Personal Archives

As I don’t cease to remind people, my first degree was in history, so I love a good archive. When I truly felt I’d “got there” as a proper historian was when I set off for a day at the National Archives in Kew to read some documents for my undergraduate dissertation on the postwar redevelopment of Bradford City Centre – Labor Omnia Vincit. In the manilla folder of papers I discovered a cracking internal memo from the Ministry of Town and Country Planning despairing of the City Engineer’s plans for a very tightly bounded inner-ring road (the bit Bradfordians ended up knowing as Hall Ings) which was completely contrary to Ministry guidance. I vividly recall sitting on a bench outside on a cold winter morning, eating my lunch, watching the planes fly into Heathrow, and feeling a bit miserable.

My PhD also took a bit of a historical approach – analysing the New Life for Scotland Partnerships which existed from 1989 – 1999. Doing this I bumped into some more informal archiving. One of my case study neighbourhoods was Ferguslie Park. The nieghbourhood had also been subject to one of the UK’s earliest regeneration initiatives, the Community Development Project. Ferguslie CDP ran from 1972-1977. Like all good policy in the white-heat of the technological revolution, each CDP was twinned with a nearby University. In Ferguslie Park’s case, this was the University of Glasgow, where I did my PhD, and looking around the Adam Smith Library there one day, I happened upon a just-about-complete-set of reports on the CDP that proved invaluable for my thesis and to understand the timing of urban change in the neighbourhood. I say just-about-complete, I later found a report Whatever Happened to Council Housing? produced by the Ferguslie Park CDP team for the national CDP which included the cracking line describing the 1930s slum clearance tenements in places like Ferguslie Park as "cuts housing, neglected before it was even built". 

The other joyous archive I’ve used is those of local history libraries (many now closing due to funding cuts). The local history librarian at Bradford Central Library grew quite fond of me popping up to the seventh floor two-or-three times a week during the summer in 2003 and requesting the books of minutes of the meetings of Bradford County Borough Corporation. I ended up going through every volume from 1945-1965. Over the years they had also collected fantastic boxes of newspaper cuttings about developments in the city centre; and of course had all the local papers archived on microfiche. My visits made a welcome change to the people researching family history.

In my PhD I was lucky that the regeneration partnerships in my two case study neighbourhoods had funded community history projects. The local libraries in Ferguslie Park, Paisley Central Library, and Wester Hailes library, thus had kept great records from official documents and community projects that told me a lot about what had happened.

Being someone who studies urban policy, policy and urban planning documents are a key source of research material. Also, universities that teach these subjects tend to gain a load of such material in their libraries. The trouble is, understandably, librarians need to move on stock that is no longer useful, or is taking up space that could otherwise be used, so books and reports are cleared out. It is for this reason that I ended up saving a full set of the annual reports of the Scottish new town development corporations from Heriot-Watt University library when I was a Lecturer there. These are now in the safe-keeping of a colleague (it was a bit too much for me to move them on when I left for Stirling).

The other archival material you end up with as an academic is your colleagues’ materials. This blog post is inspired by a colleague Dr Melanie Lovatt, who told me a very moving story about some books she inherited after her PhD research. With demographics being the way they are, and Scottish universities running enhanced severance packages, my bookshelves have swelled with books from retired colleagues. Some of these are third-hand as well.

But you also end up inheriting more ephemeral archival material. One of the best stories here is the J.R. James Archive, run by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. As I understand the story, my colleague Dr Alasdair Rae moved into a new office at Sheffield, and there were some boxes of slides and other stuff from a former incumbent – Professor J.R. James. Realising these were an amazing archive of postwar British town planning, he managed to get money for two students to spend a summer digitising the slides, and then working out what they were and putting it all on Flickr for anyone to access. You truly can spend hours on the archive website.

I now have my own little archive. A colleague recently retired from Heriot-Watt. Before she joined the University in the 1990s she had worked as a planning consultant at Pieda. Knowing my interest in archives, history and regeneration, she saved a box of random documents for me. It’s an absolute treasure trove of random documents going back to the 1980s, and I thought I’d share some highlights.

One bit of it, is a box of stuff on Glasgow East Area Renewal (GEAR). GEAR matters a lot in Scotland. The proposed new new town of Stonehouse was cancelled by the Scottish Office to fund GEAR instead in the late 1970s, and it was the first Scottish attempt to use partnership working, as envisaged in the 1977 Inner Areas Act, to try and revive a derelict and deindustrialised inner-city area. This giant map shows the extent to GEAR:

As I understand as well, one of the other interesting things about GEAR was the final evaluation of it was never publicly published. It was not exactly glowing, but still GEAR ended up being the model for how to “go” urban regeneration for about the next 20 years. And, voila, I have a copy of a draft of the evaluation executive summary:

The same box also contains documents from the Scottish Development Agency and Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothians on The Leith Improvement Project – the 1980s project to regenerate Leith. Thanks to that, I’m typing this from the converted warehouse we now live in. By the time it was converted in the early 2000s, that regeneration project had been so successful, that no subsidy was needed for the developer to take on the risk of the redevelopment.

As I’ve already mentioned, my PhD was on two New Life for Urban Scotland partnerships and I now have my very own copies of their original strategies and a whole host of other documents:

I also have a whole host of other documents from the two other partnerships in Whitfield and Castlemilk, along with a load of stuff from the slightly later Priority Partnership Areas including some stuff on Motherwell and Pilton.

Finally, the other interesting tit-bit is this typed document – it’s undated and has been marked in red with some corrections.

It is a report on possible developer contributions to build a light-rail or metro system in Edinburgh – the Edinburgh Trams! Now, I didn’t realise they’d had such a lengthy history, but when I posted this on Twitter last year someone got back to me with a scan of a pamphlet from Lothian Regional Council from the early 1990s, describing a rapid transit scheme that would be similar to what has been built. The line went from Wester Hailes (rather than the airport) down the The Gyle and into the city centre; a branch went off to Leith and Granton; another branch went off into a tunnel under the Old Town, to remerge and run a route roughly out to where the Royal Infirmary is now. I can only presume it was proposed under the 1994 Lothian Structure Plan – I’d welcome any further knowledge.

