Pathfinder – Owen Hatherley – Guardian
November 22nd, 2010
“Knocking stuff down does not increase supply, […] everything we knock down shrinks supply”
Prof Anne Power speaking to LB Camden
Pathfinder seems to have been in the news since the days of John Prescott and New Labour. Back in March this year, Karen Buck MP, a lady I respect, pointed out in a housing debate that. . .
. . . when the Pathfinder projects were starting they were dealing with the problem of excess supply and indeed many areas being blighted with huge numbers of homes that they could not rent or sell . . .
Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back March 4th, 2010 https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=86
I confess that I never did understand the true reason for it especially since it quickly resulted in groups of home owners banding together and taking their local council to court, and often winning, in order to avoid demolition.
At the height of the Pathfinder demolitions I can remember BBC news reports showing people saying that they were going to lose their homes with a compensation figure that would come nowhere near the cost of a new flat built to replace it.
This seemed at the time and seems now like what is called “social cleansing” in respect of estate “regeneration” in London but this was never explicit and it has taken Owen Hatherley, author of the recently published A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain to make clear the dreadful truth in an article from the Guardian last Friday.
Pathfinder was slum clearances without the socialism
[entitled A ruinous legacy in my edition of the paper – Ed.]
Owen Hatherly 19th November 2010
Poor areas have been gutted for housing aimed at ‘aspirational’ incomers. It’s right to scrap this botched gentrification scheme
Sometimes, a massacre might claim the lives of a handful of the guilty along with the countless innocents. That’s surely the case with one, if only one, coalition scalpel – the demise of the Pathfinder schemes.
[article continues, click the link below for the rest]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/19/slum-clearance-housing-failed
As with the London estate clearances, (need I list them? Look to the r/h column of this blog to find them) Pathfinder would appear to have been an attempt to “prettify” / gentrify areas in decline, at the expense of the people who live(d) there.
That this was initiated by a Government with the word Labour in its title, is more evidence, if any were needed, of their contempt for the core vote and abandonment of the principles of the party that was hijacked by Tony Blair in pursuit of his own career.
This from Building Design:- US deal set to rescue Pathfinder terraces
This from the Guardian 2007:- http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/nov/09/comment.housing
Owen Hatherley at the Royal Festival Hall 22nd November 2010 click here
Musings of an Urbanist has written about Pathfinder too click here
I found this while searching for Pathfinder references in Google click here
Another Prescott win then? I don’t think so…
SAVE puts localism to the test in Toxteth – BDOnline 22nd December 2010
Localism faces its first real test as Pickles is asked to stop Pathfinder bulldozers from razing Ringo Starr’s childhood neighbourhood
The coalition’s localism agenda is facing its first legal test after SAVE Britain’s Heritage wrote to communities secretary Eric Pickles asking him to use his powers to protect people left living in Victorian streets left derelict by Labour’s £2.2 billion Housing Market Renewal (Pathfinder) programme.
. . . . .
Here’s another from the Guardian in 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/apr/28/regeneration.housingdemand
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/mar/10/regeneration.housingpolicy
Another very relevant and interesting article:-
http://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/2013/02/fencing-contest/7356