BRITISH LIBRARY 
OF POLITICAL AND 
ECONOMIC SCIENCE 



LONDON SCHOOL OF 
ECONOMICS AND 
POLITICAL SCIENCE 



fabian tract 400 
community action 

1 introduction 
2 
3 
4 
the role of central government 
community action in America 
local authorities and 
Dorothy Runnicles 
Ray Gosling 
Jan O'Malley 
Bob Holman 
5 
6 
7 
8 
social change 
the social worker and 
community action 
St Ann's, Nottingham 
community action in 
Notting Hill 
Handsworth adventure 
Jim Radford 9 
playground 
from King Hill to the 
squatting association 


1 
. 

this pamphlet, like all publications of the Fabian Societ'1 
represents not the collective view of the Society but only tht 
view of the individuals who prepared it. The responsibility o 
the Society is limited to approving the publications which i 
issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour move 
ment. Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1 
June 1970 SBN 7163 0400 ~ 


introduction 

~nne Lapping 

•ne of the series of measures for which 
te Labour government deserves credit 
what might be called the attack on 
reas of poverty. It emerged in dribs and 
, rabs. First came the educational priory 
areas. Next the urban programme.
hen, seeming the most radical of all, 
te Home Office announced its communy 
development scheme--an attempt to 
j et to grips with the cluster of problems 
~ · 1at beset poor people living for the most 
~~ art in inner city slums and redevelop. 
1ent areas. This last programme was to 
n unusual degree the personal creation 'If one civil servant, Derek Morrell, the 
· ead of the Home Office children's deartment, 
who died early in 1970. 

,. 

1 

:1 the autumn of 1969 the Fabian Socity 
held a conference to look at the commnity 
development scheme. Or, to be 
r 10re exact, as the scheme was still in 
s early stages, the conference was in'~
nded to look at what the government
1eant by community development ; at 
1e American experience which inspired 
1e British programme and from which 
~ritain hoped to extract some hints and 
1arnings ; at the position of local authories 
through which central government
1as committed to act ; and at the role 


'f the social worker as community actiator. 
All these themes add up to a 
lausible skeleton of community develop-
lent built up from first principles and 
::>reign experience. 


:ut Britain has her own history o.f st::oa meous 
or voluntary community action. 
t was vital, therefore, to involve in the 
iscus~ion a number of people already 
ommJtted to community action of one 
ort or another. How far woU'ld their 
1~ory run parallel to the government's?
>1d anything ill their experience suggest 
:1~t community action could not be inprred 
by official agencies, however cam-

r ·uftaged? Or were the community action 
,•eoJ?le already in the field talking about 
0 different animal altogether from the 

lome Office? 

n the end I think that one of the most 
.seful functions the conference perormed 
'Yas to collect together the articu:
tted att1tudes of workers ill movements 


like the Squatters, workers in specificgeographical areas like Handsworth in 
Birmingham, St. Ann's in Nottingham,
and Notting HiJ.l in London ; and to 
confront them with the official view, 
from the Home Office and local authorities. 


By the end of 1970 some twelve to fourteen 
community development areas will 

1have been designated by the government(the first batch includes Liverpool, Coventry, 
Glamorgan and Southwark). Each 
area will have a local action team consisting 
of twelve to 20 members drawn 
from a range of social services. Three 
of the memlbers, including the projectdirector, will be full time, paid by the 
local authority. The others, social workers, 
teachers, supplementary benefits officers 
and so on, will all be part time, 
seconded from their own jobs. Each 
team's work will be studied and evaluated 
by research workers from a local 
university (each research team of two to 
four workers will probably cover two 
areas). The researchers will start work at 
the same time as the action teams, beginning 
by helping them to build up a profi•
le of their area. After that the researchers' 
work will be largely descriptive. 
Although there is to be a measure of 
local autonomy on both the action and 
research side, the community development 
programme has a central directorate 
in the Home Office. 

What are the assumptions ly:ing behind 
the community development programme?
Both John Banks of ·the Home Office, 
and Martin Rein have tackled this question 
from different angles, but neither of 
their arguments wiN be anticipated by 
this rough outline of official thinking. 
First the government assumes that peoplewho need the social services and who 
are not gett:Jing access to them tend to 
Jive in impoverished areas. Directing 
more resources into such areas throughthe traditional agencies help -but obviously 
not enough. And the pr cess has 
no foreseeable conclusion. The second 
assumption is that the real demand for 
support from the social services is higherthan is apparent: this is because workers 
in the services are failing to communi· 


cate what they have to offer, or to make 
themselves sufficiently available. Thirdly, 
it is assumed •that there are people in 
these poor communities who have abilities 
and qualities of leadership that have 
never been exploited, but who could 
probably do more for the communitythan a bunch of officials. 

Whether it will turn out to have been 
logical to jump from these premises to a 
plan for community development areas 
remains to be seen. What became immediately 
clear from the Fabian conference 
was that there was so great a difference 
between the thinking of people involved 
in voluntary community action and those 
more or Jess in the official camp as to 
raise fundamental questions about the 
definition of the government's chosen 
technique. The nub of the conflict maybe summed up as the distinction between 
development-what you do for other 
people, however subtly-and action-
what people do for themselves. 

Several of the community action speakers 
made it clear that disil'lusion w;.th 
the way local politics work-which 
means the failure of the Labour partywhere it is in power and as an affective 
opposition-was a prime factor in generating 
community action. The speakersfrom Notting Hill's community workshop, 
from the London squatters (Jim 
Radford) and St. Ann's (Ray Gosling), 
all made this point in different ways. It is 
possible to say that such a reaction is a 
matter of party politics and need not 
stop the government instituting a policyin which local authorities act as its 
agents, whichever party is in power. But 
there is a more disquieting implication to 
be drawn. It is inevitable that suspicion 
of the political parties comes to mean 
suspicion of the town hall-regardless of 
who is occupying it. Clearly the existence 
of voluntary community action pro-
grammes (in which the local Labour 
party is not involved) ought to make the 
Ioca·I party think. 

The suspicion of local bureaucracies 
which appears to grow with the heightened 
political consciousness resultingfrom community action is a factor radi


cals in the field feel the Home Office is 
not facing squarely. On the other hand 
those who feel they have been forced 
into organising direct action must be 
wary of isolating those radicals who are 
undoubtedly struggling away inside local 
government. Robin Guthrie argues that 
such by-passing of local authorities can 
lead to political stagnation and decisions 
made behind locked doors. I would like 
to add a time dimension to this argument. 
Successful direct action focussed 
on one issue may gain activists a short 
term victory without winning them a 
structural foothold in the bargaining and 
deciding processes. It takes more than 
drama and local headl:ines to make certain 
that decisions which ignore the interests 
of minorities do not recur, or that 
inactivity does not rule council agenda 
papers. 

A dominant strain in the papers of the 
volunteers was fear of the situations that 
can result when community action is 
muffled by superficial encouragementfrom the local bureaucracies. At least a 
couple had seen neighbouring or preceding 
groups politically castrated. The 
Handsworth adventure playground group 
has made it a policy not to accept council 
money which might inhibit its freedom 
to make political statements about 
matters other than the playground. 

Community action is seen by its practitioners 
as a last resort. It is perhaps Jim 
Radford who makes this point most 
strongly. "As a general rule I believe 
in exploring what are called the 'properchannels' before resorting to direct action 
..." How far can a last resort be 
institutionalised? 

The aims of spontaneous communityaction groups are political in the widest 
sense of the term. They aim, in the jargon 
of the times, to get people more 
involved in decisions affecting their lives, 
partly through exerting group pressure 
on the decision makers; partly by getting 
people in the community to throw upthe issues themselves through participatory 
rather than the representative democratic 
procedures they have grown to 
distrust. Raising political consciousness, 


leading to the demand for rights, is an 
implicit aim of most spontoneous community 
action groups, whatever the primepractical issue. 

government planning 

The aims of the Home Office plan suggest 
that it is a different species of endeavour. 
The indicators by which the 
success or failure of the teams will be 
judged are what might loosely be called 
social work standards. The initiators will 
hope to find evidence of improved personal 
care (for example, use of preventative 
hea'lth services, family planning) ; 
improved family functioning (increased 
marriage or cohabitation stability) ; improved 
child rearing practices ; and improved 
physical conditions in the neighbourhood. 
There is an obvious similarity 
between the hopes and even the likely 
specific demands (say for playgrounds)
of the unofficial and official community 
workers. But the distinction between the 
techniques and formulation of objectivesis significant. It lis clinched by the fact 
that client representation has not so far 
been written into the Home Office 
soheme. Its democratic element is confined 
to local authority representation at 
steering group level. 

Two immediate problems a-rise from 
this restriction. The new scheme is likely 
to inherit the suspicion of local politi)
cians and bureaucrats tha-t is common in 
areas where their efforts have not resulted 
in any notable benefits for the inhabitants. 
Secondly will not aU the new 
leaders thrown up by the community be 
a little frustrated by not being in on the 
planning side (the resource supply side) 
even if they are encouraged (manipulated?) 
to start their own playgroups,

tenants associations and so on? 

It is easy to point to holes in the 
government planning a-t this stage in the 
game. And it is impossible to be unaware 
of ~the restraints on central government 
activities in local government territory. 
Nevertheless, the point about democracy!s an important one. And more local say 
m decisions could still be y;ritten into 

community development. It could be 
crucial to the success of the venture in 
its own (modified social work) terms. 

The voluntary action groups a'lso face 
contradictions. At what point should 
they treat with the powers that be or, is 
it the intention to set up an alternative 
society? For those who have large political 
aims it is difficult to find a way of 
extending the essentially parochial interests 
of local action groups. For how long 
should expert advice be repU'lsed because 
of the threat to the principle of "doing it 
ourselves for ourselves"? And so on. 

Some of the questions raised in this introduction 
are examined in detail in the 
papers that follow. Others came up during 
discussion. One suggestion that was 
not raised at the conference but which, 
looking back, seems irresistible: whydoesn't one of the Home Office project's 
research teams take an already existing 
voluntary community action group as 
one of its pair for study? Comparison 
could not fail to be useful-though of 
course to make it fairer the voluntary 
group ought to be given some additional 
resources-if it would be prepared to 
accept them. 


2. the role of 
central government 
John Banks 


Without engaging in a historical or 
comprehensive review of communityaction, one must start from some conception 
of the kinds of community action 
we have in mind. Even a rough typologywill, hopefully, clarify some of the characteristics 
of community action ; and 
this in turn may illuminate aspects of 
the role of central government in the 
management of response to social change. 

My impression is that most people see 
government as essentially, and perhapsunalterably, antagonistic to communityaction. And my contribution to this pamphlet 
is mainly to suggest that this assumption 
is wrong. 

Community action seems to cover four 
main kinds of activity. 

1. It can describe action by a minority 
pressure group pursuing redress or reform 
on behalf of others: examples are 
the Child Poverty Action Group, Abortion 
Law Reform Association, Release, 
and so on. 
2. It can describe action by a minoritypressure group pursuing reform, particularly 
in the health and welfare services, 
on beha•lf of themselves and others;
examples range from the Spastics Society, 
the National Association for Handicapped 
Children, Council for the Advancement 
of State Education, to consumer 
societies. 
3. It can describe the work of minoritygroups primarily concerned with reform 
or changes on behalf of themselves: the 
main example here are the ci\'ic and 
amenity societies. 
4. It can describe the work of minoritygroups whose main function is to provide 
a service to society not otherwise provided, 
coupled with an interest in promoting 
reform to have the service provided 
by an agency of government: some 
such groups are mainly self help or 
mutual help: others, like the young"volunteer" agencies may have a social 
education role: yet others may be primarily 
a form for expressing rejection of 
society's values, or for achieving by 
direct action what society has come to 
regard as impossible. 

The precision, or mutual exclusiveness, 
of this grouping is not important. From 
it one can deduce sufficiently accurately 
some characteristics of community action. 

~These can be looked at under two heads. 
First, as to their aims, community action 
groups appear to be: 

1. Problem orientated: they originate in 
response to a need in society and would 
theoretically come to an end when that 
need was met by society in other ways, 
or ceased to be a problem. 
2. They therefore are concerned with 
exerting pressure on au~hority, wherever 
situated, to see what they see, feel as 
they do, and react with action. 
3. In order to exert pressure they are 
anxious to expand the basis of their support 
by widening the community of aim 
and action that they have established to 
comprehend society, or a majority of its 
members (or key members). 
The methods relevant to these aims are: 

l. Direct action : to start doing something 
themselves to remedy the wrong, 
and in some instances, to learn how to 
teach others, including those in authority, 
to learn from them ; i.e., action plus development, 
education. 
2. Drama: in pursuit of publicity, to 
cause concern. Shock is used as a tool to 
create awareness and caring, and to generate 
the community of view between 
themselves and others which they need 
for success. 
3. Objective data collection-to measure 
and define the problem. 
4. Anti-professional campaigning-or to 
be more precise, working with only selected 
professionals. On the whole, the professional's 
lack of understanding of, or 
sympathy with, their concern are likelyto be among main targets. 
5. Experimental: some, but naturally far 

from all, groups engage in what are in 
effect pilot experiments in which theythemselves test the validity of the suggestions 
for social action they have taken 
up. 

The relationship between these kinds of 
action and the role of government-andI am here speaking mainly about central 
government-begins to emerge on the 
last point-the launching of experiment.
The principa'l function of government is 
usually seen as regulatory and policyexecuting. This is not surprising since it 
is the detailed execution or administration 
of policy which makes up most of 
the average person's dealings with a government 
of any sort, local or central. 

But government has of course manystyles of operation; the relationship between 
central government departmentsand loca<J government is "constitutional, 
political, administrative and occasionally 
\iudicial" (J. A. G. Griffiths, Central de-
Partments and local authorities, 1966).
It is also promotional ; .policy forming as 

well as policy executing. 

