After the riot, can everyone win?
Estates Gazette
02/08/2003
Two years ago Oldham was ravaged by race riots and it appears that previous “ghetto-creating” regeneration must bear part of the blame. David Quinn looks at how a new regeneration initiative will be handled this time
It began as a brawl between two youths outside a chip shop, the type of teenage scuffle that occurs in towns across the country every weekend. But this encounter was to have a far more serious outcome.
Following a mobile phone call by the mother of one of the youths – one of whom was white, one of whom was Asian – two taxis arrived at the scene in the Glodwick area of Oldham. Ten white men emerged and proceeded to smash the windows of Asian homes and businesses, in supposed retribution for an Asian attack on a white youth. It was 8pm, twilight, on Saturday 26 May 2001 and some of the worst racial violence seen in the UK had begun.
Oldham is a town of 217,000 people, bordering Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne and Rochdale on the edge of the Pennines. Although often described as part of Greater Manchester, it is historically a Lancashire mill town. Like many of the UK’s former manufacturing strongholds, production activity has fallen away, creating high unemployment. But this wasn’t the cause of the violence.
Nor is the fact that Oldham’s Asian and Asian-British population stands at just under 12% of the town’s total, compared with a national average of 4.6%. The major triggers of the rioting of two years ago was racial self-segregation. The resident Asian population of Oldham is not evenly dispersed. Instead, it is centred on deprived areas close to the town centre.
In the ward of Werneth, for example (see map p26), the Asian and Asian-British population is 55% of the total. In St Mary’s, which includes Glodwick, where violence broke out, the Asian and Asian-British population is 38%. These areas have become virtual ghettos, fuelling what community leaders describe as the “myth” of “no-go areas” for white residents of the town.
On that May evening, the fighting escalated. Rumours of police violence against Asians quickly circulated. As an angry mob grew to 500, police contained it around Waterloo Street and Glodwick Road. Cars were overturned and set alight.
Violence continued for several nights, though not on the scale of the Saturday. The repercussions were massive and prompted much soul-searching on the part of Oldham council, as well as a government inquiry.
Strategic and organisational changes are under way at the council and urban renewal is seen as crucial to easing the town’s problems. Here, EG reports on the council’s approach, finds out about a new “Vision” for the town led by urban regeneration specialist URBED and King Sturge, and gauges community leaders’ views of the plans.
What went wrong
Regeneration has been criticised as one of the causes of division in Oldham.
In April of this year, an all-party committee of MPs concluded that the distribution of single regeneration budget (SRB) funds may have been one of the factors behind the racial disturbances in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001. “The competition for recoveries [of funds] between communities had exacerbated divisions in areas where there was a strong correlation between wards and different ethnic groups,” said the report by the Housing, Planning and Local Government and the Regions Committee.
The findings echoed two other key reports. Published at the end of 2001, the Ritchie report into the Oldham riots of May 2001, carried out by the civil servant David Ritchie, concluded that the segregation of Asian and white communities was “deep seated” in Oldham, creating “ignorance, misunderstanding and fear”. This situation was heavily to blame for the riots, it concluded.
Ritchie also berated Oldham council for its failure to act sooner, accusing it of institutional racism.
A year later, the Audit Commission identified management weaknesses at the council, criticised its apparently meaningless use of the slogan “Oldham Together”, and highlighted the fact that just 2.6% of council employees were from ethnic minorities, compared with 14% of the town’s population.
The council accepted that work remained to be done but pointed out that some changes in organisation and approach were already under way. The criticism of its management appears to have hit home last month it appointed five new chief officers.
The council: ‘We must seek to unite’
Regeneration is the key to Oldham council’s overhaul of the town and its own battered image. But this time round, the plan must tackle the divisiveness of the town’s segregated, inward-looking communities.
Andrew Fletcher, assistant chief executive of Oldham council, is not keen to dwell on the past. Nonetheless, he acknowledges the impact of May 2001 on the council’s thinking.
