Ablack-and-yellow caterpillar struggles across the top of a hot stone wall and puckers its way down towards the shade. Seed heads tick in the sun. Hardening shadows pick out the fine architectural detail of the sandstone cottages. Across the valley, the landscape rises to a cow-cropped ridge, beyond which the view is shut by the gauzy shoulder of Pendle Hill. The heavens smiled when they made east Lancashire. It was up there, on Pendle Hill in 1652, that George Fox is supposed to have had the vision of God that inspired Quakerism. What inflamed his passion was hypocrisy — the gulf between what Christians professed to believe, and the way they behaved in practice.
Not much changes. It is not in the name of God but in that of John Prescott that the valley now lies in the way of a policy juggernaut spilling fine words but fixed on destruction.
The fine words are about "sustainable communities". It is a phrase that even its authors are hard pressed to define, though it seems to involve house-price inflation and access to jobs, schools, shops and "leisure facilities". Where these are lacking, so the theory goes, the community needs to be "regenerated" or "renewed" — words that, in the simple minds of ordinary folk not schooled in the language of government, are commonly taken to mean restored or repaired. The reality could not be more different.
To sustain such a community, says the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), you must first knock its houses down and disperse the people. Not only here in Nelson, but in towns and cities right across the Midlands and the north. Houses by the thousand — 1,700 in Salford, 2,000 in Newcastle and Gateshead, 2,700 on Merseyside, 1,600 in South Yorkshire, 790 here in east Lancashire — are being lined up for the bulldozers in an agonising, slow-motion replay of the community-wrecking slum clearances of the 1960s. The more typically "northern" a community (terraced houses, corner shops), the more certainly it faces the wrecking ball. Between 1.5m and 2m houses in nine separate areas are caught in the crusaders' sights as targets for the unimprovably Orwellian process of "housing market restructuring".
Not far from Nelson, in the Lancashire town of Darwen, a builder who has just refurbished his house from roof to kitchen opens a letter from the borough council, signed by the "Director of Regeneration", and finds it has been declared unfit for human habitation. An eminent structural engineer invited by the residents condemns not the houses he sees but a borough council blind to justice and deaf to the voices of the people whose lives and houses it seems hellbent on wrecking.
In the Toxteth area of Liverpool, where every conversation in pub or cafe swells into a public meeting, the same questions are repeated over and again. How do you sustain a community by knocking its houses down? Where are people supposed to go? What about the old folk? Many families have lived in the same houses, generation upon generation, for decades. In Liverpool there is a sulphurous whiff of rebellion — bitter talk, alarming to some, of direct action. Talk, even, of ethnic cleansing, for the targets include many areas of mixed population. And there is grief. "If they kick me out from here," says a man in the Whitefield ward of Nelson, below the looming hulk of Pendle Hill, "I say maybe I live 20 years more but that's the last day of my life."
In the minds of residents there is duplicity — local authorities sheltering behind legal language in order to justify the wrongful condemnation of perfectly good and healthy houses. There is confusion — officials in Darwen, for example, are telling owners of condemned properties that they cannot discharge unfitness notices by carrying out the repairs specified in them (if they were "unfit" on the day of inspection, that's the end of it). Prescott's staff say exactly the opposite. And there is secrecy. Having reacted angrily to the discovery that I have visited the city without telling him, an official in Liverpool, to whom I have been referred by ODPM, declines to answer a single question about Toxteth (though the master plan for the area clearly indicates the clearance of entire streets).
Everywhere, trust and reasonableness are the first casualties. People feel they have been misled by cunningly worded letters that don't mean what they seem to say. In Nelson they are ready even to believe their local authority guilty of harassment — of orchestrating acts of vandalism and assault in order to drive them out of their homes. It shows the depths they have reached. "Nobody will ever understand," says Sylvia Wilson, secretary of the local conservation action group, "the streak of gut-wrenching fear that runs through your veins on reading a letter from the council saying your home is about to be taken away from you, or that it's unfit for habitation." Sylvia was born in Whitefield, went to school there, worked there, lives there. She knows every stone in every street; every family in every occupied house. People emerge as she passes, to hear the news or receive instruction (which meetings to attend; which forms to fill in). And she has some potent allies. English Heritage, the Ancient Monuments Society, the Victorian Society, the Council for British Archaeology, the Heritage Trust for the North West, Save Britain's Heritage and the Prince's Foundation have all lined up behind her. In October last year, the Prince of Wales himself came and offered his encouragement.