Clearly the potential importance of this 
role grows in periods of rapid social and 
economic change. The incidence of fresh 
problems and the search for workable 
and acceptable solutions to them places 
a very great responsibility on social 
organisation of aU kinds and not least 
on central government. Its role must be 
more promotional and experiment orientated, 
if it is to enable resources to be 
used effectively in pursuit of relevant and 
equitable social policy. Research and development 
related to policy must be recognised, 
in such times, as a very important 
aspect of government functions. 

research and development 

Action research (research monitored experimental 
action) could well be regarded 
~s !he characteristic tool of government 
~n Its developmental mode of operation 
Ill the social policy field. What research 
and development mean in this context is 
o~~aining by organised experiment empmcal 
evidence about the .viability of 

solutions to social problems ; the evaluation 
of such solutions in terms of their 
suitability for general use; and finally the 
development of strategy for diffusingthem which takes .particular account of 
areas where resources and capacity to 
respond to change are low. The process 
can be distinguished as : 

I. A priority and problem orientated 
approach to social policy: it demands 
that government should take a stand on 
current issues, identify a hierarchy of 
needs, an·d al,locate resources accordingly. 
No less than other conceptions of government's 
role, it recognises that responding 
to change (rather than determiningit) is government's stance ; but responding 
to it not as a way of reconciling conflicting 
forces or pressures on itself, but 
in .pursuit of goals which can 'be stated 
and defended. 
2. It is an experimental approach. In 
two senses: it does not rest upon findinguniversally valid and applicable solutions 
to social .problems lbut recognises the 
need to take into account loca'l needs, 
resources and aspirations in hammering 
out solutions. And, in reflection of the 
complexity of, for instance, urban social 
problems, .it does not imply that anysolution is known to exist, though it is 
willing to hypothecate and test some. 
3. The approach entails central government 
acting in partnership with others : 
primarily with local government and 
statutory and voluntary bodies : central 
government's role is as a change agent, 
acting on and through others, including 
universities, professional bodies, etc. 
obstacles to change 

Where community action and action by 
government in its developmental role intersect 
is largely in identifying means of 
overcoming resistance to change. Resistance 
takes various forms: and the sort 
of obstacles which have to be tackled 
will be familiar : 

1. Institutiona-l incomprehension of role 
in relation to social change. 

2. Lack of data about policy alternatives 
and their consequences; and how people 
would choose between them. 
3. The bureaucratic culture-the organisation's 
tendency to protect itself, by 
systems of accountability to the boss 
rather than the client, and by devising 
procedures and languages which render 
its services inaccessible and incomprehensible 
to clients. 
4. Partial approaches, perhaps engendered 
by over specialisation and over 
emphasis on professional detachment and 
expertise to the exclusion of looking at 
clients (or pupils, or consumers) in the 
round, as whole people, with feelingsand rights. 
implications for government 

If one accepts this analysis, what is it 
open to government to do? So far the 
evidence on which to answer this is 
slight. But should we wish to take advantage 
of them, there are a considerable 
range of to<Yls available to operate on 
some of the obstacles. We can perhapsdivide them under two headings, strategy 
and tactics. 

First, strategy. We can use the influence 
which central government exercises on 
local government to emphasise the entrepreneurial, 
problem-solving experimental 
role of government. It is very importantthat in the field of developing new social 
policies, central and .Jocal governmentshould be seen as working partners, and 
that local government administrators 
should not cast central government in 
the role of deus ex machina, as if it 
possessed wisdom about the answers to 
social problems which of course it has 
not. Its co-ordinating and supportive role 
in developing a search for new answers 
needs to be seen separately from the possession 
of special wisdom about what 
these answer may be. 

Second, since the process of finding 
answers will be difficult, and failures 
must be expected as well as successes, 
government (in this case either central 

or local) must be fully prepared to provide 
help and protection (from snipin~ 
and uninformed criticism) for those 
working in the field on its behalf. This 
in turn demands that government commit 
itself to finding solutions, however 
painful and explosive the process maypromise to be. This in turn implies that, 
third, central government should provide 
settings, data and support for experimentation 
locally, including evaluation. 
Fourth, government as the controller of 
training must see the process of policydevelopment and development in training 
as a whole, and not as separateactivities. 

Tactics here implies finding ways of imP'lementing 
the strategy with the minimum 
of tension and the maximum of 
mutual understanding and effectiveness. 
For instance, central resources and influence 
can be used more to promoteprogressive experimentation. Local authorities, 
like individuals, vary ; and within 
them, similarly, are officers who vary 
in their perceptions and commitment. 
Favouring the "better" authority in terms 
of the help and extra resources that gowith experimentation may seem in the 
short term to be a misallocation of scarce 
resources ; but as a way of rooting and 
bringing to fruition new approacheswhich may turn out to 'be of generalvalue and applicability, it is high'ly justifiable 
in the longer term. 

Establishing and protecting experimentation 
can be approached in various ways. 
For instance, some people will accept as 
research suggestions which they would 
find disturbing if offered under Jess respectable 
auspices. Equally, new policyideas presented as "experiment" mayprove less frightening and unacceptable, 
particularly if responsibility for them is 
shared with other "experimental" areas 
and central government. Equally, the 
attractions of taking part in a limited 
nationa'l experiment, involving only a 
few areas, is a factor to be remembered. 

Again, special arrangements for the local 
control of experiments can also be of 
value. In a co-operative, experimental 
setting, new arrangements for control of 


action have to be made, in which traditional 
lines of accounta!bility are likely 
to be supplemented-for instance by a 
degree of accountabi'lity to the external 
change agent, central government. There 
may also be opportunities for trying out 
more direct accountability to the client, 
or community. The setting can then be a 
learning situation, in which roles and relationships 
aU round can be re-appraised.
Hopefully the experiment may suggestwhat these should be. 

The s·ame can be applied to training. 
The experiment is a iearning situation 
for all and all enter it equally. This is 
important in the sense that while no one 
has grounds or the right by virtue of the 
experiment to provide retraining for the 
professiona:ls engaged in it, it offers a 
setting in which re-appraisal of professional 
tr·aining inevitably takes place.
Olient and professional can be broughttogether on "neutral" ground to reassess 
traditional methods and concepts of 
treatment, and the realities of the client's 
situation can be explored more vividlyand fully because of this. It is to be 
hoped that one party to this re-appraisal 
will be the administrators from Whitehall 
: experiments of this kind are clearlyhandicapped if the change process does 
not include feeding back a more informed 
and graphic perception of client / 
community realities into central government. 


conclusion 

This is a highly tentative list of possibilities, 
but it should suffice to show that in 
the field of experimentation of the kind 
this pamphlet is concerned with, there 
is a considerable potentia'! role for government. 
So far experience is limited, 
and little has been written about the process. 
But experience in regard to the 
Community Development Project over the 
next few years should be valuable in 
helping to define .the possibilities, and 
limitations, of government's role. 


3 . community action 
in America 
Martin Rein 


In the 1960s a new form of social policy 
has been developing. It consists of community 
or social action programmes. Despite 
the difficulty of comparing the two 
situations, lessons learned in America, 
where the policy originated, ought to be 
applicable here in Britain, because both 
programmes are operating within the 
same set of constraints. The American 
and British governments wanted to 
initiate community development programmes 
that were at the same time effective, 
non-controversial and inexpensive.
The problem is simultaneously achieving 
all these attributes. For example, popular 
schemes tend to be expensive, and 
significant innovations are bound to disrupt 
established patterns and hence must 
be controversial. Community action is 
such a new social policy that we have 
no adequate terms to define it. I therefore 
list its main distinguishing characteristics. 
I will then review the American experience 
of programmes which have these 
characteristics. 

characteristics of 
social action programmes 

Purposes are so broadly defined that no 
single criterion of success or failure is 
possible. These broadly defined goals are 
loosely concerned with the problems of 
social equity and with the competenceand resources of local communities to 
respond to the problems of redistribution. 
The philosophica'l framework for addressing 
these issues of equity has been 
that people living in unlike circumstances 
of need should be treated unequally. 
Inequity is to be redressed by some 
form of positive discrimination which 
concentrates resources in geographical 
areas. Target areas and positive discrimination 
are the key ideas. 

Secondly, the amount of the resources 
allocated relative to the problem tends 
to be limited. Moreover these modest resources 
are not committed to any specificform . However they are loosely informed 
by a theory concerning the circular and 
cumulative causation of social distress. 
These terms of reference offer a framework 
for action. Programmes are to be 
directed at a variety of resources (a 

social mix), and at the concentration of 
these resources in order to produce a 
critical threshold at which ~ntervention is 
effective. Those who are to receive the 
services are called upon to contribute to 
the specification of the social mix of resources. 
This position is based partly on 
the assumption that in the absence of a 
causal theory to guide action, personalpreference of consumer groups is to be 
supported above professional judgment. 
(From participation in the choice of resources, 
to the control of decisions about 
these resources can be only a short step.)
In essence this strategy is committed to 
co-ordination and concentration. The 
marginal increase of resources is used as 
a lever for promoting institutional changeand co-operation. Co-ordination and 
social change are the key ideas. 

Finally, the programme is experimental 
in intent, and hence tentative in commitment. 
Here it is assumed that scientific 
knowledge wiH contribute to politicalchoices. The political processes can be 
strengthened if they are informed by 
more rational choices which are based 
upon the contr~bution of social scientific 
knowledge. Thus the social scientist is a 
contributor to the political processthrough his evaluation of the impact of 
the social programmes he is studying. In 
this process social science and politics 
are so c'losely intermingled that the politics 
of evaluative research is as important 
as the methodology of research. 

In summary then we are witnessing the 
development of new social policies directed 
at diffuse goals which are broadlyconcerned with issues of social equity;
limited resources are accepted as a constr~
nt ; and hence a strategy of innovation 
and resource co-ordination is crucial. 
User participation in the specification of 
these resources is desirable because 
knowledge is uncertain, yet the positivecontribution of social science to the development 
of social policy is assumed. 

I believe these characteristics reinforce 
each other. Societies, whatever their 
rhetoric, are indifferent to the goals of 
equity and thus tend to supply limited 
resources to implement programmes 


directed to these goak Since the reference 
system for defining equitable goals 
depends, in the end, upon the subjectiveview of the 'recipient, citizen involvement 
in the process of defining equity is crucial. 
And limited resources force a strategy 
of co-ordination. Because the entire 
effort is conceived of within an e:x,perimental 
framework, there is resistance to 
a premature large scale commitment, 
thus justifying limited resources in search 
of innovative programmes to fulfil illusive 
goals which are urgent but vague. 
Specific examples of these types of pro-
grammes can be found in both the 
United States and Britain. Delinquency 
prevention, grey areas, community action 
model cities and compensatory education 
all offer striking examples in America, 
of these social policies. (But it is important 
to remember that if all these pro-
gra,mmes are aggregated in a single city 
they account for about 1-2 per cent of 
total expenditure on the schools they are 
aimed ·at changing.) In Britain we find 
the urban area legislation, the proposedintergration of social work services, educational 
priority areas (EPAs) and community 
development projects (coPs). 

the separation 
of thought and action 

I want now .to review the American experience 
in planning and implementing 
eXcper~mental equity oriented programmes. 
It is logically persuasive to try to understand 
the dimensions of a problem before 
attempting to solve it ; hence 
thought must be separated from action. 
Moreover, according to this point of 
view, few constraints should be placed 
on the process of reflection and study, 
so that a full understanding of the nature 
of the problem may be revealed. 
With these basic precepts the delinquencyprevention and the model cities progra,
mme were called upon to plan respectively 
for the prevention of delinquency 
and for the enhancement of the 
quality of urban living without attention 
to the costs. A high premium was set on 
their being logically coherent. This after 
all is the essence of dispassionate social 
research, it is unconstrained by political 
realities in the search for truth. It was 

assumed that the resources of the total 
Federal Government could be broughtto bear on implementing such plans. The 
administrative co-ordination of these resources 
was believed to be a less demanding 
task than rationaliJsing their integration. 


Experience suggests that planning without 
financial constraints leads to double 
planning. After the planners had completed 
their task, it was discovered that 
the Federal Government could not meet 

>its end of the bargain. It could not convince 
autonomous adm~nistrative departments 
to reallocate their resources along 
the lines developed by the local plan.
The result was that a much more limited 
amount of resources was made available 
to the local communities. A form of 
crisis planning then took place, in which 
the original plans were discarded and 
new prioritlies had to be allocated based 
upon sca,rce resources. Problem solvingplanning is by its nature very different 
from priority planning for scarcity. Under 
conditions of scaroity projects opted 
for programmes which were fashionable, 
that is the proposals put forward by the 
national government, such as head start,
legal services, health services, and neighbourhood 
services or one stop comprehensive 
social service centres. 

Secondly, the process of organising for 
planning left little time for planning. 
Local projects discovered tha,t ~t was extraordinarily 
difficult to create an administrative 
structure or a project team to 
embark upon planning. If a team was 
brought together hastily then the divisions 
within it emerged after the planning 
had begun. If an effort was made to 
negotiate before the team was created 
then the divisions between citizens, local 
government, and established administrative 
agencies served .to prolong the process 
or to defeat it altogether. Under 
both circumstances it took almost a year 
to organise the planning effort. With the 
result that the actual plans were often 
prepared in an exceedingly short periodof time-a month, a week or even over 
a frantic weekend. 

Finally, when an extended pel'liod of 


time, such as two to three years, was 
available for the planning process, it becomes 
exceedingly difficult to separatethought and action. People become impatient 
with the failure to act, and political 
pressure conspired to place action 
before planning. Of course the more the 
.programmes became committed to action 
the less did planning effect choices. 

participation by agencies 

Much depended upon the ability to organise 
a team for planning and action. 
In the United States new administr<Ltive 
structures were created which were 
broadly representative of all the majorinterests within a commull!ity. In addition 
to the core staff, many projects borrowed 
staff from the established agencies 
that they wished to develop co-operative 
arrangements with. The motives were at 
least two fold ; scarce resources com-
pe,lled a co-operabive approach; equally,
it was hoped that involvement in the 
process of study would lead agencies to 
a better understanding of the problems 
to be solved and this understandingwould enhance commitment to action. 
But borrowed staff tended to owe their 
primary allegiance and, indeed, their 
career lines to the administrative agency 
from which they originated. Even when 
they were seconded on a full time basis 
the problem of dual allegiance proved 
extremely difficult to resolve. 

Participation in policy making by autonomous 
agencies proved equally catastrophic. 
The school system, the welfare 
department, the state employment agencies 
all participated in the new planning 
structure at the policy level. But such 
participation did not lead to increased 
commitment to the plans developed by 
the project's central team. Rather participation 
was a way of protecting agencies' 
interests. Thus the ideal of self reform 
through self study and self education, 
proved to be one of those ideas 
which are attractive in theory, appealing 
to common sense but seldom implemented 
in practice. 

But equally the plans could not be de


veloped independently of participatingagencies for they would reject any plan 
they were not involved in. This dilemma 
led to the development of exemplaryplanning-planning sets an example for 
the established agencies. But this also 
meant duplication of function, for 
example, manpower training programmesfor youth duplicated the national system 
of vocational education. This process of 
course further fragmented the fabric of 
social serv,ices at the local level. Thus a 
programme committed to co-ordination 
exacerbated the problem of dispersion of 
resources among functionally autonomous 
units. 

co-ordination 

Despite the wide appeal of strategies of 
co-ordination bec<Luse they are efficient, 
orderly and coherent, in practice it 
proved extremely difficult to know what 
was to be co-ordinated. And even when 
objectives were understood ~t was exceedingly 
difficult to implement without 
reducing the autonomy of independentorganisations. Yet to fully respect autonomy 
as a constraint left the planningteam with only a weak mandate to win 
co-operation. 