This report just details possible development locations along the western route estimating how much planning gain they might be able to get out of developers attracted to these sites that were soon to be serviced by a brand-new tram. He report glumly concludes that only £5-£10 million could be expected. That would be around £7-£14 million in 2010 when the tram did eventually get started on construction. Edinburgh Council did end up using developer contributions to help pay for the tram. I can’t find an exact figure, although £45 million is discussed in some reports as being money CEC put towards the project from “developer contributions and capital receipts”. If anyone knows of a precise figure, it would be interesting to know if Pieda’s estimates were correct, whenever that report was written.

I don’t really know what I’ll do with this box. It’s currently just sat in our bedroom, as it’s difficult for me to get it to Stirling. But, as my followers on Twitter know, I’ve a soft-spot for Milton Keynes as I really think it is one of the greatest successes of town planning ever. And, at the end of the week the city turned 50, and inspired by Melanie, I just thought it would be nice to blog about these odd little personal archives one ends up with. 

This is the hyperlinked text of a talk I gave at the annual Built Environment Forum for Scotland Conference in Edinburgh on 9 March. 

And the excellent Graham Ogilvie drew this as I was speaking: 

We put 'class' front & centre #HeritageDiversity @urbaneprofessor pic.twitter.com/Mf9Z5nCPyy

— BEFS (@TheBEFS) March 10, 2016

In the first draft of this talk I aimed to be provocative but conciliatory. However, in the end this version is just provocative; in fact I would go as far to say it is combative and it’s a good job I have to run off and catch the train to Stirling as soon as I finished otherwise I’d probably need bullet-proof armour to get out the room. What I am going to suggest is that the main trouble with heritage protection is that it is an example of middle class self-interest. People do not protect heritage for some transcendent, higher reason, but because it is in their own class interest.

In my research with Professor Hastings at the University of Glasgow we demonstrated that the middle classes are particularly good at getting resources from public services because they take advantage of four different mechanisms. Firstly, they join groups that policy-makers listen to, often because they have statutory duties; the classic example being the Community Council. Secondly, they are just much more likely to engage in policy-making on an individual and group basis. What is more, when they do engage they are more likely to get what they want which is a further incentive to engage. Thirdly, they have greater access to people with the necessary expertise, and also the ability to understand complex technical language, to have influence in policy-making. Finally, policy-makers just make policy to suit the middle classes; because they vote more, but also because they know the middle classes are likely to complain if policy is not made to suit them and their demands.

You are now probably bristling and thinking “I’m not middle class!” or the more sociological question of “what does he mean by middle class?” There is a lot of evidence behind this talk that is available free to access; but also the greatest revelation of this research for me is quite how middle class I am, and then using these mechanisms to get what I want.

Let’s apply this model of middle class influence to heritage. On the first mechanism, heritage groups are archetypal of this type of activity. Many started off as small groups of the great-and-the-good who used their influence to protect heritage – such as civic amenity associations – and then have gradually become a formal part of development processes and people who expect to be listened to.

We just need to look at the most controversial development decisions recently to see evidence of the second mechanism. I could reel off a list of controversial planning applications in well-to-do neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, but this would be unfair to my fellow citizens of this city. But it’s rather telling that the controversy over the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats in 2014 was largely one of the lack of taste in demolishing people’s homes during the Commonwealth Games ceremony, not uproar that we have housed people so poorly that the only sensible thing to do is to demolish their homes after 40 years.

In terms of the third mechanism – I lived in a listed building. It is listed because it is a unique collection of early nineteenth century industrial buildings, with a restrained classical façade, with dressed stone and proportional fenestration to the road elevation. Do I need to say any more? Most people don’t even know what fenestration means – it sounds more like something you’d see your doctor about rather than windows. Further, far fewer people who know someone to contact to tell them what fenestration is so they can get listed building consent and planning permission to do something about their windows. As the story of the Tinker’s Heart movingly showed, you are in a system that actively excludes people who can’t “talk heritage”.

Now the fourth mechanism. “Ah” you’re probably thinking, “look at the Royal High School! The St James Centre! Caltongate! There is no way he can say development policies are suited the interests of middle-class people!” Yes I am. Because the evidence is fairly obvious. As Dr Madgin suggested, we value places based on judgements of taste that come from a specific cultural background. When we afford an untouched neighbourhood of working class council housing the same level of protection because of its social value as we afford Edinburgh’s New Town, then I’ll accept that policy is not made in the interests of the middle classes. But it seems we struggle to even have a reasoned discussion on this. The only suggestion is that we merely continue to expand existing protection systems, slowly allowing different kinds of heritage – industrial, working class, associated with a specific minority group – because we expand the definitional envelope of what should be protected very marginally. We need a discussion about whether we have the right envelope at all.

Why is this all class interested? At its most basic, itprotects house prices which are the largest asset for most people. But all this social capital – the links to people of influence; and cultural capital – the valorisation of certain aesthetics and the language used to describe them, puts middle class people in positions of power and influence. And they, you, we, are not going to give up that lightly.

So now I’ve revealed myself as the, self-described “envy-driven author trying to pass off as an intellectual” I’ll don my flak jacket and tin helmet and beat a hasty retreat. 

ABI n* – return of the ABI

I did my doctoral research on area-based initiatives, or ABIs. Even when I was doing the research the writing was on the wall for them – the focus of my research had been the former Scottish Executive Community Regeneration Fund administered through Single Outcome Agreements. This ceased to be just as I was going into the field following the first SNP victory in 2007, so it ended up being about the “ending” of meaningful regeneration for residents. Following the 2010 election and the coalition government it looked like any form of regeneration was off the cards under the excuse of “austerity”. I’ve co-edited a book – After Regeneration­ – that argues this very point. My research had turned to broader questions of inequality in our cities, particularly what the increasing focus on community engagement and involvement in service delivery might mean for inequalities in service delivery.

And then David Cameron goes and announces a new ABI on the Andrew Marr show. Thanks. I’m back in business; or am I? First of all, as many have pointed out, the amount of funding for this ABI is pitifully small. It’s the same as the former Community Regeneration Fund in Scotland spent in one year – and that was in 2006 when the money was worth more and in a country ten times smaller. But it looks like it’s just enough money to prompt a private-sector to “regenerate” some of the neighbourhoods concerned; to remove the risk of having to get rid of pesky tenants or asbestos. This is the continuation of the processes happening in numerous estates in London that do not deserve the title of “regeneration”. It is state-funded removal of low-income households from our cities.

