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A plague on their houses
Feb 9th 2006 | LEEDS AND LIVERPOOL
From The Economist print edition
What to do with Victorian slums
“YOU have to use your imagination,†says Elizabeth Pascoe, who has lived in Kensington, an impoverished district a mile to the east of Liverpool's city centre, for the past ten years. “This area may look grim, but the harm is superficial.â€
To make Kensington truly appealing, something closer to hallucination would be required. The streetscape is relentless: rank upon rank of houses pressing on to the pavements, with narrow alleys behind. Weeds apart, scarcely any greenery is to be seen. Some streets are denuded of human life, too; in the worst ones, every window has been covered with a security grille or simply bricked up. Not surprisingly, the few local shops are ailing.
Liverpool's terraced streets are a legacy of its industrial past. Similar ones shocked George Orwell, who, in “The Road to Wigan Pierâ€, described tenements crowded with poor families and bugs. (He was surprised to find that some of them had stood for 50 or 60 years; they are now up to 120 years old.) Since Orwell's time, Liverpool has lost about half of its population, and more alluring accommodation has sprung up in the suburbs and the city centre. Why keep the old terraces?
Why indeed, says the government. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, a peculiar fief that covers housing, planning and local government, reckons terraced houses that cannot be cleaned up should be knocked down. It has allocated £1.2 billion to nine “pathfinder†schemes in areas where the property market is weak. In Liverpool, the plan is to demolish some 7,200 properties in the next few years, including the one belonging to Ms Pascoe.
To conservationists, and some local people, it is a horrifying prospect. Liverpool's Victorian terraced houses are not all pretty, they say, but they are a lot better than the high-rise blocks and lifeless housing estates that were inflicted on the city—and many others—in the mid-20th century. They could still make good family homes. Besides, the terraces are as much a part of Britain's history as the grand Georgian houses of London and Bath.
Much of this is hyperbole. Liverpool's terraces may be historically significant, but so is bubonic plague. Local estate agents reckon the conservationists' dream of Victorian streets thronged with respectable families is unlikely to come to pass. The lack of gardens dooms them, while the generosity of mortgage lenders means the suburbs are within reach of most buyers.
But something odd is happening in Liverpool's supposedly hopeless slums: prices are rising. Since the first quarter of 2003, the cost of the average property in England and Wales has risen by 22%. In Liverpool, prices are up by 59%, and terraced houses have soared by 101%. A two-bedroom house in an undesirable area, such as Kensington or Toxteth, can now fetch up to £70,000. A few years ago, such a property could hardly be given away.
The buyers who have driven up prices rarely have any intention of living in their properties, according to James Kersh, a Liverpool estate agent. Most are investors from London and Dublin who are looking for cheap properties to rent out. Their customers are mostly students and poor families in receipt of housing benefits.
This rush of private investment may yet stay the wrecking ball. Last year, a parliamentary committee that had been strongly in favour of demolition issued a more cautious report, saying that local authorities should be alert for signs of revival in the property market. Even if they are not, the cost of buying owners out has risen so much that cities will probably have to scale back their demolition plans.
If the market is recovering, why do so many properties stand empty? One clue is in the windows of condemned houses in Toxteth. Notices telling potential scavengers that all fixtures and fittings have been removed bear the stamp of public housing associations. They used to lodge tenants in the area, but have moved them out, partly because of the cost of bringing houses up to the standards now required of social housing. They, rather than private owners, are responsible for running down the neighbourhood. “It's a contrived decline,†says Griff Parry, a chartered surveyor.
For a sense of what might happen to cheap Victorian terraces if market forces were allowed to prevail, consider the Harehills district of Leeds. This is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Britain, with benefit and unemployment rates more than double the Leeds average, and crime rates to match. Its Victorian terraces are, if anything, worse than Liverpool's. Many are “back-to-backâ€, meaning that not even an alley divides them: what appears from the front to be one house is, in fact, two.
Yet Harehills buzzes with life and commerce. The private landlords who own most of the houses will rent to anyone—asylum-seekers, poor families on benefit and groups of single men. These days, much of the demand comes from eastern European workers, who cram into tiny rooms. Harehills does not just look like a Victorian slum. By providing a pool of manual labour close to the city centre, it also functions like one.
Walk the terraced streets of a northern city, Orwell wrote, and “you think that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations.†As Liverpool is proving, though, there are worse things than crowded slums. Rather than call down a plague on the houses, condemn the restricted property markets that prevent neighbourhoods from thriving.