What was to be co-ordinated? The 
efforts of social workers (manpower),
who inundated clients with a multiphlcity 
of social visits ; or the policies of agencies, 
as in the example, some agencies 
were encouraging women with children 
to enter the labour force, while others 
were encouraging them to stay home to 
care for their children ; or resources so 
that the total aggregate value of resources 
in a selected target area would 
be substantially augmented ; or the continuity 
of programmes, so that those persons 
recruited by referring agencies and 
agencies which went out to find clients 
were also accepted for training and other 
services, and that the graduates of training 
programmes were also accepted in 
the job market for which they were 
trained? It proved exceedingly difficult 
to determine whether manpower,
policies, resources or programmes were 
really the targets of co-ordination. 


On occasion a national crisis produced a 
commitment to concentrate resources in 
selected areas. Perhaps a classic example 
is the racial riot in the Watts area of 
Los Angeles, California. The riots 
brought national shock and a presidential 
commitment to concentrating resources 
in the Watts ghetto. But an 
analysis of the results several years later 
demonstrated how difficult it was to 
achieve this goal. Even when supportedby presidential power, organisations at 
the federal level were reluctant to redeploy 
established commitments to selected 
priority areas with the result that the 
resource level in the Watts area were 
altered only negligibly after the riot. 

One result of these efforts to co-ordinate 
was to further proliferate co-ordinating 
agencies, each trying to co-ordinate the 
activities of other agencies on behaTI of 
a specified function, but no super coordinating 
agency ever emerged because 
effective co-ordination implied concentrating 
power. As a result ·we have comprehensive 
co-ordinated planning in the 
areas of mental health, del·inquency prevention, 
poverty prevention, manpowertraining, and so on. In the absence of a 
coherent national social plan, these plans 
· only encouraged the chaos they were designed 
to relieve. This process was 
accelerated by federal legislation which 
encouraged specialised co-ordinated and 

comprehensive planning. 

Becau~ehedifficulty of achieving

of ' 
~uch co-ination there was a tendency 
for t e lowest level of government to 
assume the responsibility for co-ordination. 
Although the Economic Opportun-
Ity Act empowered the director of the 
Poverty Programme to co-ordinate all 
federal efforts concerned with the reduction 
of poverty, no serious effort was 
ever made to do so. Instead an alternative 
strategy was devised in which it was 
hoped that a planning structure could be 
created at the city-wide level which 
would act as a funnel filtering all the 
~esources from the federal government 
mto the single planning agency, which 
could then re-allocate the federal funds 
on a more coherent basis. But federal 
agencies soon •began to ne_gotiate con


tracts outside of this central planning 
structure and the efforts to create a single 
city wide co-ordinating unit collapsed.
The next efforts was to try to achieve 
co-ordination at a neighbourhood level 
by concentrating resources in a neighbourhood 
service centre. Thus the efforts 
at co-ordination tended to be located at 
the lowest administrative units. 

·marginal resources 
as a lever for change 

.----~~--~--~

According to this formulation the im_
portance of planning and the availabilityof central or federal resources is that 
they provide a lever of social change. 
These new resources which might comprise 
I per cent of a city school 
budget were to stimulate a social experiment 
in some type of innovative pro-
gramme. The central government clearly 
hoped to review and to monitor the allocation 
of these expenditures ; indeed this 
was the central idea behind the development 
of a plan for action. But as we 
have seen the plans were hastily drawn 
together and their action implicationshad not been properly thought through. 

The federal government was, of course, 
aware of the ambiguity of purpose and 
the lack of local commitment when theynegotiated with local communities for 
these funds. But although they saw the 
risks in the strategy, they had already by 
this stage become committed to givingthe money and could not withdraw it 
without political embarrassment. 

Marginal .increases of resources have 
power as long as they are not committed, 
and they have the most power when the 
amount of resources is most indeterminate. 
That is to say local communities 
appear to be willing to make changeswhen the stakes are uncertain and there 
is a promise that it might lead to substantially 
larger amounts of resources. 
But once the resources are committed 
and their amount definitely known, they 
lost their appeal as levers for change. 
Moreover, it proves to be very difficult 
to know whether these resources added 
to established programmes or were a 
substitute. Social entrepreneurship flour



ished under these circumstances and 
one of the central problems the federal 
government faced was how to assess the 
authenticity of the programmes. Researchers 
were called upon to evaluate 
the impact of the programme, but it was 
not altogether clear whether an event 
had taken place which merited evaluation. 
American community action pro-
grammes were thus vulnerable to th~ 
charge that they participated in an elaborate 
planning process which culminated 
in non-events whose consequences social 
scientists were called up to assess. 

the politicalisation 
of social action 

When social services were politicalisedthey became ·instruments of protest and 
criticism. A reasonably safe service pro-
gramme, such as recreation and creative 
dramatics in the ghetto of Harlem under 
the leadership of Leroy Jones, became a 
Black arts festival, whose searing indictment 
of welfare colonialism became a 
source of much controversy and embarrassment 
to the federal government.
Similarly, saJfe service programmes, such 
as parent teacher associations, slowly became 
converted into centres of parent 
protest. The experience of a small but 
influential parent organisation, Mobilisation 
of Mothers (MOM), organised byMobilisation for Youth, illustrates the 
process. Parent participation in education 
was interpreted not only as a process 
for educating parents but for educating 
teachers as well. However, as the 
parents attempted to spell out to the 
teachers and the principal what the needs 
of the children were, they encountered 
extreme professional resistance, which 
led to parental anger and indignationwhich, when greeted by professional resentment 
created protest and confrontation. 
To take another example, the neighbourhood 
service centres attempted to 
link the community action programmeand the poor by a strategy designed to 
make the poor aware of the agenciesavailable to help them through outreach, 
intake, referral, and follow up. 

Here then, was the traditional social 
work function of information, referral 

and follow up, combined with the rendering 
of specific services when referrals 
were cumbersome and inappropriate. One 
of the major areas for which families 
sought help was welfare. When referrals 
proved to be an inadequate procedurefor redressing grievances, social workers 
collaborated with lawyers to challengeadministrative procedures. The use of 
law as an instrument of social change 
was further buttressed by efforts to organise 
welfare recipients on their own 
behalf. These exper.iences inspired the 
creation o.f the weLfare rights movement. 
In reviewing ·these events I do not wish 
to imply a simple causal link between 
social work referred services, the legal 
use of test cases and the creation of a 
pressure group of welfare clients. But 
referral procedures when exercised bysocial workers in a political context did 
lead on to the use of more assertive 
instruments of persuasion. 

With over one thousand communityaction programmes in the United States 
it is self evident that not all the pro-
grammes created a pol·itical challenge.
Many programmes have attempted to 
work through the established agenciesdf the community. In these cases planning 
was essentially designed to conserve 
and to expand the established patterns of 
rendering services ·in the community 
as a whole. 

Kenneth Clark in his forthcoming book 
on community action, is extremely critical 
of this trend. "Community action,
while intended to be a means for the 
poor to change the harsh conditions of 
their life has been side tracked into setting 
up various "service" organisations, 
similar to the traditional services of government 
that have failed the poor and 
emphasised their dependence". Of 400 
different anti-poverty projects studied, the 
Clark report said, "three out of four had 
this 'service fault'." The Government Accounting 
Office (GAo) evaluation of 
economic opportunity programmes in 
rural areas offered a similar criticism. 
After listing the service areas that rural 
community action programmes funded, 
they went on to assert "these services, 
although in themselves beneficial, can do 


little toward mitigating the basic problem 
in poverty". 

university research 

Since the programmes were tentative and 
experimental, research was central to the 
entire social aotion [ramework. The reseachers 
were called upon to make a 
contr.ibution both to the development of 
social policy and to the assessment of 
policies already implemented. I draw 
here the distinction between reseMch for 
planning, and research for evaluation of 
established plans. Logically the federal 
government turned to the universities to 
recruit the intellectual talent needed to 
/undertake such evaluative and planning 
studies. But the essence of planning is 
timing and the crucial ingredient in evaluation 
is relevance, and on both of these 
counts universi·ty academics seemed hopelessly 
inept. I offer one example to illustrate 
what is a trend. The research staff 
in the Philadelphia project for delinquency 
prevention undertook to conduct 
a survey of the perception by Negroyouth of relevant others in the familyand community who contributed to their 
emotional development and to their per· 
sonal identity. There were two major de· 
fects with the study. First its design was 
focussed on the attitudes and aspirationsof Negro youth, rather than on the performance 
of institutions. Thus the researchers 
imposed on the planning a 
methodology of survey research which 
altered the purposes of the planning process 
as they were defined by the planners. 

Research based academics tended to 
~dy the problems they were interested 
m and those fo!f which they felt theyhad special competence. But the more 
serious indictment of the research efforts 
i~ t.hat they could not comply with the 
t1mmg demands of social action projects. 

It is now almost half a dozen years later. 
The planning organisa·tion has gone out 
of existence having been r~laced by a 
community action agency and then by a 
model cities programme. The research 
team has not yet fully analysed their 
findings and a final report is still forth


coming. There is no doubt that the 
efforts will in time lead to a scholarlybook, but of very lit·tle use to the action 
agency which comrn,jssioned the study. 

the interpretation of 
action and research findings 

One of the major assumptions in experimentally 
designed social action pro-
grammes is that research will produce 
information which in turn will be useful 
for planning. Or more pretentiouslystated, social science knowledge can 
make a significant contribution to the 
development of scientific government. 
But virtually no project was prepared to 
think through in advance the policy implications 
that negative or positive findings 
from research might imply for 
action. 

Would positive findings be retained when 
the programme was implemented on a 
larger scale with less resources? HigherHorizon programmes, for example, were 
an experimental success and a programatic 
failure. But sociological research 
more typically uncovers negative or non-
statistically s1gnificant differences. How 
should this be interpreted? In the evaluation 
of social work, psychotherapy, community 
action, compensatory education, 
the findings all suggest these programmes 
have no measura:ble irnpaots. But what 
implications are to be drawn from such 
findings? In psychotherapeutic research, 
although clients do not c'hange by any 
olbjectoive criteria, they do appear to feel 
better. And patients' satisfaction makes 
therapy important and useful for them. 
Should these prog·rammes be supported 
when they fail by some criteria and succeed 
by others? Or consider community 
action programmes ; the projects may 
not have helped a disadvantaged youth 
secure adequate paying jobs, but theydid in many instances help create increased 
involvement by the black middle 
class in local and national politics. Such 
a side effect may be the significant outcome 
of the programme ; but it may not 
have been included as a criterion of pro-
gramme success. How are spill over 
effects to be assessed in determining the 
future development of policy? Since the 


goals could not be defined in advance 
the evaluation of the impact of the pro-
gramme was uncertain and commitment 
to its findings was indeterminate. 

Finally, methodological weakness mayobscure the findings. For example, in the 
evaluation of the Head Start programme 
no systematic attempt was made to determine 
the nature of the programmaticinputs and so non-events and events were 
aggregated. Because of the failure to 
standardise the programmatic input it is 
not clear what inputs had been evaluated. 
It is easier to reject the research 
for its weakness than reject the pro-
gramme for its effectiveness. 

conclusions 

One compelling conclusion to be drawn 
from this summary of the American experience 
is that clarity of purposes and 
adequacy of resources is crucial for pro-
gramme effectiveness. But on the other 
hand this may be too harsh an assessment 
; community action may be better 
understood as a strategy for buildingconstituencies and thus altering the level 
and the distribution of resources whatever 
the impact or adequacy of these resources 
may be. Scientific inquiry about 
the impact of these resources on some 
independently defined objective criterion 
may obscure and confuse this political 
strategy for multiplying resources. This, 
of course, does not imply that knowingthe impact of resources on predefinedobjectives is not important. But it mayhardly be the most important purpose of 
EPAS, CPOS, urban area projects, and 
American community action. 


4. local authorities and 
social change 


Robin Guthrie 

The relationships in a town between the 
local authority and the voluntary organisations 
are often a better indicator of 
the social and political character of the 
community than the colour of the partyin power and the turn out at local elections. 


In the London Borough of Kensingtonand Chelsea, for example, the relationship 
between the borough council and 
the newer forceful organisations in Not-
ting Hill appears to be one of unremitting 
hostility ; each side has different 
priorities and conflicting objectives, and 
each has given up hope of changing the 
other. Politics spill away .from the town 
hall into the streets. 

Elsewhere voluntary organisations docilely 
accept policies and terms of reference 
from the town hall and even the 
requirement to have a councillor as 
chairman. Their capacity to help people 
solve their personal problems is not impaired, 
but they are impotent to tackle 
the root causes of those problems. No 
voice is raised outside the council chamber 
and the committee room to questionpolicies, unless the local press takes upan issue of its own accord. 

Neither extreme is satisfactory ; one 
leads to revolution, the other to apathy, 
and apart from the very few people for 
whom things are so bad that even a full 
scale revolution could not make them 
worse, nobody gains from either. On the 
nther hand conflict between the elected 
representatives and people operating outside 
conventional political structures can 
be fruitful, however unwelcome it may 
seem at first to some. Jim Radford and 
the London Squatters' Association (LSA)
are among those who have demonstrated 
it. There is a problem of homelessness,
but the local authorities have tended to 
take the way of the long term solution 
and of easy administration; LSA identified 
a part of the solution and tackled it 
head on-tough and uncompromising, 
but ready to talk with an authoritywhich they always assumed would wish 
to act reasonably, even if there was evidence 
to the contrary. Similar examples 
can be found up and down ,the country, 

where people have spoken up and acted 
without fear to change their administrative 
and often their physical environment. 

The fact that the pressure for change 
comes so frequently from outside local 
authorities, and is so often well publicised, 
gives emphasis to the popular image 
of local authorities as reactionarybureaucracies dedicated primarily to self 
preservation. 

Some of them are. It would be surprising 
if they were not, given the factors with 
which they have to cope. They have, to 
start with, been lumbered with a burden 
of routine activity which nobody wants 
to know a~bout-unless things go wrong 
-but which everybody wants done. 
Sewers, refuse collection, street lighting, 
traffic lights, highway maintenance, parks 
and verges, rate and rent collection, and 
the routine aspects of public health, 
weights and measures, educational administration, 
planning control, and a 
multiplicity of other chores fill the local 
authority year and excite few passions-
although they too can be imaginatively, 
efficiently and economically performed. 