Secondly – as any human geographer, economic geographer, planner or policy analyst worth their salt will point out, ABIs don’t work; or at least they’re very bad at doing what David Cameron thinks they are good at. In terms of the causes of neighbourhood deprivation, I can’t bang on about this enough. Saying deprived neighbourhoods cause deprivation is like calling a bucket you have filled with apples an apple tree. Deprived neighbourhoods exist because, either, we put all our social housing in one place (something Scotland is particularly good at doing and is repeating), or wider macro-economic forces mean that a neighbourhood is a risky investment proposition so property values and rents fall, so it becomes somewhere where households with a low income end up living. There is some evidence in some circumstances that “neighbourhood effects” exist – that is, living with lots of other people in poverty decreases your chances of escaping poverty. But that evidence is very scant, and as Tom Slater highlights, it is macro-economic processes, still, that cause the concentrations of deprivation in the first place.

So, ABIs don’t work because they misidentify the policy problem – they look to solve a problem in neighbourhoods that isn’t there. They also don’t work because, well we just know they don’t work. As this blog from the RSA highlights, the biggest ABI ever, the New Deal for Communities, achieved some change in some indicators, and some of this was caused by broader processes of gentrification in London. As a lot of evaluations of ABIs have shown, and was picked up in my own research, ABIs are very good at changing physical things in neighbourhoods – building new housing, refurbishing housing, building new schools, doctors surgeries, libraries etc. But these rarely cause long term change in the outcomes for the residents. That occurs through enhancing services in the neighbourhoods – more resources for schools; public health interventions; employability projects – and the gains from these often leak out of the neighbourhood and cease pretty shortly after the ABI has ended.

But, as has been recognised from the 1990s, politicians like ABIs because it makes it looks like they’re doing something about something. Also, communities often like ABIs and the physical renewal they produce because it makes them feel like something is being done about something. And, much as I criticise ABIs, I do agree with the broader premise of them that if you invest in deprived neighbourhoods they will get better. The trouble with ABIs is the “boot-strap” approach – that this is a one-time fix. It is not, and the investment needs to continue in perpetuity. I would welcome a return to a proper regeneration policy as England had until the Treasury Sub-National Review: prioritised neighbourhood spending delivered through local authorities, nested within city-wide economic policies, nested within regional policies that sought to encourage economic development and rebalance growth. If you slapped a layer of national planning on top of that it would have been grand. You also probably would’ve been called a Communist.

Cameron’s regeneration policy is not this. As a piece coming out in the journal I’m on the editorial team of, Local Government Studies, highlights, the ending of the Revenue Support Grant for local authorities in England is leading us in into terrifying and uncharted territory. Local authorities, or the wider city region authorities being created, will be entirely responsible for raising their own revenue, no matter how flimsy their tax base is. As Michael Lord Heseltine laughably suggested on BBC Radio 4’s PM last October when this was announced, the idea is that if a local authority like Sunderland wants the tax base of Westminster, then it just has to drop its taxes to attract in new business and households. If only urban policy was as simple as it is in Sim City.

Under the guise of localism, this government is locking the UK into a framework of the spatial distribution of economic growth last seen for a brief period in the UK between 1848 and 1870 – when the Corn Laws stopped artificially supporting the agricultural economy of the south and before central government grants to local government started. When central government expenditure does have a spatial impact it is the inverse of what might be considered progressive: the cuts to welfare benefits, as analysed by CRESR which massively effect the north of England, Scotland and Wales; the infrastructure expenditure as analysed by CRESC which massively benefits the south of England and London; the billions cut from the budgets of the most deprived local authorities, as analysed by research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. By 2020, I’d be interested to know if there was any country that did less fiscal work spatially redistributing the benefits of economic development than the UK.

So, David Cameron has launched an ABI. To say he’s launched a regeneration policy is an insult to the thousands of people who have created and implemented regeneration policies since 1968. Given the pitiful sums involved, I doubt we can even call it state-led gentrification. But in broader policy changes this government is creating a tidal wave that will lead to the UK being a massively spatially unequal country. Deprived neighbourhoods will be like baby turtles being tossed around on the massive outflows of capital from towns and regions. This expenditure will distract a shark from eating them for a few seconds; it definitely isn’t a life line.

* I’d give the title a number, but there’s been so many ABIs over the years I couldn’t possibly count them.  

Book reviews - Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities

Inspired by Paul Cairney, I thought I'd start making my book reviews more widely available. So first off this one, which I did for Town Planning Review.

Title	Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series
Editors	Stephen Zavestoski, Julian Agyeman
Publisher	Routledge, 2014
ISBN	1317930983, 9781317930983
Length	346 pages

I live in a slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Scotland – of the sort that typifies many of the case studies in this book (Doucet 2009). The main road to the city centre from the neighbourhood is currently being upgraded and there was a local campaign to get it redesigned in what this book, and readers based in North America, would call “complete streets” style – wide pavements, segregated cycle lanes and vastly reduced space for vehicular traffic, with speeds reduced to 20mph. The battle was lost, and non-segregated, advisory cycle lanes were installed which are now predominantly used a car-parking places for businesses on the road. Meanwhile, in the more affluent south of the city, an extensive segregated network of cycle paths is emerging. In the suburban south-west of the city, a non-affluent community I work with extensively have poor quality public realm and a streetscape designed in the 1960s which is hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.

This collection of essays edited by Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman illuminates these issues of equity and road infrastructure design in fascinating detail. The book focuses on the “complete streets” movement (living streets in the UK; standard road design in the Netherlands and Denmark) highlighting through various critical approaches that in societies with high levels of socio-economic inequality ‘when implemented incrementally, Complete Streets will inevitably benefit certain people in certain urban spaces and not others’ (p.7). The book is broken into three sections: processes, practices and possibilities.

The processes section essentially takes us through stories to tell us “where are we now?”, starting off with Peter Norton’s beguiling chapter on the role of the motor industry PR in the US in forming motor-vehicle oriented road design standards, a theme developed further by Aaron Golub. The chapters by Chronopolous and Lee then critically engage with the intersection of sustainability policies – such as complete streets design and congestion charging – and various policies that could be labelled “neoliberal”. Chronopolous, in particular highlights how congestion charging is a regressive tax. The section ends with Mehta using an evocative description of street life in India to describe what a complete street might be like if it was truly inclusive.

