Empties please
Hmm, it’s not always easy to reconcile a love of property with a desire for social justice. But this week’s Channel 4 special documentaries on Britain’s empty homes might make you feel a bit worse, then a bit better. If you’ve ever passed an unloved building and fantasized about grabbing the keys and doing it up, this show is for you.
Last night’s episode, with George Clarke, covered, among other topics, the travesty of the Pathfinder project, which moved thousands of families out of ‘unfit’ terraced houses in, among other areas, Lancashire. The idea was to rehouse them in new builds, but the scheme ran out of money, leaving street after street of boarded up houses.
Picture: Paul Barker
I interviewed a woman who was refusing to leave her home in Pendle for the Guardian back in 2006, and it seems the story is still rumbling on, unresolved 5 years later. The idea of the show – and goodness knows whether it will succeed, my guess is not – is to get the government to create a loans fund to allow those in need of housing to do up empty properties themselves, then pay the money back. They’re also encouraging people to photograph empty properties in their area and post them online. I could tell them about hundreds, all within a brisk walk of my house. Could you?
It’s a great idea and I really hope it comes off for them but I hear they need all their spare cash for the opening ceremony of the Olympic games…
It was a very disturbing programme, transmitted over two nights. It seems a shoking waste and the idea of the loans fund is great, if perhaps a bit pie in the sky in the currenr financial climate. However, a lot of money and misery would be saved in the long run.
Is anybody following the programme with Penelope Keith WATCHING people running around transforming that beautiful manor house and garden? The National Trust must be spending millions but presumably the tv company have had to pitch in for the transmission rights. It makes for great tv, though I’m not wild about the marbled effect and whether it was worth the painstakingly effort of colouring the friezes inch by slow inch!
It is a great idea but the fact that the funding can be revoked so easily makes it seem like a shaky project even if it does succeed initially. GG
OMG! Its nice to meet another person who has an obsession for doing up old houses x