, but by then it was too late. Lenton was as good as lost. A few of us hung on in the hope that things could be turned around. In the end, Susan and I made the painful decision to leave Lenton and find a smaller house in Beeston. It took thirteen months and was a traumatic experience.

If Beeston's councillors and Broxtowe Borough Council continue to be complacent about the impact student housing is having they will be the architects of their own demise.

It probably won't be an issue in this year's Borough election, but in 2019, in the absence of action to address the problem, it will be an issue. It might though be an issue in the 2017 Nottinghamshire County Councl election.

You may wonder why the photograph of the Humber Road street sign? The answer is that 43% of the properties on the road are already council tax exempt. Other roads are running it close, as you can discover for yourself from my street by street list opposite.

Landlords and students like to cluster together and as they take over a street, so the families and older residents begin to sell up and move out, happy to sell to the next private landlord who wants a slice of the action.

My map starkly shows the streets in Beeston already lost or in the process of being taken over. The Beeston Fields Estate is prime territory for student housing. Many of the houses have large back gardens making it easy for houses to be extended and the number of rooms increased.

Students will impact on local shops and it is easy to imagine a '30 week economy' developing. For the best part of 20 weeks every year the houses stand empty and this change the nature of Beeston shops and shopping. Compared to what is happening to Beeston's housing stock right now, the tram only acts as a diversion.

I believe in 'balanced communities', made up of all kinds of folk. Too many councillors and the Borough Council mouth the phrase with little intent — they see it as something they have to say, but if old folk want to live in their own urban villages and the rich in gated communities, then so be it. If and when you adopt this attitude, it is easy to surrender streets to private landlords.

Again if you doubt me, walk up and down Beeston High Road looking in estate agents' windows and you will find plenty of properties for sale, described as a 'investment opportunity'.

For my part, I believe housing too important not to managed in the interests of local communities and I see no place for private landlords whatsoever. I am in favour of municipal housing, managed and controlled by local councils. The growth of housing associations can be linked with the demise of council housing across England and these 'not-for-profit' housing companies, often based many miles away, are a poor substitute.

I spent twenty-one years as a manager of charitable housing, first in the Midlands, then nationally. In truth, my work involved offering second-best solutions to very local problems, which local councils could have managed better had they not been stripped of their housing stocks and budgets by Thatcher and it is to Labour's shame they did nothing during their thirteen years in power to address the chronic housing shortage which has existed in England for decades.

Even when they had the opportunity to pour billions into housing after the 2008 crash (and saving jobs and empowering local authorities in the process), Brown and Darling chose to give the money to the banks instead.

What is happening in Beeston right now is part of the same mindset. The evidence is there for all to see.