Feb 9th 2006 | LEEDS AND LIVERPOOL
From The Economist print edition
What to do with Victorian slums
“YOU have to use your imagination,†says Elizabeth Pascoe, who has lived in Kensington, an impoverished district a mile to the east of Liverpool's city centre, for the past ten years. “This area may look grim, but the harm is superficial.â€
To make Kensington truly appealing, something closer to hallucination would be required. The streetscape is relentless: rank upon rank of houses pressing on to the pavements, with narrow alleys behind. Weeds apart, scarcely any greenery is to be seen. Some streets are denuded of human life, too; in the worst ones, every window has been covered with a security grille or simply bricked up. Not surprisingly, the few local shops are ailing.
Liverpool's terraced streets are a legacy of its industrial past. Similar ones shocked George Orwell, who, in “The Road to Wigan Pierâ€, described tenements crowded with poor families and bugs. (He was surprised to find that some of them had stood for 50 or 60 years; they are now up to 120 years old.) Since Orwell's time, Liverpool has lost about half of its population, and more alluring accommodation has sprung up in the suburbs and the city centre. Why keep the old terraces?
Why indeed, says the government. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, a peculiar fief that covers housing, planning and local government, reckons terraced houses that cannot be cleaned up should be knocked down. It has allocated £1.2 billion to nine “pathfinder†schemes in areas where the property market is weak. In Liverpool, the plan is to demolish some 7,200 properties in the next few years, including the one belonging to Ms Pascoe.
To conservationists, and some local people, it is a horrifying prospect. Liverpool's Victorian terraced houses are not all pretty, they say, but they are a lot better than the high-rise blocks and lifeless housing estates that were inflicted on the city—and many others—in the mid-20th century. They could still make good family homes. Besides, the terraces are as much a part of Britain's history as the grand Georgian houses of London and Bath.
Much of this is hyperbole. Liverpool's terraces may be historically significant, but so is bubonic plague. Local estate agents reckon the conservationists' dream of Victorian streets thronged with respectable families is unlikely to come to pass. The lack of gardens dooms them, while the generosity of mortgage lenders means the suburbs are within reach of most buyers.
But something odd is happening in Liverpool's supposedly hopeless slums: prices are rising. Since the first quarter of 2003, the cost of the average property in England and Wales has risen by 22%. In Liverpool, prices are up by 59%, and terraced houses have soared by 101%. A two-bedroom house in an undesirable area, such as Kensington or Toxteth, can now fetch up to £70,000. A few years ago, such a property could hardly be given away.
The buyers who have driven up prices rarely have any intention of living in their properties, according to James Kersh, a Liverpool estate agent. Most are investors from London and Dublin who are looking for cheap properties to rent out. Their customers are mostly students and poor families in receipt of housing benefits.
This rush of private investment may yet stay the wrecking ball. Last year, a parliamentary committee that had been strongly in favour of demolition issued a more cautious report, saying that local authorities should be alert for signs of revival in the property market. Even if they are not, the cost of buying owners out has risen so much that cities will probably have to scale back their demolition plans.
If the market is recovering, why do so many properties stand empty? One clue is in the windows of condemned houses in Toxteth. Notices telling potential scavengers that all fixtures and fittings have been removed bear the stamp of public housing associations. They used to lodge tenants in the area, but have moved them out, partly because of the cost of bringing houses up to the standards now required of social housing. They, rather than private owners, are responsible for running down the neighbourhood. “It's a contrived decline,†says Griff Parry, a chartered surveyor.
For a sense of what might happen to cheap Victorian terraces if market forces were allowed to prevail, consider the Harehills district of Leeds. This is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Britain, with benefit and unemployment rates more than double the Leeds average, and crime rates to match. Its Victorian terraces are, if anything, worse than Liverpool's. Many are “back-to-backâ€, meaning that not even an alley divides them: what appears from the front to be one house is, in fact, two.
Yet Harehills buzzes with life and commerce. The private landlords who own most of the houses will rent to anyone—asylum-seekers, poor families on benefit and groups of single men. These days, much of the demand comes from eastern European workers, who cram into tiny rooms. Harehills does not just look like a Victorian slum. By providing a pool of manual labour close to the city centre, it also functions like one.
Walk the terraced streets of a northern city, Orwell wrote, and “you think that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations.†As Liverpool is proving, though, there are worse things than crowded slums. Rather than call down a plague on the houses, condemn the restricted property markets that prevent neighbourhoods from thriving.