From his office overlooking the concrete jungle of the town’s brutalist 1960s civic centre, he says that the council has reassessed its approach to regeneration following the riots of 2001. He agrees with the MPs’ committee that “ringfencing” specific areas for regeneration can lead to resentment and, eventually, violence.
“We had a radical rethink of the way to approach regeneration and our view now is that it should be a process by which we implement a comprehensive strategy,” he says.
“This contrasts with the previous approach of defining specific areas to regenerate, for example with SRB funding. It is important to start from a borough-wide perspective.”
The King Sturge/URBED Vision team is to carry out a borough-wide study to help it come up with three “demonstrator” plans. These will not be a starting point for regeneration, but will show the ways in which it could be accomplished. One of the demonstrator plans is likely to focus on Werneth, which is a “pathfinder” area, and will obtain money from the designated-housing renewal fund, and is therefore eligible for central government funding too.
In this way, it might look as though focusing on Werneth constitutes the type of ring fencing from which Oldham is trying to escape. Not so, according to Fletcher, who says the masterplanning exercise will work from the outside in, and that funding will not be applied to isolated areas. The £300,000 Vision masterplan (see over) will be published in January 2004, although the housing renewal plan will need to be finished by November to attract funding.
The Vision: Regeneration thinking stresses integration
The URBED consortium is firming up its Vision masterplan for Oldham, which will be published in January. The objective laid down by the council is the creation of a single, non-stratified population. But while looking at the whole town, the Vision proposals will feature three “demonstrator” plans, as examples of how regeneration could be carried forward in the rest of the borough.
“The idea is to get a feel for how the whole borough works, to get an idea of its contours. Then policies can be developed for each of the contour bands,” explains David Rudlin of URBED, who is the Vision team leader.
Rudlin stresses that it can be much harder to put things right in towns, rather than cities because of economic factors. “In towns suffering decline such as Oldham, there are no jobs for people to transfer to. Unemployment has risen and so has resentment between sections of the community,” he says.
Overcoming this insularity is crucial to the Vision strategy because the town’s ethnic diversity could be transformed from an apparent “negative” into a positive, Rudlin explains. “Social research finds that people are attracted to places that are diverse, and the most successful towns in the future will be the most ethnically diverse,” he says.
The involvement of King Sturge, still wrongly regarded in some quarters as shed shifters, may strike some as surprising. Yet urban regeneration partner Gordon Hood is a former director of the Central Manchester Development Corporation, and so is more than qualified to take a leading role in Vision masterplanning.
Hood echoes Rudlin’s optimism about Oldham’s potential but focuses on its infrastructure. “Oldham has positive features,” he says. “The Metrolink tram system is coming, and it has easy access to the M60 and M62.”
Hood argues that major cities have successfully reinvented themselves and that it is now the turn of smaller towns. “It’s up to places like Oldham to create active, vibrant town centres,” he says.
The proximity of Oldham to a newly regenerated Manchester less than 9 miles is clearly a plus point for the town.
“Land prices have shot up in Manchester. That’s squeezing out people from the cultural and creative industries. Oldham could attract these businesses from the end of a 20-minute Metrolink ride. It’s about finding the opportunities and capitalising on them,” says Hood.
Two of URBED’s three demonstrator plans for the town centre and for Werneth and Freehold are defined. The third area is up for consultation. Both Hood and Rudlin suggest this third plan could involve the regeneration of Oldham’s redbrick mills, such as the iconic Hartford Mill in Werneth, many of which have fallen into disrepair.
“One of the reasons for the town’s difficulties is the decline of these mills and it makes sense to ask if we can turn liabilities into assets,” says Rudlin.
If this course of action is agreed, Oldham’s mills could perhaps be the most obvious physical evidence of regeneration. However, things will not stop there. As well as new housing, the masterplan is likely to advocate the creation of new public buildings in central Oldham and an upgrading of many of the borough’s public open spaces.
Tags: oldham, regeneration
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