Knock me down

STANLEY ALLEN, a self-employed painter and decorator, bought his house in Liverpool’s Welsh Streets 18 years ago. He is still there—but few of his old neighbours are. Most of the redbrick Victorian terraced houses on his street are sealed off with metal grilles across the doors and windows, ready for demolition. “They’ve destroyed the whole community”, he says, of Liverpool’s scheme to regenerate the area by demolishing older houses. “And it used to be lovely.”

The Welsh Streets are one of the more prominent examples of the failure of the previous government’s plan to restart the housing market in several depressed cities in the north of England. Tenants were moved out and compulsory purchase orders sent to landlords. A row grew as protesters claimed that the government was subsidising private developers to knock down Britain’s industrial heritage. The programme’s defenders claimed that replacing old houses with new ones would attract young families to blighted areas, increase house prices and even cut crime.