In the execution of these and other 
duties, however, a prime requirement of 
local authorities is that they should be 

fair and seen to be fair ; no one section 
of the community can lbe allowed an 
advantage not shared by all the other 
ratepayers. This is particularly difficult 
for the passive authority which must 
always be arbitrating between the new 
ideas and claims for attention which we 
thrust upon it, but it also.lirnits the scopeof the more imaginative. The members 
of a housing authority which, in or9er to 
facilitate the mobility of workers which 
is essential to our economy, drops the 
residential qualification for council housing 
will quickly lose votes; one which 
by contrast discriminates against newcomers 
will gain votes from the existing.population out of all proportion to the 
number they might gain from the mobile 
population, who are less likely to vote in 
local elections anyway. 

These pressures tend to reinforce the 
universal tendency in any organisation 


for internal structures and loyalties to 
affect its stated objectives. Local authorities 
are no exception. The body of full 
time personnel are under pressure to 
judge their own performance less in relation 
to the task and the people they are 
there to serve than by what their chief 
and the leader of the council may think 
of their performance. The pressure is all 
the more acute for men and women with 
a career to make within a well established 
profession. The hierarchy looks upwardover its shoulder, even while it is ostensibly 
engaged in the task in hand. It is 
difficult enough for middle management 
to retain consistent priorities ; pity the 
poor receptionist who has to deal with 
the angry, worried man in overalls during 
his lunch hour and at the same time 
to impress her boss and enhance the reputation 
of the institution she works for. 
Pity the poor man in overalls. 

The drab hand of officialdom, where it 
occurs, can be reflected in the politics of 
local government, particulafly the stable 
ones which have been for years the preserve 
of one or other party. At worst, 
decisions are made behind closed doors 
by the caucus of the majority party instead 
of in the open. Like its opposition 
counterpart, the caucus resembles more a 
club than a sensitive political machine 
for social change and advance. Elections 
in such circumstances become a time to 
decide who should remain in the club 
rather than a serious exposure of policies 
and performances to the voters, who 
may not, in consequence, take much interest 
in the polls. 

Of all the aberations, however, which 
from time to time affect a local authority, 
the most suffocating is the delusion 
of omnipotence. "This is our job; we'll 
get on with it" is another way of saying 
that any contribution from a private citizen 
is mere interference with esta!blished 
power structures. It is not easy to peruade 
the relevant authority that in omitting 
play spaces for children in a multitorey 
development it has failed to 
achieve its own objective of a better environment 
for the families it is rehousing, 
still less to do something about it after 
the scheme is completed. It was impos


sible to persuade the London CountyCouncil that people could spend ten 
years in their schools and still be unable 
to read or write ; but it happens, and it 
reflects no shame on any successful 
authority, least of all the old Lee, to acknowledge 
that a small but importantproportion have failed . (fhe Inner London 
Education Authority has now both 
extended the scheme of extra, peripatetic, 
teachers in schools, and is supporting the 
volunteers who act as tutors to illiterates 
in London through the CambridgeHouse Literacy Scheme.) The assumption 
on the part of a local authority both 
that it can do no wrong and that criticism 
and help from outside constitutes 
unwarranted interference is itself an unwarranted 
assumption of omnipotencethat will not be tolerated by an increasingly 
sophisticated and consumer conscious 
society, whether or not they bother 
to vote in the periodic local elections. 

the power to effect 
social change 

Redevelopment, or urban renewal, provides 
one of the most dramatic examplesof the power of local authorities to bring 
a-bout social change ; often enough it also 
highlights their weaknesses. Millions of 
pounds are spent on the destruction of 
old homes and the building of new, without 
necessarily acfding to the total number 
of homes available for people. The 
social fabric is torn down together with 
the buildings and no effort is made to 
rebuild it, even if anyone knew how. 
Worse still, the authority is unwittinglydestroying precisely those cheap, rented 
homes without which life will become 
impossible for the families who now use 
them and who will then become an extra 
burden for the local authorities themselves. 
In any town there is usually at 
least one twilight area that is generallyviewed with scorn, but which is at 
least easy for newcomers, single people 
or improverished people to move into, 
and for old people to live on in ; demolish 
it, and the housing problem is 
dramatically intensified. In any largescheme of redevelopment much that is 
perfectly good, or capa•ble of being renovated, 
disappears along with unre



deemable slums. What replaces them is 
sometimes good, but often is an architectural 
and social disaster. And the process 
of change, for those who are directly 
affected, is compounded of fear, anxiety, 
dirt, diminishing services, vandalism and 
despair. 

On the other hand, in Leeds, for example, 
a radical clergyman active in politics 
in the thirties gave the housing committee 
a tradition which is carried on by 
his successors. As soon as coloured immigrants 
began in their turn to move 
into Chapeltown, previously used as a 
first base by Jewish, Polish and Irish 
immigrants successively, the housingmanager began buying in the houses to 
convert them and let them as cheap accommodation 
for the purpose they had 
served for so long. The environment has 
been gradually improved, both ·by the 
residents and by the council. There has 
never been any question of demolishingthe area, which would have been necessary 
by now without early action and 
which would have entailed the loss of an 
irreplacable part of the total housingprovision. 

This kind of sensitive and comprehensive 
approach is not utterly untypical of 
local government, despite the inherent 
difficulties which local authorities face. 
Rarely, however, is local government 
seen as an agent of reform or a source 
of radical ideas. Consequently it does 
not attract into its service all the reformers 
or active radicals it might. Even 
the government, when it initiates a majordevelopment such as the urban pro-
gramme, expects to have to persuade the 
local authorities to a more progressivepoint of view ; in the case of new towns, 
it appoints its own agency for the job. 


alternative forms 
of democracy 

As a result, much social change is initiated 
without reference to elected members 
and their officers, although it is the 
local authority which must absorb the 
change and distribute its benefits. Alternative 
forms of democracy are therefore 
being ·sought, under the general heading 

of community development or community 
action. 

Community work, to use an umbrella 
term, derives from two main streams of 
thought and action: social work and 
politics. 

Social work has been concerned with 
helping people in difficulty, mainly in 
this country, by offering them a relationship 
with a professional caseworker. The 
caseworker may deal with the client in 
his family situation or immediate group, 
but the relationship remains an intimate 
one to one affair, geared to the restoration 
of a particular person. It has become 
more apparent, however, that much of 
the pathology with which the caseworker 
deals arises from the physical and social 
environment of whole communities. The 
best way of affecting this environment 
and preventing some of the individual 
breakdowns is to tackle it as a whole 
from within, identifying latent resources 
of talent and energy and relating them 
to what people in the community feel is 
what they want. The aim is, in the words 
of last year's Gulbenkian report, "to 
broaden and deepen the community's understanding 
of its own general problems 
and those of particular groups. This, 
though apparently slower than tellingpeople what they need and how to 
achieve it, an approach which they frequently 
reject, is assumed in the long 
run to be more effective, and to helpself development and self determination." 
(Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Community 
work and social change, Long-
mans 1968). 

The Gulkenkian Report goes on to describe 
community work as "essentiallyconcerned with affecting the course of 
social change", or as "part of a protestagainst apathy and complacency and 
against distant and anonymous authority". 
This sounds more like politics (although 
the Report does not discuss it as 
such). There are people actively involved 
in affecting social change, often usingpolitical methods, who are not part of 
the regular pattern of politics. 

Both approaches are important. They can 


even coincide. But it is important to distinguish 
between them, or we risk deceiving 
the people with whom we work. 
The politician basically depends on getting 
enough people to support him, 
whether at the polls or in the streets. 
The community worker operates throughthe people with whom he comes into contact; 
he helps them to identify problems 
or opportunities which they may well 
have felt but have not necessarily thoughtabout, and to set up and achieve possible 
solutions or objectives of their own 
choosing. 

The crucial difference emerges when the 
worker's values are challenged, as theyoften are, for example, in the field of 
race relations. Community relations 
workers are usually employed by a local 
community relations committee or directly 
by a local authority. They have the 
somewhat inadequate brief to improverace relations in the area. If they operate 
as community workers, helping people 
to identify their problems and to do 
something about them they may well find 
themselves in opposition to their own 
liberal point of view: "We don't like the 
blacks and we don't want them". He 
cannot simply tell them they are wrong. 
He can only try to restore them to their 
original objectives. 

For the politician, official or unofficial, 
the reverse is the case. It is his voice 
which must be heard, and must be effective. 
If it is to rbe so, he must convince 
enough people that he is right, and he 
must be able to prove his success at the 
polls or in the streets ; he has a task of 
persuasion which is foreign to the community 
worker. 

Local authorities, with or without reorganisation, 
must be prepared to meet the 
double challenge of apathy on the one 
hand and of unconventional political activity 
on the other. Community workers, 
whether employed by the local authority 
or by a voluntary organisation, will be 
able to help in the process of interpretingpolicies to people and of interpretingpeople's feelings to the authority. Conversely, 
those who choose to effect social 
change outside the conventional channels 

of local democracy must be ready to understand 
not only the tangible problems 
of a local authority in maintaining the 
essential services, but also the less tangible 
factors local authorities have to live 
with. For both sides a conflict of opinions 
is not merely an obstacle to social 
change or an improper interference with ' 
statutory powers; it is the essential weapon 
of democracy, which in some places 
has ·been too long gathering rust. 


5. the social worl<er 
and community action 
Dorothy Runnicles 

Aiding groups to form and take collective 
action has been seen by some social 
workers as a valid method of working.
With some workers it has arisen from 
their emphasis on pursuing work to prevent 
family and individual breakdown. 
With other workers it has been used as a 
therapeutic method to help break apathyand despair. 

We have, otf course, been influenced by 
the American experiments in this field, 
and the developments in psychiatric hospital 
treatment. And there are fortunatelythose who have never seen themselves in 
any other role but that of a resource to 
the community they serve in helpingstimulate action by them and with them 
and alongside them towards more equality. 


There are examples of statutory and 
voluntary efforts where social workers 
have been employed from the strategicpoints of adventure playgrounds and detached 
family advice centres. Also where 
they are working alongside communities 
of people with special problems or specialinterests like the social workers in the 
Brighton Archways Project aiding the 
beatniks. 

We have had examples of mental 
welfare officers aiding and helping the 
formation and strengthening of groupsof people receiving their services, for example, 
the parents of the educationallysub·normal; the development of foster 
parent groups by child care officers in 
some children's departments, for mutual 
support and action. Some local authorities 
aided play group development by 
employing a worker (for example, psychiatric 
social worker) who has acted as 
an accessible source of help to voluntaryparent managed groups. These are as yet 
isolated examples which illustrate possible 
opportunities. 

Social workers -in general can help public 
opinion accept the need for communityaction. This can be done by a varietyof methods, one of which is collectingand publishing evidence from their work 
to make more widely known amongstthe public the linked cycle, of poverty 

and social impoverishment that is still 
occurring for a sizeable minority in our 
society. Poor housing, low educational 
opportunity, reduced play facilities, insufficient 
social services and inadequate 
budgets are some of the linked factors 
we often see in the course of our social 
work activity. As residents and parents 
we can act in our own neighbourhoodsas active participants in local groups. 

By aiding public opinion to understand 
this linked cycle social workers wiil come 
some way to dispel the continued existance 
of the philosophy of the deservingand nondeserving poor. 

They can identify and link up peoplewith common stresses relating to their 
environment who they meet in the course 
of their work. For example, by bringing 
together people handicapped by lack of 
play facilities or inadequate housing to 
promote mutual support and action. Advice 
and help can be directed to linkingpeople together with common needs. The 
formation of such groups will provide 
the basis of collective act-ivity where this 
does not occur spontaneously or by other 
means. It is important that social workers 
in touch with the public know of any 
groups or organisations concerned with 
common problems and interests in existence 
in their locality, to whom they can 
appropriately retfer people like neighbourhood 
associations, tenants associations, 
consumer groups concerned with 
welfare rights, schools or hospitals. In 
most areas such groups are non-existent. 
The Seebohm Report suggests that 
one task of social work activity could 
be to help such groups into existence and 
to apply some resources of manpower to 
this end, especially in areas where there 
is mobility of population, immigrants 
groups and new communities. Such developments 
constitute part of the task of 
community social work. 

Within existing local authority departments 
and agencies they can help the development 
of consumer groups. For example, 
in some areas social workers have 
aided groups of the disabled and those 
on supplementary benefits and helped in 
the provision of local advice and inform



ation centres. For many this has been 
outside their official task. 

From their present diverse branches they 
can provide information about the different 
services and consumers' rights to 
key people in neighbourhoods and to 
consumer groups. For example, local tenants' 
associations can be a-ided in their 
task of helping their membership with 
problems by the social service agents that 
serve their area. Providing information 
to groups can strengthen their efforts. 
In the area in which I work the 
mental welfare officer makes weekly calls 
to local helping agents most likely to be 
in touch with those needing mental 
health services. 

There is a hope that more and more 
social workers serving areas will be seen 
as potential allies of local groups along 
with more doctors, teachers and lawyers. 
One hopes more groups will seek their 
collaboration. There is a special need for 
help to minority groups where publictolerance is less evident. Greater local 
participation could act against these mi:-~orities' 
interests. 

In order to divert manpower to the aiding 
of community interests, social workers 
can press for a more rational use of 
their present resources. Changes to be 
encompassed in this field of reorganisation 
will demand a high measure of common 
purpose to see that the services we 
offer in quality and quantity are of maximum 
use to the public we are paid to 
serve, alongside teachers, doctors, lawyers, 
clergy, serving in the area. Better 
referral services could be promoted by 
providing expert diagnosis about which 
services most appropriately can be used 
by those seeking help. 

community work 

There hasbeen anin_c_r_e_a_s_e_l··-n--:t..h_e_e_m_ployment 
of community workers and 
community development officers by local 
authorities, new town corporations, and 
by volunta:ry agents and neighbourhood 
groups. Their ·tasks are related to community 
needs both in the area of com


munity development and community organisation. 
Some of those who have developed 
their work along these lines have 
been paid by various local authority departments 
under a variety of legislation.
They have to contend with many constraints 
and with conflicts that their work 
engenders. But all jobs are subject to 
constraints and if social work is viewed · 
as an exercise of collccboration and problem 
solving, then we can hope to learn· 
from experience and devise strategies to 
attempt to overcome some of these problems. 
Encouragement should be given by 
making money available to indigenousgroups in socially deprived areas. 

The term "community work" can be 
used in many different ways by different 
people. The Gulbenkian Report Community 
work and social change, published 
early in 1969 provides one useful 
definition. It says "it typically consists of 
social work with groups of loca:l people 
who have come into existence because 
they want to change something or do 
something that concerns them. It _also 
embraces attempts to relate the acti-¢tties 
of social agencies more closely to the 
needs of the people they serve." It goes 
on to elaborate that "community work 
is essentially concerned with social 
change brought aJbout through the two 
processes of analysing social §.ituationsand forming relationships with different 
groups to bring about some desirable 
change". 