The sections on practices and possibilities were less clearly delineated in terms of content. They were mainly case-studies of various cities in the US and how they have implemented various Complete Streets policies, or related policies such as pavement/sidewalk food vending, or community stewardship schemes. Particular highlights in these last two sections were Langegger’s account of the racially-driven removal of Hispanic “lowriders” from the streets of Denver; and Vallianatos' account of the illegal street vendors making the sidewalks of Los Angeles their space.

However, in their introduction Zavestoski and Agyeman rhetorically suggest that ‘this volume initiates the kind of dialogue and future research that can help answer these questions’ – and the trouble, as they allude to in their conclusion, is that many of the chapters signally do not answer questions. Over many of the chapters the bogeyman of gentrification looms large – essentially (and the evidence presented in the volume is compelling in this regard) complete streets as an urban design practice in the USA goes hand-in-hand with gentrification and the displacement of poor People of Color by richer white hipsters on fixed-gear bikes.

I find this troubling, because it leaves the planner with a Hobson’s choice – design safe streets and create a tidal wave of gentrification; or leave things as a status-quo. As a researcher interested in delivering socially just urban renewal I find this troubling – do less affluent communities have to stay in neighbourhoods with poor quality public-realm that endangers their safety and their health just in case improving them leads to some displacement? Obviously, the answer is no; we can do things such as ensure levels of affordable rented housing remain high; but that the logic of their argument ends at this point does not seem to have been fully grappled by many of the authors.

The chapters that get nearest to this are Cadji and Hope Alkon in their chapter on North Oakland farmers market and Goodling and Herrington writing about the Portland Community Watershed Program. Both these chapters offer fascinating accounts of community organisers and workers wrestling with the challenges of trying to deliver environmental equity without exacerbating socio-economic injustice through their work. A frustratingly short chapter was that by Chapple – this highlights that in the US context Complete Streets policies are regressive because most lower-skilled, lower-paid workers have to drive to their suburban work locations. This is an argument and issue that could have been explored in much greater depth throughout the book.

A major weakness of the book was its parochial focus on the USA and this weakened the argument overall. An engagement with practice from northern European countries, particularly Denmark and the Netherlands could have offered real opportunities to learn how to deliver environmentally sustainable street design without exacerbating socio-economic injustices. Parallels could also have been made with UK practice which seems to be following the US trend.

This notwithstanding, I would recommend this book be read by anyone involved in urban design, transport planning and cycling advocacy – it raises thorny issues and questions that stick with you a long time. I wish traffic engineers would read it to realise their engineering solutions have social impacts. As a cycling advocate myself, it has made me rethink what my priorities are for the city in which I live as it expands its provision for active travel.

Doucet, B. (2009). "Living through gentrification: subjective experiences of local, non-gentrifying residents in Leith, Edinburgh." Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 24(3): 299-315.

Queer-ying gentrification

18 months ago my colleague Dr Kirsten Besemer blogged on here about a surprise finding from some work we had done for the EHRC in Scotland – that a disproportionate number of non-heterosexual people lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. We’ve since written this up as a journal article now published in Housing Theory and Society.

In writing up the paper we set the findings in the broader gentrification literature. As Kirsten wrote about back in 2012, this was because the narrative of LGBT households as gentrification pioneers is dominant. Growing up, one of the formative events in my emerging sexuality was watching the Channel 4 drama Queer as Folk. Aiden Gillen’s character Stuart typified this narrative – he lived in a swanky loft apartment in central Manchester, in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, paid for through his successful career, despite the homophobia he had experienced in his life. Similarly, in a lot of American scholarship on the creative class, LGBT households are synonymous with the creative class. If you’re a gay man, you’re rich and live in a loft apartment.

Reading through the literature on gentrification and LGBT residential location choice that I did for this paper, it was surprising how much this narrative has not been troubled – even though Loretta Lees in this article from 2000(£) argued that gentrification scholarship needed a much greater focus on issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual identity as well as class. Apologies if I did miss out on particular literature, but the stuff that came up in my literature search was predominantly accepting of the gay gentrification narrative.

There are two issues with this. Firstly, it does smack of a growing heteronormativity that has been particularly noticeable in the debates around equal marriage. Gay men are now just seen as men, in fact they’re almost seen as uber-men as they aren’t burdened with childcare, and just want to settle down with their husband in a very tastefully decorated house. This ignores the “little things” that Panti Bliss talks so evocatively about that frame how non-heterosexual people experience the world. Yes, we have seen the declining significance of homophobia in our society, but as a non-heterosexual you still find yourself censoring your behaviour; or feel that lump of fear in your throat when you reveal the gender of your partner to a relative stranger. To presume that non-straight households are always gentrification pioneers, or increasingly second-wave gentrifiers, is to ignore diversity within the non-straight population, and impose a heteronormativity upon non-heterosexual people. If data on sexual orientation at a neighbourhood level is available for other countries, I would strongly encourage others to repeat our analysis to see if this is a Scottish phenomenon, or a broader one.

The second issue is one of the policy implications of recognising that the lives of non-heterosexual people might be difficult and therefore they find themselves living in socially-rented housing in deprived neighbourhoods. As we stated in our original Hard to Reach report it is all too easy to presume Scotland’s deprived neighbourhoods are homogenous, white, heterosexual working class areas. We have shown they are not. Our finding might be a geographic fluke because the non-heterosexual population is so small, although tests of statistical significance show it is not. That this non-straight population living in deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland is comparatively older, does give credence to the description an older LGBT-identifying friend described, of lots of older non-straight people who had pretty difficult lives, living in social housing in the west of Scotland. If we accept this, then we need to consider whether services for non-heterosexual people need to move out of inner-city locations, or that mainstream services in deprived neighbourhoods need greater skills and training around helping a non-heterosexual population that might have multiple problems. 

Bulldoze Belgravia

I've rewritten my "Demolish Morningside" argument as "Bulldoze Belgravia" for the Conversation. The piece got edited down a lot as the Conversation like things to be 800 words long and readable. I'm not that fussed as the general argument got made.

