'Bearing in mind we’re ordinary people, what we’ve done is magnificent.'
Hazel Tilley
This morning in The Guardian Aditya Chakrabortty has published an article he's been working on with a group of us over the past couple of weeks. I've decided to link to the article from this blog so it can be included on here in the story of what's been done in Granby over these last few years. Also because I think the interview process itself, the chance to reflect with such a skilled and interested visitor, has helped me, for one, to be able to see the story so far with an objectivity that wouldn't otherwise have been possible.
Go here to read Aditya Chakrabortty's article:
'How one community beat the system and rebuilt their shattered streets'
Where Aditya says:
This great clearance went on for decades. Despite residents’ protests, street after street was demolished until only four were saved. Formerly a senior manager with Liverpool Housing Trust, Ronnie Hughes remembers how, as late as 2010, people were pushed into “selling their homes to the council for £8,000”.
Then came their most audacious move: they set up a community land trust(CLT), with no land, no paperwork and only a vague idea of what it was. “We formed a CLT on nothing but imagination,” says Hazel Tilley. It was both common sense and utterly radical.”
The group of us interviewed are by no means everyone involved in Granby 4 Streets but we are all founding members of its community land trust.
And being a part of all that has definitely been one of the best things I've ever done in my life. Talking with Aditya reminded me of this and I'm grateful that our story and reflections will now be read widely and might help other people in other places. Not necessarily by becoming a community land trust yourselves, I have my own doubts about them, but perhaps by seeing how we became a group of friends who improvised pragmatically around what was possible, over several years. Then achieved, with help, more than we'd thought we ever could. It’s been great. And it continues.
As well as the article there is also a podcast by one of us, Hazel Tilley, available here.
Photographs above: Mark Waugh for the Guardian
Granby Street Market painting by Erika Rushton
These are part of Aditya Chakrabortty's "The Alternatives" series considering different ways we could be running the economy and the country.