These two processes are seen as interrelated 
activities. At present if and where 
either of these processes are undertaken 
they are seldom carried out by the same 
members of a group. For example, in 
the social services the senior peoplewho are not personally in touch 
with clients nor based in one locality,
are responsible for analysing social situations 
and taking policy decisions. This 
task of analysing a social situation is 
also undertaken by people in research 
and in teaching jobs in universities or 
statistical departments of local or central 
government. 

These people concerned with policymaking are often separate from the field 


workers, who are at the other end of 
the scale and who are forming relationships 
with different groups to bringabout change. The middle management 
!iase to co-ordinate social service departments, 
and here again the people concerned 
with co-ordination rarely have 
first hand contact with the needs of the 
people in the locality. 

Where work is concerned with forming 
relationships with groups of local residents 
to bring about change, some departments 
delegate a field worker (if any 
resource is allocated at all). This method 
of splitting up the community work tasks 
through the hierarchy seems inappropriate. 
Until services to the pUJbloic can find 
ways of undertaking their planning function 
in consultation with the consumers 
and field workers we are likely to continue 
to see problems of irrelevance and 
inappropriateness recurring. 

The task facing co-ordinating groupswithin the social services is to make their 
services more appropriate to neighbourhoods. 
In order to do this weH they need 
to know the views of the residents and 
the consumers of their services. Community 
workers have a task to aid them 
in this process. Situations in local neighbourhoods 
change fast, so t:he social services 
need constant awareness of local 
factors affecting the relevance of services. 
Identifying needs cannot be undertaken 
once and acted upon yearslater. If we want local services to be 
relevant and appropriate then residents 
and others undertaking local neighbourhood 
tasks must be allowed to carrythrough their strategies and discuss needs 
.for change with those who hold the 
power. Hierarchical structures and closed 
communication channels do not fit with 

the need for change and innovation. 

Community workers also have the task 
of aiding social services to accept the 
response of community action which they 
will be attempting to aid locally around 
issues that are important to Jocal people. 
If in fact the local authority services can 
understand the importance of a responsive 
community to their own effectiveness 
as well as to the furctioning of 

healthy democracy, then the communityaction groups may receive a better response 
to their efforts when they produce 
changes by their collective activity. 

The community worker seeks to increase 
the availability of the strengths of areas 
and the mobilising of resources. In their 
analysis of social situations community 
workers will be concerned with the way 
in which ·resources are allocated in relation 
to needs. We cannot pretend when 
effective community work in deprived 
areas will enable people to form self 
heLp groups that these groups will reduce 
demands on services. 

The Seebohm Report and other studies 
reveal the unequal distribution of services 
and the basic lack of t:hem to manypeople who need help. Jean Pakeman's 
book, Child care needs and numbers, 
revealed that where services are good in 
terms of numbers and trained personnel, 
demand is higher. Though it was my experience 
that local domiciliary and day 
care services can prevent reception into 
care if social workers concentrate with 
residents on improving local solutions to 
family difficulties. 

Such local application of knowledge and 
service can increase the opportunity for 
community care, though this may demand 
more domiciliary and local centres 
for day care heLp for the young, old and 
handicapped. 

The energies being applied by hospital 
and institutional staff to enable their residents 
to be rehabilitated in the community 
will demand a •better service. However 
it is the task of the communityworker to promote and aid community 
groups with their own leadership, who 
will seek heLp themselves either by demanding 
better services, like housing or 
play space or day care, or to enable 
them to contri'bute to each other more 
effectively in their day to day l•ives. 

Of course community action groups can 
work to very different ends. Not everything 
they do would generally be thoughtvaluable; for example, where community 
action was being promoted against 


gypsies. Tensions and conflicts between 
interests and amongst groups are likely. 

community action 
in Southwark 

In the Southwark Community Project,
sponsored by the National Institute for 
Social Work Training, which has now 
been running very well since 1968, we 
have begun to see some of the opportunities 
for working 'in a deprived neighbourhood 
alongside residents and peoplein the various services. We see these 
tasks as interrelated to promote social 
change and perhaps this could be illustrated 
by one recent example in which 
a team member participated. 

One of our areas of interest is m the 
social planning being undertaken by the 
borough. The Planning Department is 
constructing development plans for the 
physical renewal of different areas. Byworking alongside the planners in their 
attempts to make physical planning more 
useful and relevant to the public and to 
social planning, we have attempted to 
act to them as a resource. 

In recent months a piece of land was 
known to be becoming available and in· 
formation was passed to us by the Planning 
Department staff to see if we could 
help by discovering what the localityfelt about its use. There were alreadydemands from various departments for 
making use of this land and the local 
hospital wanted to use it as consultants' 
car park. The only people who were not 
offering suggestions were the local residents. 
The task of the community worker 
with this information was to find out 
how a residents' group could be mobilised. 


This task was undertaken alongside interested 
residents in the area by getting 
representatives interested from a varietyof blocks in the vicinity of the piece of 
land and aiding maximum participationand discussion to take place collectively 
about 'it. The most ,pressing need from 
the residents' viewpoint appeared to be 
that of a local playground accessible to 
their children and appropriate to their 

particular play needs. They petitionedthe area widely, put up posters and 
planned public meetings. 

In this area there is very little open space 
and that which is open to the children 
has various constraints placed upon it. 
Parents then undertook a study of what 
sort of play space they would prefer, and 
after a few months were prepared to approach 
the council, asking for a delegation 
to be received to discuss the use of 
this land with a group of councillors and 
officials.They presented an articulate case 
with substantial evidence which impressed 
both the councillors and officers and theyachieved their aim of consideration for 
the land to be used as an adventure play 
ground with local participation and management. 
Our team member has acted as 
a servicing agent at their request. 

Similarly, we have worked with community 
groups concerned about their housing 
conditions. We have also worked with 
sooial service groups who have been 
looking at the needs of a particular estate 
and we have aided them in this task by 
initiating with other people a study of 
residents' views about the services and 
local life on the estates in question. 

The aim is to aid community action by 
neighbourhood groups interacting, we 
hope, with more responsible local services 
who are becoming aware of the 
need for changes and who are helped in 
this by the analysis of social situations 
with which they are concerned. 

The mal-functioning of the economic 
system and the lack of a minimum wage 
structure ; the educational limitations 
and financial and housing problems of 
the unskilled and of large families and 
the limitations of the post~war efforts to 
improve social justice are facts to be recognised. 
These must be acted on at a 
national level. It is important that 
we recognise that the power to cure such 
problems lies with the political structure 
and relates to the distribution of resources 
and power. It is romantic to 
see all hope in local action-we need related 
action at various .levels. 


6. St. Ann's, Nottingham 
Ray Gosling 

The mansions and the shanties. 

In Rio, Brazil, there was a fortune teller 
who managed to sell housing costing 
£20,000 each, in monthly payments. Theywere houses in heaven and the contracts 
specified occupaNon after death. The fortune 
teller was jailed for three months. 

Nice to be here, for here I lived-7 Stratford 
Square, Shakespeare Street-when I 
first came to Nottingham. Here where 
now is this new art college. 

Who am I? 

I am 30 years old. 

I was born in Northampton. 

For the past seven years I have lived by 
documentary writing, and I have a considerable 
reputation-it's nice to work 
for The Times and New Society and BBC 
3 and Granada Television. I have a room 
in London and a room in Manchester, 
but here is my home. One of the advantages 
of C20 living is you can live anywhere 
with a 'phone and trains and 
planes. No kudos problems. 

I have no money, no desire for money. 

I am not subject to the normal family 
pressures of children and the wife. 

I don't expect to die in Nottingham, but 
I hope to live here for some time yet. 

It's a nice city. 

Compared to other towns Nottingham is 
a relatively isolated Midland conurbation-
Queen of the Midlands, Arse of 
the North with a conurbation populationapproaching three quarters of a million. 

The County Borough of Nottingham is 
the centre with a population inside city 
limits of around 300,000. 

Basically the town has two sides-west 
and east. 

The West side facing the Derbyshire hills 
from where came Jeremiah Brandreth 

and the Chartists. D.H. Lawrence. Alan 
Sillitoe. Nedd Ludd who like Kilroy was 
always there but never seen. The Luddites 
were small men who wore black 
scarves over their faces. They !broke the 
hosiery frames with a hammer called 
"Enoch". They chanted "Enoch shall 
break what Enoch makes". Because it 
was at a factory owned by a man called 
Enoch the first frame was put. 

The West side is raughting, stroppy, colourful. 
It has three big industrial plants 
-Raleigh, Boots, Players, and the University 
and the Institute .for Workers 
Control, and Bulwell, where the present 
leader Alderman Derbyshire was born 
and grew up. 

The Eastern side is a little duller. It faces 
flat Lincolnshire and 150 to 200 years 
ago people from the east came to settle 
-small lace factories, hose factories, cottage 
industries. Many houses were built. 
Some big, but most of them two up two 
down, three up three down, two or three 
storey terrace, single, family dwellingswithout bath, without inside toilet-the 
lavatory a shed at the bottom of the 
yard. 

Sneinton. Carlton Road. Gordon Road. 
Bluebell Hill. St. Ann's. St. Ann's Well. 
Woodborough Road. J1he main roads going 
east to west and the housing roads 
off them at right angles up the sides of 
the hiHs. 

Some were in owner occupation, but 
most were owned either by the landlord, 
who is the lady at the corner and can't/
couldn't afford to maintain and improve, 
or by a large trust body, who managed 
their properties through agentswhose motivation was often to get as 
much rent with as little trouble. Accommodation 
was always cheap. 

In the 1920s politicians began to say parts 
of St. Ann's should come down. At that 
time the Corporation were clearing the 
Broad Marsh and Little M&rsh, the 
ancient stews and progressive politicians 
said the momentum should be continued 
to deal with the bad in St. Ann's. Nothing 
happened and nothing was done. 


We have an advice shop. 

Old residents have heard politicians saying 
each May St. Ann's to come downthatrs 
my programme, a bright brave new 
future my campaign. And nothing happened. 


During the Second World War was some 
bomb damage and some council houses 
were built to replace the damage. More 
talk of tomorrow. Not everyone waited 
for the tomorrow. Many got out on their 
own, through the Corporation waitinglist or Forces waiting list or savings and 
bought-and in their place came Poles 
and Ukrainians and Italians. 

In 1950s came West Indians and Indians 
and Pakistanis, few Africans and a few 
Chinese. In 1958 there was a riot between 
white teddy boys and black men 
at the bottom of Robin Hood Chase/St. 
Ann's Well Road. It was the first race 
riot •in Britain in modern times. I was 
living in Ladbroke Grove in London at 
the time and weLl remember the news 
coming down that hot summer of bashing 
the •blacks they are up in Nottingham 
: that's the idea-and within a dayWest London had followed suit. 

The controls on people came from many 
sources. The small shop, the small factory, 
the out-work, the parson, landlord, 
corporation, estate agent. On HungerHill allotment gardens ·people fed themselves. 
In spite of the flare ups and the 
problem people, the majority were decent, 
almost pre-mass production 1industrial 
consuming man. The minorities 
found a lot of freedom to set up small 
businesses, delicatessen, shebeens. We 
got the "pot" .pub. We got the upstairs 
room of the Newtown Inn handed over 
to lesbians to run as a kind of club of 
their own. Yacht makers-but the fabric 
was rotten and no one did anything. 
Politicians made bigger promises of 
grander schemes. 

In 1965 I moved from here on this art 
college site to there on the edge of St. 
Ann's. Not really St. Ann's, althoughthe ward boundary is 50 yards away, but 
for my shopping, drinking, walking, I 

used St. Ann's a lot and liked it a lot 1 
and talked to many people and got myself 
an allotment and grew things. I had 
talked to a group of architect students 
about anarchy and Buckminster Fuller 
and Gilberto Freyre and one of the students 
moved near to me, even nearer to 
St. Ann's, to live. 

It's nice to think that once in one's life 

one has an original thought. Not true. 

At this time Nottingham got itself a 
Town Clerk and Chief Executive Officer, 
and a City Architect, and a City Planning 
Officer, and formed a Chief Officers' 
group (coG). The officers were lookingabout. The Council was controlled bythe Labour Party who in Nottinghamthen were controlled by the Co-op and 
the Union Stewards. 

Three of the final year students got permission 
to do a joint final year thesis 
and to do it on St. Ann's. They wanted 
to involve the people, the client. I spent 
a lot of time with them and they spent 
a lot of time with me and all of us in 
St. Ann's. It so happened the man at the 
architeot's drawing office was a newlyelected Tory councillor for St. Ann's, and 
he had a mate who had a stall on the 
market, who was also a Tory councillor 
for St. Ann's. Councillors who have stalls 
on markets are easily accessible. Not 
necessary to talk to him, but to be there 
and Jet him be there. 

We discovered by ferreUing, and in those 
days it was really cloak and dagger. One 
of the three architects got a job for the 
summer in the City Architect's office to 
ferret. It was a desperate business getting 
information then. The Corporationhad a dream of deck axis flats across 
the valley because it was a vaJ.ley. The 
Corporation had a scheme for demolishing 
all the area. The Corporation had 
been asked by the ruJ.ing Labour Partyto draw up detailed plans for demolishing 
all this area-what became phase one. 

We-that is three final year architect 
students and myself, began to make a 
Wish Street map. It .produced highly 
complex answers. Some folk wanted to 


move from the area but thought their 
place was good and should stay up. Some 
folk thought their place was bad, but it 
was theirs and they wanted to stay. It 
was complex. The students continued to 
collect data. I looked at what was happening 
among agitators. Two sociologists 
were interested and were doing a 
survey into how much poverty there was. 
· They were not particularly interested in 
the area. Two Tory councillors were 
alive and ambitious. Labour Party was 
not as strong and active as we thought.
, On the ground it was weak and its plans 
were for comprehensive, total, re-development 
like tomorrow and as we walked 
and talked that made less and less sense. 
Some parts were so bad they should 
have come down in 1923: some so good 
they should be there in 2023. No squatters. 
A little but not very radical communist. 
No campaigning vicars. Strongbut not very socially conscious Catholic 
Church. It was v·irtually virgin ground 
and we decided to enter politics. Politics 

I 
for me is educating the broad mass of 
people, banding them together, stimulating 
their social beings. Something like 
that. 

We called ourselves a tenants' and resident 
association. We paid-it was about 
£30 for 20,000 leaflets which we delivered 
in every door in the_ area and all its 
fringes-fringes important-includes us-
widens scope. 

The architect lads had done much more 
work and we incorporated into the leaflet 
a programme for a more human redevelopment 
we thought could be tackled 
quickly. 

We were careful to keep it to St. Ann's. 
No in X-town, with X-party. 

We were careful to write for inteUigent 
people-no look at what bastards they 
are. 

