Neighbours get it together
By David Spittles, Evening Standard
22 July 2003

In an ideal world, people would work together to improve the areas in which they live. Next month the Government will appeal to our better natures in an attempt to persuade us to do just that. It is launching a new grants scheme, Living Spaces, to help us clean up our village greens, improve play areas and plant trees on wasteland.

The idea behind the scheme is that there is no shortage of ideas - only negative neighbours and feet-dragging councils ready to frustrate your plans. It will enable residents to apply for grants ranging from £1,000 to £100,000 and get help from a trained "enabler" who will draw up an action plan and encourage a start-up group (call 0845 600 3190 for an application pack).

The scheme follows a report by the Government's green spaces taskforce, which showed that reviving urban green spaces does more for quality of life than almost anything else, and acts as a catalyst for wider community initiatives.

This is also the view of Cabe (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), an influential quango with a growing profile. In the autumn, Cabe will launch Wasted Space, a campaign aimed at shaming councils and developers into utilising pockets of abandoned land.

"Too many new buildings arrive with little or no consideration for their context," says Sir Stuart Lipton, who chairs the group. "Where is the bench or tree to sit under? Where is the fountain, small garden, sculpture, street lamps, playground or café?

"Often, in one borough the council gives priority to looking after its parks, but in the borough next door similar spaces are undermanaged, under-resourced no-go zones."

All this strikes a chord with Malcolm Bacchus, head of the Telegraph Hill Society in New Cross, south-east London, who moved to the area in the mid-1980s, drawn by the large Victorian houses, tree-lined streets and Telegraph Hill park, so named because it was once the last semaphore point from Portsmouth to the Admiralty in Whitehall.

The park was already deteriorating when Bacchus arrived. Park keepers had been made redundant, tennis courts vandalised, original railings chopped down and debris was mounting in a drained lake.

"If a park looks wrecked, nobody cares or takes any interest and there is a downward spiral," says Bacchus.

As a first step, he came up with the idea of reinstating the railings. "It was 1993 and, naively, we thought we might be able to achieve something in time for the park's centenary two years later. There were good non-emotional reasons as well as aesthetic ones for the improvement," says Bacchus.

"The chain-link fencing was an eyesore and often had to be replaced."

The cost of railings was put at £60,000, a sum Bacchus hoped to coax from Lewisham council. Little did he know that his campaign would take 10 years to succeed - but be much bigger than originally conceived.

Last spring, Bacchus received news that the Telegraph Hill Society had won £1.09 million from the Lottery Heritage Fund. Together with additional funding from the council, £1.4 million is to be spent on new railings and gates, remaking all the paths, recreating the pond, enlarging the tennis courts, improving a children's play area, turning old Victorian toilets into a ranger's office, new landscaping and park furniture. The work should be completed by 2005.

During this time the society has evolved into an effective pressure group, forcing the council to do a U-turn on compulsory parking zones, agitating for traffic-calming measures, convincing Transport for London of the need for a safe pedestrian crossing at a busy main road boundary to the neighbourhood. It has even campaigned for a new secondary school.

"You learn quickly that you have to play the long game," says Bacchus. "It has taken 10 years of dogged lobbying, but it proves that local people can make a difference. You just have to keep pushing: writing letters, attending meetings, raising your profile, working behind the scenes. It is a bit of a numbers game. The more people you have on your side the more you are listened to."