However, one wee argument was lost and that this. In the section about Moving to Opportunity and housing vouchers versus subsidising bricks and mortar I originally made the point that devolution is providing an interesting experiment on this. In 2017 the right-to-buy is going to be ended for all social housing tenants in Scotland, meaning Scotland is very firmly saying we want the subsidy in housing to go into the homes themselves and their low rents, not directly to tenants. England, on the other hand, is sort of going the other way. Despite the benefits cap, it still seems that subsidy will be directed to tenants, especially with affordable rents in England being laughably not affordable to anyone. So essentially, we'll have an interesting natural experiment on our hands to test which system produces better outcomes for tenants, housing markets and the wider economy. 

It's not the only natural experiment like this that's emerging - the other interesting one I was reminded of at an event on Tuesday is the Curriculum For Excellence vs. Govian ideological bullshit in education policy.

That is unless Labour do win the 2015 election and reintroduce rent and rate rebates at as local authority, as seemingly is being suggested. Or we vote yes in September. 

And now I could get onto why policy evaluation and analysis is so difficult....

Why the Improvement Service is wrong on this one

This morning the Improvement Service, the organisation that is “Supporting Scottish Local Government and its partners to deliver better outcomes for communities” has a lot of coverage in Holyrood magazine for some research it has done looking at the “outcomes” in the most deprived 330 datazones in Scotland, the middle 330 datazones, and the least deprived 330 datazones, according to SIMD.

This has got me extremely riled and angry, but I am going to try and remain reasonably calm as I argue my case. The head of the Improvement Service, Colin Mair, is quoted as saying:

“The relationships examined represent neighbourhoods rather than individuals or households, which raises another significant observation: people born into a deprived neighbourhood in Scotland have a higher chance of being income deprived, of needing emergency hospitalisation, being a victim of crime, and achieving poorly in education. In this respect, the neighbourhood in which you live can have a substantial impact on your future experiences and outcomes.”

Now, essentially, this boils down to the Improvement Service proving that margarine causes people to get divorced. I cannot easily find the full report of the IS’s research to see if these points are addressed in it, but here’s the reasons why the reporting of this report, and seemingly its interpretation, are wrong.

Firstly, the SIMD is an index of measures of things like income deprivation, emergency hospitalisation, crime victimisation and educational attainment. If lots of people do badly in these indicators in a neighbourhood, then it will be low down in the index. That is what the index measures. Basically, all they are reporting is auto-correlation – that something is correlated to itself. If every single person in Scotland had the same outcomes, there would still be a “most deprived” and “least deprived” neighbourhoods in Scotland due to natural variation, it’s just the differences between them would be very slight and down to natural variation.

Secondly, Colin Mair speaks of people “born into” deprived neighbourhoods. The only longitudinal measure – i.e. a measure of the same thing over different points in time – that the SIMD includes is the datazone boundaries themselves. We can say nothing about the individuals within it. Between any two data points of the SIMD, the population of the neighbourhood might have completely changed. We can see this happening as the most deprived neighbourhoods slowly depopulate – by the 2013 SIMD they had about 14% of the population, as opposed to 15% if the population was randomly distributed – and the least deprived neighbourhoods increase in population. In the most recent SIMD the least deprived neighbourhood – Meggetland in Edinburgh – had a population 800 people too high. The Scottish Government know this and are thinking of redrawing the datazone boundaries, the trouble is if you do that the data is no longer comparable over time.

Thirdly, the SIMD is a relative measure of deprivation. This means two things that weaken this study. It cannot measure “affluence”; the indicators chosen mean that once you get into the top of the index it becomes pointless, as all the measures are focused on characteristics of deprivation. You cannot meaningfully say there is something different between a neighbourhood with one unemployed person and a neighbourhood with two unemployed people. Secondly, the datazone rankings move around a lot because neighbourhoods change. The most succinct way of summing this up is the knowledge of the residents of Ferguslie Park that there neighbourhood “became” the most deprived in Scotland not because it got any worse, but because places that were more deprived in Glasgow were demolished and the populations dispersed.

All we can say is that a third of all Scotland’s socially rented housing is in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland making up two-thirds of the housing in these neighbourhoods, and house prices are substantially lower. Subsequently it is housing allocations, spatial planning and housing markets that create deprived communities. Basically, we have historically put all our social housing in large estates; now it is people in greatest need who need social housing, so these neighbourhoods become concentrations of need and deprivation.

If people “born into” these neighbourhoods had worse outcomes, then we would be talking about neighbourhood effects existing – that is, an effect on life chances from living in a neighbourhood, that is over-and-above the effects of poverty, unemployment and other factors on the individual. And it’s fair to say that the evidence for the existence of neighbourhood effects in Scotland is mixed. A few years back Atkinson and Kintrea(£) identified very small effects on education and health, but nothing to justify the sort of language used by Colin Mair. More recently, van Ham and Manley (£) used actual longitudinal data from the Scottish Census, via the Scottish Longitudinal Survey, to look at whether neighbourhood had any impact on the chances of being employed on individuals. They found no evidence for a neighbourhood effect – the higher concentration of poor employment outcomes (i.e. being unemployed) was simply down to people having to access housing in these neighbourhoods.

From this though, I do not want to say that the neighbourhood does not matter at all. It just does not matter in the way the Improvement Service argue. Services should be targeted at deprived neighbourhoods, but not because if we “fix” these neighbourhoods we suddenly will solve the problems of inequality – we will not as the majority of people experiencing poverty do not live in the most deprived neighbourhoods. But you can make specific useful interventions: there is evidence that targeting employment initiatives at people living in deprived neighbourhoods gets you a bit more “bang for your buck”; the concentration of socially rented housing in these neighbourhoods means a third of all disabled people in Scotland live in these neighbourhoods, so you’d disproportionately help those people. Also, we do need to recognise because of the specific concentration of poverty and deprivation in these neighbourhoods they do need greater investment in basic services like environmental services (street cleaning etc.). The inverse care law is still in place.