We timed the leaflet so it came just before 
council delbated the first compulsory 
purchase order. They were doingthis without a comprehensive plan. We 
sent copies to all councillors, press, etc. 
The programme we put for\'l'ard was to 

save the good, improve the improvable, 
and those houses with a life span of 
seven years (not fifteen) should get an 
improvement grant. We used the Leeds 
yardstick. Areas that were worse than 
bad should come out at once. There 
should be a timetable published. 

In phase one Cromer Road was goodand should stay. The streets behind it 
were bad and should go. North of Hungerhill 
Road was mixed and should be 
improved. On part of the allotment gardens 
new should be built for the first 
area of bad to be moved into. Then on 
that, that ·bad and so on. 

The object of the leaflet was to engage 
the people. Some 30,000 people received 
the leaflet and out of that number the 
serious response was two. A man who 
wanted to stay up. A lady who wanted 
to come down now and saw no chance. 
Whenever I have bad meetings now I 
remember two out of 30,000. 

We booked a hall and produced a second 
shorter leaflet calling people to a public 
meeting and some 400 people turned up 
at that and many were turned away. The 
area had risen up. 

In the municipal election of 1967 in 
which we stood, the Tories took control 
and the Labour Party virtually disappeared. 
Since then we have worked in a 
one party system. Since then we have 
kept ourselves carefully outside partypolitics and the municipal election arena. 
We were now a proper tenants' association 
and have stayed so, a people's body. 
We have been careful in using student 
help. We have •bitterly fought sociologists 
who have used the poverty among 
some of us to prove fundamentals. We 
have been sickened by politicians making 
song and dance about a particular problem 
during the carnival weeks of electioneering. 
You don't see them again. 

We have expanded into social action 
with playgroups, youth club, adventure 
playground, community worker. We 
have played a leading role in bringing together 
agencies of church and Corporation 
and people to make the new succeed. 


When we began there was nothing but 
an architect's dream and an intention to 
demolish one phase. In people's hearts 
there was despair. 

Now we have 12 phases with dates for 
demolition and dates for rebuilding and 
a comprehensive plan. 

I am still amazed at how many schemes 
in Britain don't have published timetables. 
Gorbals began in 1960. It isn't 
completed and no one is sure when. 

The argument to leave the good as retained 
areas was easy, but to have the 
not so good improved was impossible. 
It is a difficult argument and the Corporation 
behaved much better in speed 
of re-housing than we or anyone thought. 

Areas of down now have been achieved 
in part, but was only able to be done 
quietly ·because, while it may be true 
that Mrs. Jones is worse than Mrs. 
Evans, if Mrs. Evans sees Mrs. Jones 
coming down now she wonders why, and 
won't believe. People from one phase do 
not necessarily know another phase. 
Everyone wanted out once they saw the 
programme roll and will do until they 
see the rent bill. 

participation in the 
plans for the new 

Direct participation in general plans has 
been nil. It is always us who have to 
make the running. Never do they officially 
Iproperly say we would like youropinion on. We have worker throughmiddle grade officers, councillors, and 
public opinion. Recently in the light of 
Skeffington the Planning Office has asked 
that all bodies who want to be consulted 
be registered. 

There is a danger here. At present we 
can get hold of information. If information 
has to be channelled through the 
set up procedure then we may find some 
of our present sources drying up. 

In Liverpool the Federation of Tenants' 
Associations came to an agreement with 
their Corporation for full coo meetings 

once every two months. Fine theythought. A victory until they found that 
they couldn't raise the problem of Ethiopia 
Road but must let it rest until the 
regulation meeting. 

Notorious example of the gulf between 
Corporation and People is the Road, 
urban motorways. We are not property 
owners. The Corporation owns our land. 
The road plan was presented in 1964 as 
an idea of the City Engineer and it was 
approved in principle, as an idea, in 1965 
by the City Council. The City Engineer 
held a short exhibition and produced a 
glossy illustrative booklet. Then he got 
down .to making sure that the idea bystealth became a fact. The road plan has 
never been full argued. Both politicalparties have fought shy of thinking about 
it. Alternatives have never been considered. 
No consideration •given or opinionsought from any source having experience 
in community life. 

No high rise. No budgie boxes in the 
sky. We wanted houses like houses: highdensity, low rise. We got a Wimpey package 
deal. Wimpey were very good at 
public relations, to us: models and plans, 
but that was not participation. And what 
is a nice house !becomes a nightmare if 
it is repeated in thousands and thousands. 
No budgie boxes on the ground either. 

Participation is not really what we want. 
We want control. In the old times there 
were a number of controls. Now there 
will be one Corporation control. At a 
time when we have at last got a rent act 
for private tenants we find it doesn't 
apply to corporation tenants. 7s 6d rise 
a week in any 12 months. 

The chance for variety / choice / opportunity. 
Of rent and style and ownershipcontrol. 

The rich and the poor will have to go 
-only 10 four bed houses in 300 new 
units .phase two. No private landlord in 
the new, no owner occupiers, no housing 
association. 

Hark back to the scheme of the three 
architectural student lads. 


Small scale. 

Kit house. 

Self build. 

When they return they castigate the tenants' 
association they helped to form . 
, But we have to work in the given situa


r 
~ion. No one has done enough home 
work on smaller units. We have three 
chances for the future. 

The posher area on the fringe we can 
try having that made an ImprovementArea. Some down. Some improve. Maintain 
the standards of the majority. 

In the retained areas there will be a need 
in 10 or 20 or 40 years time to take 
them down as .their time comes. The new 
building to replace them can be small 
scale, varied, of a different time and style. 

The Church of England will keep, we 
hope, the land of their not so livingchurches. Build a new church to replace. 
But we hope they see the sense in hanging 
on to their land, developing it to 
provide alternatives in the area. 

In a normal place, a village, community, 
town-there is always something rotten 
being pulled down, something old being 
cherished and something new being built. 
It is a natural cycle. The process is continuous. 
We suffered because St. Ann's 
all went up at once. Then the fabric 
was left to :fall apart. No one patched. 
No one built anything new. Until too 
late and it was time .to take it nearly 
all down all at once. Nearly. That's the 
chance. 

The fringe. 

The retained. 

The Church of England. 

There can be no one solution. 

Many. Vim. Persistence. 


7. community action 
•

1n Notting Hill 

Jan O'Malley 

Notting Hill stretches from Kensal Road 
to Westbourne Grove, Bramley Road to 
Chepstow Road. It is a home for a very 
diverse community: the West Indian 
migrants, often still with dependents in 
their home country ; the indigenous English 
families; the Irish migrants, first or 
second generation, but now settling in 
the area ; the young newcomers coming 
from the provinces or abroad to study, 
take a job, or sometimes to find refuge 
in the anonymity of Notting Hill, and 
the middle class families, usually to be 
found in the restored houses. Most of 
these people cope very well. They are 
neither "slum dwellers" nor "problemfamilies" but firm, independent and resourceful. 


For more than a century Nott1ng Hill 
has been prey to the profit hungry owners 
of property. After years of neglect,
the crisis grew most acute in the 1950s 
and 1960s as the Rachman slumlords 
seized the shortage of homes as a chance 
to make vast profits through crowding 
families at extortionate rents. These 
families were forced by their work to 
live near the centre of London. Theywere forced to move into the only property 
that would take them. Low wages 
and often colour, prevented them from 
getting a mortgage on their own home. 
The shortage of Council housing, the 
endless waiting list and the five year wait 
before it was even possible to be placed 
on the list, made rehousing a very distant 
chance and the more respectable 
parts of Notting Hill and other areas 
were ruled out by "No children" or "No 
coloured". There was no choice but the 
one or two rooms in the decayed and 
overflowing tenements. 

Those are still the forces which pressdown on too many families. The husband 
and wife are never alone; the kids can 
play only in the cramped home or on 
the traffic ridden streets ; the teenagers 
are forced to choose between the stifling 
relationships at home or the policethreatened street corners; the sheer physical 
decay throws the family into despair 
in the struggle to keep up their self 
respect. Now and then they may try to 
break out-desperately searching for a 

better flat, badgering the landlord to repair 
the house, calling in the health man 
to force the landlord to do so. Yet always 
the reaction seems to be refusal, 
indifference, unkept promises-and often 
victimisation for being a "trouble 
maker". 

It would not be true to say that the 
Notting Hill family rots. It does not. 
Slowly, against overwhelming odds, the 
family usually finds its feet. A succession 
of grimy furnished rooms leads to an 
unfurnished flat with slightly more space, 
an opportunity in a new town or a housing 
trust (of which more later) tenancy. 
But not before incalculable damage is 
done to the family, leaving a legacy of 
bad health, poor education and shattered 
nerves, a legacy that the next generation 
will have to suffer. 

If the family gives up hope, after years 
of strugg-le and rebuffs, then society calls 
that "apathy". And if ever the strain is 
intolerable the authorities swoop like 
vultures. The family may be given support 
to avoid the break down by social 
workers and town hall agents, but they 
are also imprinted with the stigmas of 
failure: the "disturbed child", the "problem 
family". At best the workers hold 
the family together, at worst they harass, 
demoralise and destroy. Being financially 
dependent on the local authority they 
never offer a radical challenge to the real 
problems: the overcrowded home, the 
slum school and the ·rotten environment. 

the politics of 
North Kensington 

It is just to single out the Royal Borough 
as the major culprit for the present con-
di~ion of Notting Hill. Since 1900 the 
borough council has been controlled by 
Conservatives. Its dominant ethos is that 
of South Kensington . Its interests have 
been the interests of the landowner, the 
stock broker and the businessman. 

The record is plain. Nearly three quarters 
of the borough's housing is rented from 
private landlords, only 6 per cent is 
owned by the borough. Private development 
has always been encouraged, while 


compulsory purchase powers remain unused. 
The borough council builds fewer 
houses, leV'ies lower rates, gives less housing 
subsidy and charges higher rents than 
J any comparable London borough. The 
bleak figures spread much farther than 
housing into almost every aspect of the 
council's activities. One example is that 
the borough's health and welfare staff is 

. the smallest in London, just over half of 
their nearest rival. 

1 

1 Yet it is not the borough council alone 
., that is responsible for Notting Hill. The 
" ·conditions have ·been created by yearsof exploitation of the people who live 
there. Industry and business have attracted 
people to the heart of London where 
there is little chance of decent family 
1 life. Low wages make the search for 
better conditions virtually impossible.
The landlords either choose to maximise 
5 their profits by overcrowding their houses 
5 and neglecting repairs or are forced to, 
5 by crippling repayments to the mortgage 

: l dealer or merchant bank. 

The authorities have been willing accom~ 
plices in all this. Refusing to control 
r land prices or restrict profits made from 
the poorest people, they have taken at-
l tention away from the worst excesses by Ioffering the so-called compensatory sup/ 
port of educational, welfare and cultural 
facilities. But even these are thinly spread 

1

1 where they are needed most. Belated 
moves to enforce minimum conditions 
are defeated before they start as the 
landlords change their arrangements to 
maintain profits and to evade control. 
Last year's peeling tenements are becoming 
tomorrow's leasehold town apartments 
at the expense of the families for 
whom the damp single room was the 
only defence against homelessness. 
The classic case was that of 1-9 Colville 
Gardens. Run -in Rachman style byDavies Investment for 13 years, the 
houses have recently changed hands, first 
for £7,000 over the District Valuer's 
assessment and then, less than a yearlater for £120,000, £48,000 more. Theywill now be turned into luxury flats for 
rich people. Tenants who lived there 
have ·been turned out. The ,same trend 

can be traced in Colville Square, Powis 
Terrace, Arundel Gardens, Clarendon 
Road and throughout the area. Cheek by 
jowl with overcrowding and homelessness, 
new flats are being erected at prices 
up to £75,000. Whole streets change their 
character as chea:p rented accommodation 
is eroded by the invasion of the rich. 

These trends are encouraged or condoned 
by the borough council. Property companies 
are permitted to buy up large 
crowded homes, and planning agreement 
is given for luxury conversions. The 
council itself builds very little. Owner 
occupiers are encouraged by council 
mortgages and the government legislation 
for house improvements. Most critically, 
the council refuses to intervene in 
the housing market by buying up houses 
or using their compulsory powers. The 
money flows freely where the profits are 
largest. Inevitably that means the area 
will be changed to a primarily middle 
class community. The poor will be driven 
out. 

It is true that in the last few years pressures 
from inside the area, buttressed by 
full scale publicity, have brought changes 
in council policy. These changes, however, 
involving increased expenditurefrom the rates and heavy dependence on 
voluntary organisations (particularlyhousing trusts), will only alleviate some 
of the worst symptoms while leaving the 
basic problems alone until the pressuresof uncontrolled finance move them on 
to other areas beyond the boroughboundaries. 

the agents for change 

In this context we must look for the 
forces likely to bring about changes. The 
first consideration must go to traditional 
.political organisations. The main political 
parties have organisations in North 
Kensington, but in no way provide a 
meaningful political forum in the area. 
This is partly a ·result of the absence of 
a real party struggle in the area, in that 
the Tories rest secure with their overwhelming 
majority. The La:bour Party is 
the traditional opposition to the Conserv



ative council, yet their critical weakness 
lies in their failure to build up a radical 
movement instead of concentrating on a 
naHbw electoral strategy. The energy of 
the Party has been thrown into the 
machinery of winning elections, yet on 
the borough council the Labour councillors 
are inevitably a t·iny minority. Lacking 
support in the community, isolated 
from the people they are meant to serve, 
the councillors grow disheartened by the 
experience of constant ineffectiveness. 

The caucus which selects them growssteadily less representative. There are, 
for instance, few West Indians in the 
local party and the Gol'bome Ward is 
scarcely able to raise a quorum. The 
smaller political parties are just as ineffective 
as their more infl.uentiaJ rivals 
and have even less contact with the 
population, seeking only to gain respectaobility 
by imitating traditiona'l postures. 
Trade unions have little influence on 
local affairs. 

As in many areas, the stark record of a 
sectionally interested inhumane council 
has been challenged in a different wa.y. 
Notting Hill is littered with voluntaryand charitable organisations formed to 
get improvement and change. All were 
set up with enthusiasm and zeal, either 
to force change or to fill gaps left in 
public provision. Many of them have 
shown the way to a more sophisticatedand comprehensive supervision. Very few 
have managed to breach the structure 
that creates the .problems they wish to 
solve. 

('J 
The reasons for this are clear. Most voluntary 
groups have come into existence 
as the result of a swell of outrage over 
some excess or other. Demands for 
wholesale change are presented and are 
refused. The group then settles to the 
long task of doing the job itself. Once 
established the group measures its progress 
in terms of its relationship with 
the status quo, never in terms recognised 
by the people themselves. For the sake of 
their own identity they must be seen to 
make progress, and progress is interpreted 
as recognition either by incorporationinto the work of the existing authority, 

by expansion through receipt of charit· 
able funds or by 'legitimacy through the 
status of an experimental or academic 
exercise. In the acceptance of these relationships, 
the organisation declares its 
impotence, its willingness to work within 
the constraints of the system and its intention 
of never extending the boundaries 
of its action to a point where the establishment 
will be faced with its own real 
contradictions. 

