BiRD’S WORDS
Last week I spoke at the Housing Technology conference, run by the magazine of that name. I was asked to go to the East Midlands Conference Centre at Nottingham University to give a short speech and accept an award, which I did.
Seemingly always on and off the train these days, I relished that the morning after the conference I could walk from the campus to the station in town. I walked along a canal, past parts of old industrial Nottingham now converted into bars and houses and offices for a new post-industrial world.
Like most conferences with awards ceremonies – though it was Housing Technology’s first – it was loud and self-celebratory. Blaring music and jocularity turned it into a version of the ultimate award ceremony, the Oscars, though with more serious ends: to award people who have created technical innovations around social housing.
Social housing remains one of the most pressing of all our contemporary concerns and will remain so for dozens of years to come. Our crisis of supply has taken decades to grow to the current fever pitch of need, and only a very full and deep investment programme will right the wrongs of undersupply.
But as with most concerns around social housing, the terrible outrage of Grenfell Tower hangs over us, even though the palls of black smoke have long since cleared. The monster of municipal neglect that grew out of a housing crisis in possibly the second-richest borough in the UK raises serious questions about local democracy; and how it can work in an area where there is so much wealthy housing while people in deep need live around the corner.
That alas, is the lot of the place of my birth, born as I was up the road a few minutes from where Grenfell killed so many people. Knowing the slum streets that were blown up to make way for Grenfell I can’t help but feel that Grenfell is more symbolic (yet real) of a deeper malaise that dogs local democracy.
Nottingham has always had a great pull for me because it was the first place I ever recognised as representing a different Britain to the one I grew up in. I grew up in a slummy London that did not have Nottingham’s big factories and the row after row of poorly made housing. It had different people who spoke with what we in the South took to be northern accents, only later to discover that they were in fact Midlanders.
There was a closeness among industrial workers and their families and the areas they