Planning offensives, like military campaigns or space probes, are given virile, go-get-'em titles. Thus it is that the nine areas targeted for "regeneration" share with Nasa's Mars mission the title of "Pathfinder", and that individual Pathfinders personalise themselves with names of their own. In Liverpool, for example, the streets of Toxteth stand at the mercy of "NewHeartlands". In east Lancashire the bulldozers will be directed by "Elevate" — a partnership of five local authorities with Lancashire county council and ODPM. Twice already a public inquiry has rejected the council's scorched-earth proposals, yet like hyenas driven from a carcass the men with clipboards still circle and wait.
The town of Nelson, it has to be said, is not typical — none of the other Pathfinder areas has attracted such high-profile defenders. It grew in the 19th century as a purpose-built, preplanned mill town, linked to the superhighway of Victorian industrial enterprise by the Leeds and Liverpool canal. Its mills and cottages were beautifully built of Lancashire sandstone; its streets cobbled in granite; its pavements made of York stone flags. "Humble" the dwellings might have been, but in quality they could bear comparison with palaces. Every block of stone is flawlessly cut, immaculately laid and mortared; every terrace subtly different from its neighbours. Like all the best old towns, it folds into its landscape, the grid of terraces like contours girdling the hill. The grain of the streets runs northwest to southeast, with natural and man-made landmarks — Pendle Hill and the spire of St Mary's church — commanding the views. It's so nearly the Hovis-and-brass-band cliché, so Last of the Summer Wine, you almost want to laugh.
Almost, but not quite. The grass beginning to push up between the cobbles in Portland Street might be thought attractive, but not so the nailed-up doors and windows. The ugly, corrugated metal shutters bear the signed confession of their perpetrators — "Pendle Borough Council" is stamped on every one — and a crimson legend daubed by hand: "Don't Knock Them". This, and other streets like it, are the muted victims of an "urban renewal" scheme introduced by the council four years ago. By "renewal", in the language of the day, was meant "clearance". A line was drawn around the houses to be demolished, wiping out a third of the old mill town in a single swipe of a felt-tip pen. Pendle borough council issued a compulsory purchase order and sent out letters inviting the owners of 146 properties to sell up to them. Many agreed. The Asian families who arrived in Nelson in the 1960s have a traditional respect for authority, and felt a duty to obey. Others were encouraged to sell by estate agents who advised them to make haste. The longer they stayed with properties emptying around them, the deeper would become the blight and the lower the "market value" by which the compensation would be set. What would be the value of a lone survivor, pointlessly holding out in a blighted, boarded-up street? Heroism always carries a cost. That's what makes it heroic.
Some, however, refused to budge. Jamila Khan, whose house is the only one still occupied in a terrace on Every Street, has learnt toughness through coping with the disabling effects of polio. Her roomy three-bedroom house, which belonged to her father and which she now shares with her mother, brother, sister-in-law, two nephews and a niece, displays in its careful decoration and smart new kitchen all the pride she feels in it. Her story is typical — not better or worse than others, but a perfect example of what a political buzz phrase — "housing market renewal", "sustainable community", "urban regeneration"— actually means when it slips off the policy document and hits the pavement.
The compulsory-purchase letter arrived nine months after the new kitchen. "I thought, what? Why couldn't they have told me this when I was having the plans done and everything? And that made me pretty sick. I did really get panicky because I'd just lost my father. To lose this home!" It was, and remains, unthinkable. She despairs of the lack of fight in some of her neighbours. "It's like the council said jump, and they would say, how high? And I was thinking, what the hell are they doing? You could call us illiterate people. It's like the council have said this, then it is an order. But I think I have learnt, no, it is not an order. We have got a right to fight back." Instead of giving up her home, she tried to extend it into the council-owned empty property next door. The council turned down her offer, but at least she got further than the Heritage Trust for the North West, which offered to buy and restore a block of 50 houses but failed even to get a reply.