The people have no .place in the processand in time contrO'l comes back to that 
band of respectable, fellow travellinghigh anglican custodians of good taste, 
who can be relied upon to hand down 
binding statements on policy that are unlikely 
to trouble the existing order and 
are certainly not available to questionby an electorate. 

Two examples illustrate the role played 
by voluntary groups. A:lrnost as soon as 
Notting Hill was built over a century 
ago, the housing conditions have appalled 
successive generations of observers. Indignation 
and protest on a number of 
occasions led to the formation of hous· 
ing trusts which set out to provide decent 
accommodation at reasonable rents, but 
often with highly paternalistic management. 
The housing trusts earned the support 
of the borough council so successfully 
that at one stage they owned twice 
as much as the borough itself. Todaythe trusts with their committees of councillors, 
judges and public figures, are a 
major plank in the housing policy designed 
to reduce drastically the borough'sworking class population. They attract 
several million pounds from the council 
each year. It is little consolation to recognise 
that some of them, on a purely 
neighbourhood level, are doing a greatdeal to improve conditions and to wrest 
houses from private ownership. 

In 1958 Notting Hill and the rest of the 
country was shaken by racial disturbances. 
One reaction carne from the 
Methodist Church, who introduced a 
group ministry to the area, a member 
of which caHed together workers to set 
up the Notting Hill Social Council. This 
new group, ·like many before it, identified 


t-' housing conditions and rackets as the 
1e major problem and organised pressureic on the borough council through a mas-
e-sive petition. This action rocked the 
ts council back on its heels but brought no 
in change in policy. The Social Council, 
l· however, did not pursue its advantage 
!S and the next years saw it spreading into 

J. relatively non-contentious fields mainly 
11 •to do with provision for young people. 
Recent developments highlighting just 
ss 1those problems that brought the Social 
lt l Council into being, have found the ortg 
ganisation now with a turnover of 
e, £12,000 each year, changed into the "rem 
sponsible" local body with whom the 
1-Council chooses to deaL It now plays 
Jd little part in the development of opposi<
n tion. 

But there has been an opposJtton to the 
~ conditions in which people in NottingIs Hill have been kept. Over the years it is 
~ possible to trace a series of actions, 
~ mostly militant and direct, which are the 
. immediate expressions of frustration,

1

>f given force by a desperately felt need or 

5. a tragedy. The squatters in the forties, 
11 the tenants' associations in the late fifties, 
It both gave clear expression of the quality 
e· of change that was needed. We know 
nothing of the hundreds of street groups 
who sprang into life about a single issue 
only to fall back through frustration or 
lack of experience. We know that ·it happened 
for it is happening today. Actions 
to get a play street, to fight a bad Iande
· lord, or to protest over a street accident 
are the single acts that if they were ever 
:t to come together would form a people's:il movement. 

e·

ly More recently there has been a great in-
at crease in the number of groups which 
st have tried to stimulate community action 
around issues which the local !People see 
to be important. Such groups have tried 
1e to avoid the situation in which there are 
b· givers and receivers of charity, be it in 
1e the form of advice, resources or he1p of 
a any kind. The aim has been to develop 
er a local force of people who will fight to 
et wrest from the authorities whatever they 
,js decide their community requH-es. In the 
~ process new institutions wiH be devel


oped which will be run by the people 
themselves. 

the community workshop 

In coming to Notting Hill the Community 
Workshop put itself squarely behind 
the struggle of powerless people for a 
better life, not just so that the powerless 
became powerful displacing others, but 
for a life where all had a continuous say 
in the priorities to be followed. We recognised 
that this had national and internationa-
l ramifications. We recognisedthat we were starting work in an area 
where the community was fragmentedand demoralised and had been denied 
nearly all chances of influence and controL 
We have put our energies into supporting 
the local organisations that have 
come together to deal with a range of 
issues, gaining strength •by working together 
and by forcing issues into the 
consciousness of complacent authorities. 
The struggles on housing, on road conditions, 
on inadequate playspace, have 
led to limited victories, and often to frustration 
and defeat, but over the months, 
networks of people have grown up,
people who mostly have no interest in 
regular meetings but who will join together 
on an urgent issue or who will 
give time and energy to a regular activity 
for children. It is not true that the 
area has any representative grass roots 
organisation, but seeds have been well 
sown which have started to grow as more 
and more people use their understanding 
of what is happening to take forceful 
action. 

One of the results of three years work 
is that there ·is now in Notting Hill the 
People's Association which, at the moment, 
consists of two neighbourhood 
centres, the People's Centre and the Lancaster 
Neighbourhood Centre, but it is 
hoped that other centres will develop. 
The aims of the Association are: 

1. To improve the living conditions of 
all tenants and see they get fair playwith both the landlord and authorities. 
2. To fight the .eJQploitation of, and dis

crimination against people in the area, 
wherever it may occur. 

3. To work for the adequate provisionof play space and .recreational facilities 
for children. 
4. To make Notting Hi'll a better place 
to live in. 
the people's centre 

Early in 1967, with the collapse of a 
£13 million :property company with extensive 
slum holdings in Notting Hill, a 
meeting of over 300 .angry tenants called 
for an association to fight for their rights. 
The Notting Hill People's Association 
(later to take the name of the People's 
Centre when a second centre started)
was formed and took up the fight through 
direct Ciipproaches to borough and government, 
through the tribunals and 
courts and by petition and demonstration. 
Once esta!blished, the centre took 
on broader issues in housing, children's 
play and traffic control, establishing a 
reputation for vigorous, often militant, 
action, alongside full time programmesof legal and housing advice and information, 
and youth and children's activities. 
The centre holds a regular weekly meeting 
of up to 50 people, but its activity 
is equal'ly expressed in the autonomous 
working groups of Colville Gardens, St. 
Stephens Gardens, Powis Square, the 
weekly mothers' group, the Youth Project, 
the playgroups and the network of 
local contacts outside the organisedmeetings. 

the Lancaster 
neighbourhood centre 

Ln the summer of 1967 the CommunityWorkshop and the People's Association 
joined other organisations in mountingthe Notting HiH Summer Project, a project 
invo·lving over a hundred volunta.ryhelpers in an attempt to compile up to 
date housing information for the area 
and to start a programme of temporaryplay activity for the school holidays. The 
project was based and organised around 
three neighbourhood centres, one the 

People's Association, the other two esta 
lished for the summer. The LancasteJ 
Neighbourhood Centre, sited in tht 
middle of a redevelopment area, was om 
of these centres and after the project 
took over its own •programme with 
locaHy elected committee. The centn 
soon became inundated with the prob·
!ems of .peop1e living in the redevelop' 
ment scheme ; furnished tenants whc 
would not get rehoused, families facing 
years without repairs before they got re· 
housed ; evictions by landlords seekingthe highest possible compensation from 
the council, so the centre developed a 
twice weekly comprehensive help and 
advice session with a number of lawyers 
and social workers and their own full 
time worker. Pressure to force changes 
came with a chi·ldren's march on the 
town hall and a massive petition to getfurnished tenants the same treatment as 
unfurnished from the town hall. The 
presence of the centre and its resources, 
as in the People's Centre area, has givenreal impetus to campaigns arising from 
the streets. In Ruston Close, tenants of 
20 houses came together to discover the 
identity of their landlord and went on 
to force him to complete neglected repairs. 
In Camelford Road, a year long 
campaign ended with tenants being rehoused 
five years earlier than the counci'i 
intended. Just over two years after 
its formation the centre has secured permanent 
premises which will be shared 
with a community based playgroup. 

Both centres have developed a style of 
work combining help to individuals with 
collective actions to get things changed. 
They seldom come together formally, 
but through a high level of informal cooperation 
have helped the formation of 
groups like the Notting Hill Squattersand the new Claimants' Union (aimed to 
get clarity and justice from the Ministryof Social Security). A joint weekly newspaper, 
the People's News, has run for 
over a year with news gathered from a 
network of contacts in different streets, 
who also sell the pCiiper. A printing press 
controlled by the community groups has 
run for over a year. 

This activity is in no way all that has 


·' happened in Notting Hill. There have 
r been substantial changes locally. 

the way forward

1 

Three years ago the claims of local 
people fell on indifferent ears irt the 
town hall. It was easy to see that the 
1 speculators could run riot while the 
councillors smirked and ta:lked .of Ascot. 
Today hardly a week passes without a 
fresh plan or development breaking into 

1 
the news. In :play and amenities under 
the motorway two new committees are 
on the point of being established by the 
council with more than 50 per cent of 
their members drawn from local organisations. 
Housing plans that will involve 
rebuilding half the area and improvingthe rest have been launched with encouragement 
from the Government. 

Will the results be all that different from 
the silent days of 1967? The net result 
of housing policies will be to decrease 
the a:bsolute amount of housing available 
to people of less than average income 
in North Kensington without any increase 
elsewhere in London. It will do 
nothing to alter the continuing demand 
for fresh workers whilst freezing the 
available housing. In housing and other 
fields great emphasis is being put on the 
involvement of local voluntary organisations, 
but many of these organisations 
lack the resources and the philosophy to 
do anything other than play a weak hand 
in a game whose rules are laid down by 

1 
the council. What then ought to be 
done? 

In the past the only forms of action 
that have appeared to have ,any chance 
of success in such a context have been 
1 those that lobby for favour with the men 
1 of power, by discreet a,pproaches, reasoned 
.argument and the wooing of respectable 
support. That kind of demo1 
oracy has its own crude equations: one 
, !itled lady equals 1000 common peoplem Notting HilL Bodies which have used 
this approach have made some advances 
in the last ten years, but mostly in the 
less controversial areas, predominantly 
5 through tapping voluntary .funds and 

almost entirely by the efforts of professional 
workers. 

An alternative perspective must be defined. 
The seeds of it are present in Not-
ting Hill at the moment. In somewhat 
crude terms, it is the building of popular 
pressure ; it is the involvement of the 
community in its own affairs ; it is the 
reahsation by the people of the area that 
they can take action which will affect 
the way they have to live. In the short 
term it may be that negotiations with 
the town hall will be frustrating and 
fruitless . Concessions gained will be marginal. 
But the experience .gained will be 
valuable for the future as more and more 
people get their taste of official indifference, 
professiona:l incompetence or openbullying. And the ·real battles a:re now. 
There is little hope of waiting until better 
times or until the conditions are right. 
The fight for decent housing, adequatefacilities and the right to take part in 
life is on. A resourceful and honest 
movement can only be built if there is a 
developing tradition of working together 
month by month, year by year. 

Throughout the struggle there will be a 
continual ebb and flow, bargaining to 
win concessions, alternating with sudden 
upsurges of direct action, which fuse the 
energies of many different groups in 
united opposition to the injustices of the 
system. It is the different attitudes of individuals 
and groups as to when the barga:
ining should stop and the direct action 
should begin, which gives rise to manyof the conflicts, which fragment the 
movement. But each time the conflicts 
are forgotten and the way forward is 
clear to all, the base of a popular "movement" 
is strengthened. Movement is 
necessarily a vague word as it is impossible 
to judge what form it will take. 

Our belief that it •is rea:listic to work towards 
such a movement is based on experience 
of certain local actions which 
have resulted from the fused energies of 
diverse groups. One such experience is 
that of Camelford Road. 

Camelford Road was in the middle of 
Lancaster Road (West) redevelopment 


scheme. This meant redevelopment in 
anything from three to eight years. The 
street was typical of many others, no 
better or no worse. All the houses were 
subdivided and contll!ined two or three 
families; usuaJ.ly families with children. 
The condition of the houses was verybad. All the basements were damp and 
many had ·been closed down. Repairsneeded to be done but the landlords refused 
to do them before the houses came 
down ; and as a result the health of the 
residents suffered visibly. The effect on 
the children was seen in the fact that 
there was an abnormally large proportion 
of children living in the street who 
were classified as backward or slow 
learners at school. 

The Lancaster Neighbourhood Centre 
had made a few contacts in the street 
and decided to hold a meeting in the 
street itself. At the first meeting .five 
people came forward and became the 
nucleus of a street committee. This committee 
decided to call a further meetingin the street which would have the practical 
object of getting down on paper the 
exact conditions of the street, so that 
they could be presented in a comprehensive 
form to the relevant authorities. At 
this meeting 26 families from · thirteen 
houses came forward and gave details 
of their accommodation. In the campaignthat followed the street and the ce:1trc 
worked together to get furnished tenants 
dassified as unfurnished to allow 
them to be rehoused when the street was 
knocked down, to get repairs done and 
to get some families rehoused immediately. 
Positive results were achieved in 
the street as a result of the combined 
effect of three different kinds of action: 
individual casework, bargaining with the 

authorities, and direct action. 

In January 1969 Maggie O'Shannon decided 
to move to the other side of Camel-
ford Road, to squat in number 7, a 
house which was the best in the road, 
but which had been left empty for nine 
months and which would remain empty 
until the street came down. So she approached 
the Notting Hill squatters who 
had drawn attention to themselves when 
they occupied two luxury flats for short 

periods as a protest against the many 
empty houses in the area. With the heiJ: 
of the squatters Maggie moved in and 
was soon joined by another f•amily in 
the street. 

This squat was not just aimed at gettingthe two families rent books. Far more 
was at stake. Shortly before the boroughcouncil rephased the redevelopment so 
that the demolition date for Camelford 
Road was put off till 1975 instead of the 
eacrly 1970s. The Squatters' Charter was 
stuck outside the door of number 7 and 
stated the demands of the two squatting 
families. The families were squatting in 
order to get a tenancy ·in number 7, but 
they were quite prepared to be the last 
to be rehoused in the street. But more 
important was that they saw their squat 
as a way of fighting for better treatment 
for all in the street. They issued a statement 
saying: "We see our act as the first 

tep in a fight for better conditions for 
all the .people of Camelford Road and 
the Lancaster Road (West) redevelopment 
area". 

In choosing number 7, a house which 
turned out to be owned by the Greater 
London Council, the squatters hastened 
the discovery that it was the GLC and 
not the borough council which was responsible 
for rehousing aH in Camelford 
Road. The squat focussed pressure on 
the GLC to bring forward the rehousingdate, and as a result the GLC agreed to 
rehousing within a year. By 1970 almost 
everyone in Camelford Road was rehoused. 


It was because the squat was seen as 
an action for the street, and because 
earlier work in the street had shown that 
they all sha.red common problems, that 
there was 100 per cent support for the 
squat in the street. All kinds of assistance 
were given in supplying water, electricity 
and food. 