What worries me is that the language used by the Improvement Service does two very bad things. Firstly, as I’ve argued here, it continues the pathologising of deprived neighbourhoods – blaming them for the problems that other people have lumped on them, without recognising the broader structural causes, especially the operation of housing allocations and markets. Secondly, it feeds into the deeply problematic “early intervention” agenda that has been the rage since the “cycles of poverty” literature of the 1960s, and as I highlighted last week was utterly demolished in the 1970s. Like the idea that there are “families with three generations of people who are workless” this idea that if the all-powerful bureaucrat sails into households and communities and tells them to pull up their socks and behave in a good, middle-class way, then they won’t be deprived keeps coming back again and again. To borrow a phrase used to described intergenerational worklessness myth, it’s like shooting zombies(£). But it’s a zombie I’ll keep shooting. As I argue here, yes we need a focus on place in Scottish social policy, but we cannot pretend this is going to solve wider structural problems in our whole society regarding wealth and income inequality, poor public services and entrenched spatial inequality as a result of historic planning decisions.

Finally, if we were serious about changing outcomes in neighbourhoods in Scotland then we would stop focusing on the bottom and focus at the top – demolish Morningside and Milngavie and turn them into mixed communities.

I’ve included a lot of links to paywalled academic papers in here – do get in touch if you want copies. 

And I’ve written this in a rage and quite quickly, so apologies for any egregious errors; as I say I could not easily access the Improvement Service’s actual report, so this is more of a reflection on the way it was interpreted by Holyrood Magazine.

Tackling poverty?

I’m just back from two days spent at the Poverty Alliance fifth Poverty Assembly. It’s far too long since I’ve been at an event like this and I really enjoyed it, although was a bit disappointed how attendance thinned out, especially among the sort of policymakers who could probably learn the most and make a difference.

I want to reflect for a moment on the plenary speeches today by Jackie Killeen, Scotland Director of the Big Lottery Fund and Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which I thought were very interesting. Jackie highlighted a programme the BLF have been running called Support and Connect which essentially funds projects to alleviate real hardship – foodbanks etc. She explained that she was very surprised they had ended up funding projects like this as it was not something they thought they would end up doing.

Julia Unwin also did something that is very unfashionable and highlighted the massive progress on tackling poverty between until 2010 (and particular from 1992). Particular achievements were the disconnection between older age and poverty. It had been taken for granted that as you grew older you would end up in extreme poverty. We got to the stage where we had almost eradicated that issue before 2010. We had also got to the stage where the connection between poverty and squalor had almost been added – yes people experienced poverty, but they did not also have to live in very poor quality housing. We had also moved on from talking about destitution to talking about relative poverty. We are now back to having to consider helping people with absolutely nothing. The powerful message of this bit of her speech was that we can make decisions to make a big difference to tackle poverty if there is a political will.

She went on to a similar point as Jackie was making – that post 2008 and with austerity, things have changed. We have demographic pressures on services and massive reductions in budgets. During the rest of the two days, I spent a lot of time in a session discussion whether area regeneration can make a difference in tackling poverty. Reflecting on the plenaries, I could not help but think we are at the same place when it comes to regeneration. From 1997 in particular, we were making big strides in renewing housing in deprived neighbourhoods, starting to target services and coproduce services in interesting ways in neighbourhoods (such as the developments after the New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal). For all their localist rhetoric, at Westminster policy is tumbling backwards as funding is diverted away from deprived local authorities and as the Communities and Local Government Select Committee said, they don’t even have a regeneration policy.

I’d like to say things are better in Scotland. We do have a regeneration strategy - Achieving a Sustainable Future. However, when a Scottish Government civil servant talked through this I was very troubled by the way the policy problem was framed and therefore the solutions. The contemporary focus on community empowerment in Scotland, although laudable, does easily slip into pathologising discourses, that blame communities for not being empowered enough, completely ignoring the massive inequalities when it comes to empowerment and capability, not to mention the states’ response.

A really interesting point on the civil servants slides was that they wanted to empower communities to “exploit opportunities in communities” based on their essays. I was fascinated by the lack of agency and choice of words. Exploit is a very strong word: capital exploits labour; colonialism exploited slaves; economic growth exploits the planet and its resources. Yet, without agency “exploit” becomes lovely – all communities have assets, we just have to put them to work. But we have to ask who is doing the exploiting? Can the community exploit their own assets and maintain the benefits of this? Are public services exploiting local communities to do things they can no longer afford to do (clean the streets, care for vulnerable children, alleviate poverty)? Are community assets being exploited to make a small cabal of developers a lot of money?

Quite practically, when I look at the delivery of services around me and listen to people in projects, it seems that local authorities in Scotland and other public services are retreating from good work they were doing because of the cuts, be that through the “Strathclydisation” of Police Scotland ending community policing in the Lothians as I used to experience it or through the litter that I wade through on the streets of my local neighbourhood, or the cuts that community projects are facing as local authorities protect core, statutory services.

But, just like with tackling poverty, we can make choices to make more money available for the state as a whole, and for deprived neighbourhoods. On the latter was a nice idea (which I’m sort of editing here) that came out of our group, which is having a much more strategic approach to public sector recruitment to make sure that it benefits deprived neighbourhoods the most. I think this would be a very exciting area for spatial strategy to go into, and there is some good practice I’ve read about already from the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. On the former, today started with a panel of MSPs. I’d recommend going back on the #PovertyAssembly twitter tag and look at some of the tweets from it. Basically, it did end up being rather a Patrick Harvie love-in. But much as almost everyone agreed with his wonderful blend of Green politics and radical economics, this really has not been turned into action. And I’m sorry, I cannot see it being turned into action anytime soon unless our politicians are braver and lead public debate more. We live in a very rich country. We have enough money to pay for a large, supportive state, and to ensure everyone, no matter where they live, has a dignified life. 

Demolish Morningside!

That was the controversial title of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe show I was involved in, the fantastic Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas organised by Beltane Public Engagement Network. Yes folks, after my most popular blog post ever on cycling and the Niceway Code (1244 hits so far...) we're back to me blogging about academia, which I know you all love...

So, what was the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas? Well, it was a range of academics speaking for an hour in the afternoon on a range of subjects to a paying audience. In our case, it was me, Professor Richard Williams of Edinburgh College of Art and the wonderful compère skills of stand-up Susan Morrison.

I've uploaded a sound recording of it to SoundCloud for you to listen to:



I've got some videos that have been given to me as well, including one where I explode with rage about the way Forth Ports have treated Leith and Edinburgh - I'm told this was quite the moment in the show!

Basically, the premise of my argument was one I've kind of rehearsed here - that we're more than happy to demolish deprived neighbourhoods and disrupt the lives of vulnerable working class people to delivering "mixed communities" but we'd never dream of doing the same to affluent neighbourhoods, like Morningside. Indeed, Edinburgh Council's accidental introduction of Moving to Opportunity when homeless people were housed in private-rented housing through a contract with a company, led to widespread opposition to the hoi polloi being moved into nice areas (often quite rightly, as the tenancies were not managed properly and there were many incidents of distressing anti-social behaviour).

Myself and Richard only spoke for about 15 minutes in total and then we moved onto discussion with the very informed audience. This was very interesting indeed it also allowed me to progress my argument a bit more - particularly introducing the complicated idea of "neighbourhood affects" and highlighting the complexity of understanding them in a Scottish context; and also my main argument that rather than demolishing neighbourhoods, maybe we should invest in them and deliver very good public services in them? That way we can move away from the situation where local authorities think that this is a good way to manage green space in a deprived neighbourhood:*

Two quick reflections on the experience. Firstly, the discussion ended up containing a lot of statistics and a lot of complex ideas. What was really impressive for me was the depth of this discussion. The audience members were very good at providing critical insights, particularly to the stats, highlighting for example, how Edinburgh's population stats are skewed because of the city's boundary and because people are increasingly living in West Lothian, Falkirk and Fife due to housing affordability issues.

Secondly, the audience response was quite amazing. We had an audience of 32, only 11 of whom were our friends and family (including my mum and my partner). Somebody came up to me at the end and suggested I should run for office. I declined politely as I think my role is best served in the academy. And, if I can do more things like this, then maybe I'll start to change how some people think. One of my mum's friends said to her afterwards that it was the best festival show he had seen that day, and the discussion and ideas that were being bounced around left him thinking for the rest of the day and distracted him from the concert he was seeing. 

So, in a little way, we were helping to create a bit of a Habermasian discourse. Of course, because we had the power imbued upon us as being "academics" it did not meet the conditions of the perfect public sphere. But the audience definitely didn't hold back from being engaged in the debate! And I can't tell you how nervous I was beforehand. I've heard that Immanuel Kant was never paid, but left a bucket at the exit to the lecture theatre for students' contributions. This experience felt very much like that! 

All in all, I'm very glad I did it.

* a bit of background here, this is what the City of Edinburgh Council have been doing in Wester Hailes, a neighbourhood I work closely with. They basically tarmaced over areas of grass and shrubbery they couldn't be bothered maintaining. The Council say this was due to "community demands", but from what I hear the community demanded the spaces be tidied up and they were offered the opportunity to get some tarmac. It gets me so angry. The evidence is that this will literally shorten the lives of the people living around these areas. In terms of partnership working, I think the Council should be expected to fund local primary care for the increase in prescriptions of anti-depressants that will result. Further, the grass and plants are already growing through the tarmac and the trees are dying because they don't get enough water. And not to mention the increased flood risk. And this, after Scottish Enterprise spent hundreds in the 1990s putting in the landscaping in the first place! Luckily, the community is equally as angry and in some other neighbourhoods in Wester Hailes these areas are becoming community gardens.

The public academic - some bits and pieces

Well I got back yesterday from my first "keynote" speech - talking about my Hard to Reach research on diversity in deprived neighbourhoods to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in Wales Equality Exchange conference. 

They asked me to do a two-page summary of my talk and you can download the English version here. For conference participants, an English and Welsh translation will be distributed (so I'm told). And I've also PDFed my PowerPoint for download.

Finally, next week I'm giving evidence to the Local Government and Regeneration Committee of the Scottish Parliament who are doing an inquiry in regeneration in Scotland. You can download my submission here. 

What's regeneration all about?

I find myself quoting my favourite quote about regeneration again so I thought I'd put it up here:


‘…community participation should not be seen as a pre-requisite for the delivery of decent services. People living either in poor or more affluent areas are entitled to both quality services and an acceptable living environment. We should not accept a situation where people living in more deprived communities have to go to countless meetings or engage in endless arguments with decision makers simply to receive a level of service that other people take for granted.’
(Scottish Social Inclusion Network Strategy Action Team, 1999: 23)

Labor omnia vincit

Wincit or vincit? Either way it's pronounced it's the motto of my home city of Bradford. A wonderfully evocative motto of Victorian values - work conquers all. It's also the title of my first self-published ebook.

The title of the blog is linked to the genesis of this book. I came into town planning and urban studies from a undergraduate degree in History. Way back when I'd wanted to be an architect, but couldn't do GCSE Art so couldn't then go onto apply to architecture courses. Doing my history degree I became very interested in urban history and modern history - particularly the agenda set by Peter Borsay's The English Urban Renaissance, Asa Brigg's classic Victorian Cities and post-war history. These interest coalesced into a dissertation where I researched the comprehensive redevelopment of Bradford City Centre in the 1950s and 1960s, which famously led Bill Bryson to describe Bradford thus:
"Once this was one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now. Scores of wonderful buildings were swept away to make room for wide new roads and angular office buildings with painted plywood insets beneath each window. Nearly everything in the city suffers from the well intentioned but misguided meddling by planners."

Broadway in the mid-1970s after pedestrianisation

(on the site of the buildings in question were very few Victorian buildings of note, bar the Swan Arcade, and the insets were marble, not plywood, but that's by-the-by).

Given I had the research written up and ready, it was recieved well at a seminar at the University of Bradford two years ago, and there is renewed interest in Bradford City Centre due to "Wastefield", the City Park (one of the best urban spaces I have ever seen, ever in the World ever), and the campaign to save the Odeon, I thought it was an opportune moment to publish it as a book. All yours for £3.60.

And to give you an idea what your £3.60 will give you, here's an exclusive excerpt of the postcript that I've written for it, almost ten years after I completed the original research:

Postscript: 10 Years Later, Wastefield

When this research was being completed the buildings around Forster Square and Broadway were being emptied ready for demolition. I could peer into the lobby of Forster House and see the dated frieze on the wall of what was once the pride of Bradford city centre. The other of the two large office blocks that flanked Wardley’s civic way to the Cathedral – Central House – was only occupied by Bradford Metropolitan District Council, a hangover from a deal with Hammersons in the mid-1960s to complete this building if the local authority agreed to be a tenant in perpetuity.

Bradford Metropolitan District Council and the Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward, had agreed a deal with the Australian shopping centre developer to build a new shopping centre, with a new road layout, on the site leased to Hammersons. Then 2007 and 2008 saw a run on the Northern Rock Bank and the seizure of global credit markets in the wake of Lehman Brothers Bank. Proposals for Westfield Bradford were rapidly shelved and Bradford has been left with a large hole – colloquially known as Wastefield.
In many respects this mirrors the story from 1945 to 1965. In the post war stop-go, Keynesian controlled economy, plans often came to fruition in the fevered heat of a boom which quickly had its steam taking out. Plans were halted or scaled back. The unregulated boom from 1993 to 2007 was an even more dramatic example of this. During this period Bradford’s broader economy has also weakened as the wool industry has now almost completely collapsed.

Bradford, like many former industrial towns and cities in the north of England, is now a rock-pool of unemployment, both unemployed labour and land. The long boom meant the tide of economic growth poured credit into the redevelopment of the City. Now it has receded back in the long period of economic slump, it seems impossible to imagine this neap tide will ever get high enough to lead to a rejuvenation of Bradford City Centre.

Returning to Bradford as a qualified town planner I can now also see how development trends since the late 1990s have also limited the chances of a rejuvenation of the City Centre. Wardley’s vision was for a tight-knit City Centre served by buses and car parks around his inner ring road. That inner ring road has now been largely removed. The inner ring road now is that planned by Wardley’s successor – the large dual carriageway circling the city centre from Great Horton Road and round to the Hamm Strasse. This has led to a development pattern driven by the car. The city centre has turned itself inside out, becoming a doughnut of developments with vast acres of tarmac given over to car parking. The Forster Square retail park is largely the retail centre; the office blocks between Leeds Road and Wakefield Road are the commercial centre; and the Cineworld complex is the arts and culture centre. All the parts of Wardley’s 1948 plan for the City Centre are there, just one mile outside the traditional centre in urban wastelands, disconnected from the traditional civic core.

As with the redevelopment in the 1950s this has been driven by market trends and the actions of planners. The office space in the Hammerson development was poor quality and investors and tenants, to be tempted to a marginal market like Bradford, needed modern office space with car parking. Bradford needed the jobs provided by major employers such as Santander and the Yorkshire Bank, so was seemingly willing to allow their offices to be built on the periphery of the City Centre. Similarly, the units in the Forster Square Retail Park are ideal for modern retailers, compared to the cramped, awkward, old shopping units in the core of the City Centre.

These planning and development decisions within Bradford have taken place within a context of a changing regional pattern of development. In the late 1960s retail development in Leeds struggled as much as that in Bradford – the Merrion Centre was one of Oliver Marriot’s “white elephants” that remained vacant for many years. With the redevelopment of the Victorian Arcades and the opening of Harvey Nichols in Leeds in 1996, led to step-change in the retail offer in the city. Increasingly Bradford, and the other smaller city and town centres in West Yorkshire just could not compete.

The draft Regional Spatial Strategy developed by Yorkshire Forward initially had Leeds marked as the regional centre for the greater West Yorkshire conurbation. After lobbying from Bradford it was included as a regional centre in the final plan. However, in reality, continuing planning decisions and the real estate investment market have relegated Bradford to a subsidiary shopping centre behind Leeds, exacerbated by the out-of-town shopping centres and large supermarkets. Does this mean Bradford city centre is doomed?

The story above is strangely quiet on one of the biggest changes in Bradford over the period – the impact of migration into the City. Labour shortages after the Second World War led mill-owners in Bradford to seek migrant labour firstly from Eastern Europe and then from newly created Pakistan from the late 1940s onwards. During the research the impact of this migration would appear from time-to-time in racist letters in the Telegraph & Argus or quaint articles about how the new settlers were, supposedly, settling happily into city life. One of Wardley’s last acts for the Public Works Committee before his early death was to listen to delegation from a group of local “Mosselmen” who wished to find land to build a temple. At the next meeting it was noted that land had been found for a mosque for the moslems (terminology was almost correct by then) at the junction of Westgate and Lumb Lane.

The impact of migration into Bradford has clearly had an impact on the development of the City. As with most new ethnic minorities in cities, the Pakistani migrant community clustered in Little and Great Horton and Manningham, moving into cheap Victorian terraced houses left vacant as the white working class, increasingly affluent in post war Britain, moved into the new, suburban houses that were planned in Wardley’s 1953 Development Plan in places like Heaton, Wrose, Bierley, Buttershaw and Eccleshill.

The riots in 1995 and 2001 were the shocking outcome of this spatial and cultural divide that had emerged in the City. A broader story that has come to dominate Bradford is an implicitly racist story that links this increasing ethnic and culture diversity to Bradford’s economic decline – a story used to drive politics of race hate. The third or fourth-generation migrants who are now very much Bradfordians are disparaged as living off benefits, being stupid and lazy, and a burden on the City. This ignores the amazing growth of entrepreneurship in the City, with companies associated with Bradford’s ethnic diversity being nationally and internationally renowned. As someone who’s left Bradford, I find my fellow white British people have usually been to the City for the National Media Museum; fellow Asian British people have usually been to the City to buy clothes from Bombay Stores, visit relatives, or get long-missed foods from shops.

The story of Bradford in the 1950s and 1960s told here is one of wily London property developers and a planner who was keen to see his vision realised. Bradford in 2013 can tell a different story in the development of City Park. When this was first announced it was mocked as being a “puddle”. By closing off Channing Way, the Bradford planners in the 2000s inadvertently did what the civil servants in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning wanted Wardley to do in the 1940s. The resulting civic square, owned by the people of Bradford through the Council which can be enjoyed by all of them for free is a real testimony to excellent planning and urban design. It is one of the best urban spaces in the UK.

This publicly owned and developed space and the ethnic diversity of the City come together in what could be a new vision for the City Centre. A centre of civic life that celebrates diversity through a range of shops and nurtures civic life and creative industries through free space or low rent property. Bradford will never be able to compete with Leeds. However, it can cut out a new niche for itself in the modern World.

So, get this, and more, and learn all about the unique history of a City that comprehensively redeveloped its city centre even though it had not been bombed - for £3.60.