It was this sense of being part of the 
same struggle which existed in the street, 
together with the support of many 
groups in the area, which sustained the 
squatters till the GLC was forced to 
capitulate 5 weeks later. They agreed to 


give the squaJtters tenancies and to rehouse 
the street within a year. 

lfhe progression of what happened here 
is important. From a start rooted in casework, 
the street moved through political 
pressure on the rephasing to the supportof an illegal activity such -as squatting, 
which was seen to buttress their earlier 
demands. At all times the residents were 
actively supported by the centre, the 
squatters and others working in the area. 
There was a fusion of many interests and 
many styles of working in this one campaign_ 


the people's movement 

We have now described~condition 
that is Notting Hill. We have shown that 
there are many different agencies working 
to change that condition. We have 
stated that we are dissatisfied with the 
traditional political ·and charitable approaches. 
We have presented a new form 
of organisation and have demonstrated, 
through the example of Camelford Road, 
a way of working that we believe can 
bring results. 

But what of our democratic system?
Why is protest not registered at the 
ballot box? The reason is that the system 
we have is anti-democratic. It consists 
of electing a "representative" from 
a limited choice of options pre-selected 
by small cliques and who, once elected, 
loses touch with those who elected him 
but who gains power on the backs of 
bheir support. This is the peculiar feature 
of our system. Each higher Iayer-sayMembers of Parliament, ruling party, 
government, cabinet-once in powerloses all relationship with the layer that 
put it there and only exists relative to 
the search for absolute power which, of 
course, exists only in the layer above_ 

Even if power in this political game is 
gained it still has to compete with the 
system already described and in reality 
gives in to that system by agreeing to 
play the game according to its rules. 
Economically the rich get no poorer and 
the poor no richer. There <:an be no 

commitment within that set of rules to so 
utterly changing the system that the system 
itself, as it is now, no longer exists. 

So what are we about? If this is an overall 
national context in which we set our 
locai action what can we do or achieve? 
The basic facts that we accept are that 
the system at present holds little hope of 
producing those obvious things we hold 
good : a house for everyone by right ; a 
school that teaches children self respect 
and confidence ; a place for children to 
pl·ay ; a society that puts no pressure on 
people to conform to one idea of materialistic 
success. We believe that this present 
system exists because it disenfranchises 
the people it is meant to be representing. 
Our job is therefore to act 
as a catalyst in enfranchising those same 
people. It is not our job to put our system 
in place of one that exists now. 
Rather, we are working for everyone to 

have a voice in how their own life is 
organised. If we are not to offer ourselves 
as leaders ·this work can only be 
done on a very local level, at least to 
begin with. 

So ·there are various ways in which we 
can work with people to pierce the system 
and open it up to a truer democracy. 
We can work in the field of housing to 
question council policies (or lack of 
them) on planning and rents, or to show 
up the inadequacies of the priv·ate landlords 
system, or to set up co-operatives 
in which the tenants have control of their 
own houses, or to set up a co-operative 
repairs service. With kids, parents can 
run playgroups. So can the kids-the 
youth clubs can become theirs. We can 
press for open neighbourhood schools 
develop1ng bonds between home, school 
and community; we can experiment in 
co-operative shops, coffee bars and services 
of all kinds. The neighbourhood 
centre can become a focus for peoplefrom which campaigns can be mounted, 
ideas discussed, plans formulated. 

Out of this may well come an entirelydifferent type of political system-a 
People's Council that is truly democratic 
with delegates from each street, an open 
forum for discussion, regular report back 


to the locality and the power to recaH 
any members who fail in their responsibilities. 
Within that structure there will 
still be a need for specialist resources: 
research to unravel landlord and property 
company tang·les ; the neighbourhood 
law firm to give free and accessible 
legal advice ; community printing presses 
and duplicators to pioneer new forms of 
communications. But the role of specialists 
will have to be totally different. Their 
role will not be to lay down the law but 
to explain, support and enable. Architects 
and planners must offer their skills 
openly. The social workers, housing managers 
and teachers must not judge their 
"clients", "tenants" or "pupils" but must 
offer them support whilst working with 
them to change the system to make it 
benefit them. 

Inevitably this will be a long process. 
The building of a People's Movement 
will be hastened by dramatic events 
which crystalise feeling-squats in unoccupied 
flats, rent strikes, invasion of private 
garden squares. It will find strength 
in the counter institutions: the co-operative 
ventures, the street association, the 
neighbourhood centre, which embodythe idea of openness and communitycontrol. The forms that such a movement 
will take in .future cannot be accurately 
charted-indeed it would be presumptuous 
to do so. Such a movement will 
define its own way of working and will 
be shaped ·by the people comprising it-
the people who have the direct eJQperience 
of the conditions of the many Not-
ting Hills spread throughout the country. 


18. Handsworth adventure 
1 playground 
Bob Holman 

The adventure playground is located in 
the district of Handsworth, in Soho 
Ward. By any indicators of social need 
the ward ranks as a deprived area. According 
to the 1966 sample census it had 
a population of 27,690 of whom a highproportion, 13.9 per cent, were under five 
years. The immigrant population (from 
new commonwealth countries) made up

21.3 per cent, the highest concentration 
of immigrants in Birmingham, while well 
over two thirds of current births are of 
immigrant extraction. In terms of overcrowding 
the ward is one of the worst 
in England. 11.5 per cent of the households 
had a density of population of 
over It persons per room, while 12.9 percent consisted of six or more persons-
often living in one room. High numbers 
have no fixed bath, hot water tap or 
inside toilet. Not surprisingly, delinquency 
and reception into care rates are 
very high; the infant mortaJity rate is 
32.6 per 1,000 births (1967), an amazingfigure-almost double the Birminghamand national average. Although there are 
no offici·al figures, the private and sometimes 
dubious industries of child minding 
and private fostering aJbound. 
Clearly, the area abounds in factors 
which probably promote deprivation in 
the fields of child socialisation, health 
and housing. Yet aJthough, according to 
most indicators, it is more deprived than 
other wards in Birmingham, such as 
Sparkbrook, its name was hardly known 
mside or outside Birmingham. Probably1ts very lack of resources, its lack of a 
tashionable community association or 
middle class pressure groups, meant its 
name was never brought before the 

public. 

In ~966 Soho had no community asso-
Ciation, tenants' association, settlement or 
family casework agency. Pre-sohool activities 
were barely existent. It had one 
?ay nursery with a long "priority" wait-
Ing l_tst, seven GPs ·and not one piece of 
pubhc recreational ground. The policeattnbuted much of the area's violence 
to the l•ack of youth clubs and teenageamenities. The schools were old, overcro:-
vded, with high immigrant numbers, 
Whtle the education office r~ported that 

the area faced greater problems of 
teacher recruitment than other parts of 
Birmingham. 

foundation of the playground 

In 1967 an Indian child care officer 
working in the area got together a sma,ll 
number of residents and outsiders. They 
saw little point in asking for council 
help, and instead founded an adventure 
playground themselves. This particularproject was chosen because there was an 
objective need for play space; local pa:rents 
were asking for play facilities ; and 
a playground was seen as a focus pointwhere contact collid be made with a wide 
range of parents who might not attend, 
say, a new community centre. Thus the 
playground was seen as a stepping off 
point for other community activities. 

The participants formed themselves into 
a committee which in time began to 
make explicit the assumptions on which 
it was working. There was common 
agreement that the condition of the deprived 
was due not just to inadequatesocial services but to their lack of powerover the decisions which determined their 
lives. It followed that one objective was 
to promote their control over their environment. 
Two practical policy irnplicatitons 
were deduced from rthis analysis : 
firstly, the committee should consist only 
of persons directly involved in the playground, 
namely parents whose children 
attended, and workers. Secondly, it 
should be free to adopt any techniques 
or strategies which might promote its 
objectives. "Consensus" attempts to persuade 
local and central government to 
act in Handsworth had failed continually. 
Reports and research had been presented, 
but stil·l the council refused to 
undertake large scale housing development 
; still the repairs to slum council 
houses were not undertaken ; it failed to 
provide playgroups and playgrounds ; rthe 
area was not designated an educational 
priority area ; the parks committee announced 
"no plans for developing recreational 
facilities" in a ward which had 
none. Consequently, members felt free 
to promote direct provision of their own 


38 
services-play groups, playgrounds, and 
so on-under local control. Or, if neces-
sary, they regarded conflict strategy-
political campaigning, even against the 
council, badgering and advocating for 
their rights, rent strikes-as a legitimateapproach. In short, the committee voted 
to be not a middle class pressure group 
but an instrument used by the area for 
its own ends. 
The playground was opened in July 1968. 
The use made of it necessitated the even-
tual employment of full time workers, 
now numbering four. The demands of 
children and parents led to associated 
activities-youth clubs, footbal1 teams, 
weight lifting club, family outings and 
holidays. Particularly important was the 
formation of two playgroups serving 
mo1>tly immigrant children. Apart from 
these activities, other developments oc-
curred of equal importance to the play-
ground and the area, as will be explained. 
who is the playground for? 
A criticism of social work is that it most 
benefits those best able to respond to 
middle class modes of communication,
thus leaving aside the inarticulate and 
the unco-operative. The playground staff 
hoped to avoid this situation and soon 
found themselves put to the test. Some 
children proved extremely destructive 
and, at times, violent. The dilemma for 
the workers was whether to expel them 
or else lose many other children whom 
they were driving away. They decided 
never to expel, arguing that the play-
ground should cope with just these kind 
of problems. The result was hell for the 
workers, but the policy brought fruit. A 
hard core of youngsters, rejected byevery other club and organisation, stuck 
to the playground and, in time, re-
sponded to the staff. The same decision 
meant, however, that the playground also 
lost the parents most able to offer lead-
ership, ta,Jents, and so on. The families 
of the remaining children were frequently 
over burdened, sometimes with no father. 
Unlike more stable working class areas 
where local committees can call on 
dockers, prosperous stallholders and so 
on, the playground had to base an 
future community action around thm 
most maltreated, most rejected by tt 
rest of society. 
relationships with 
the local authority 
The playground costs some £4,000-£5,00 
a year to run, and financial difficultie 
soon raised the question of the relation 
ship with the local authority. Should i 
ask for a permanent grant and seconde1 
workers from the council, or would thi 
.Jimit the nature of the playground' 
activities? The matter was discussed b' 
studying the situation of the SparkbrooiAssociation, known to most members 
and which was in a position of dependl 
ence upon the council for a large recur 
ring grant and a seconded worker. Whilt 
not underestim·aJting the immense valut 
of that Association, it was felt its de 
pendence hindered its role. Sparkhas been developed as a body preside 
over not by users but by what can onl)
be termed the local ruling class, the pres· 
tige figures--counci!Jors, Conservative 
prospective parliamentary candidates 
bishops, and so on. Consequently, i1 
seemed that these fi•gures, plus its finan-
cial dependence, would operate against 
the use of any strategies aimed against 
the local authority, even when the in-
terests of and identification with the de-
prived demanded it. And, in fact, the 
Association has avoided controversial 
issues. It works on "a non-political basis" 
having "no views on some of the most 
important issues of race relations, such 
as immigration control" which is verymuch a political issue in Birmingham(Colour and citizenship, Institute of Race 
Relations, 1969). Again, it did not asso-
ciate with, say, anti-racialist protests.
When local tenants in nearby Balsall 
Heath went on rent strike against their 
rat infested, damp, unrepaired slum 
council property, the Association did not 
support them. 
While not denying the value, even neces-
sity, of the above approach, the play-
ground members felt it essential to be 
free to identify fully with the deprived,
even to the extent of supporting conflict 
38 
services-play groups, playgrounds, and 
so on-under local control. Or, if neces-
sary, they regarded conflict strategy-
political campaigning, even against the 
council, badgering and advocating for 
their rights, rent strikes-as a legitimateapproach. In short, the committee voted 
to be not a middle class pressure group 
but an instrument used by the area for 
its own ends. 
The playground was opened in July 1968. 
The use made of it necessitated the even-
tual employment of full time workers, 
now numbering four. The demands of 
children and parents led to associated 
activities-youth clubs, footbal1 teams, 
weight lifting club, family outings and 
holidays. Particularly important was the 
formation of two playgroups serving 
mo1>tly immigrant children. Apart from 
these activities, other developments oc-
curred of equal importance to the play-
ground and the area, as will be explained. 
who is the playground for? 
A criticism of social work is that it most 
benefits those best able to respond to 
middle class modes of communication,
thus leaving aside the inarticulate and 
the unco-operative. The playground staff 
hoped to avoid this situation and soon 
found themselves put to the test. Some 
children proved extremely destructive 
and, at times, violent. The dilemma for 
the workers was whether to expel them 
or else lose many other children whom 
they were driving away. They decided 
never to expel, arguing that the play-
ground should cope with just these kind 
of problems. The result was hell for the 
workers, but the policy brought fruit. A 
hard core of youngsters, rejected byevery other club and organisation, stuck 
to the playground and, in time, re-
sponded to the staff. The same decision 
meant, however, that the playground also 
lost the parents most able to offer lead-
ership, ta,Jents, and so on. The families 
of the remaining children were frequently 
over burdened, sometimes with no father. 
Unlike more stable working class areas 
where local committees can call on 
dockers, prosperous stallholders and so 
on, the playground had to base an 
future community action around thm 
most maltreated, most rejected by tt 
rest of society. 
relationships with 
the local authority 
The playground costs some £4,000-£5,00 
a year to run, and financial difficultie 
soon raised the question of the relation 
ship with the local authority. Should i 
ask for a permanent grant and seconde1 
workers from the council, or would thi 
.Jimit the nature of the playground' 
activities? The matter was discussed b' 
studying the situation of the SparkbrooiAssociation, known to most members 
and which was in a position of dependl 
ence upon the council for a large recur 
ring grant and a seconded worker. Whilt 
not underestim·aJting the immense valut 
of that Association, it was felt its de 
pendence hindered its role. Sparkhas been developed as a body preside 
over not by users but by what can onl)
be termed the local ruling class, the pres· 
tige figures--counci!Jors, Conservative 
prospective parliamentary candidates 
bishops, and so on. Consequently, i1 
seemed that these fi•gures, plus its finan-
cial dependence, would operate against 
the use of any strategies aimed against 
the local authority, even when the in-
terests of and identification with the de-
prived demanded it. And, in fact, the 
Association has avoided controversial 
issues. It works on "a non-political basis" 
having "no views on some of the most 
important issues of race relations, such 
as immigration control" which is verymuch a political issue in Birmingham(Colour and citizenship, Institute of Race 
Relations, 1969). Again, it did not asso-
ciate with, say, anti-racialist protests.
When local tenants in nearby Balsall 
Heath went on rent strike against their 
rat infested, damp, unrepaired slum 
council property, the Association did not 
support them. 
While not denying the value, even neces-
sity, of the above approach, the play-
ground members felt it essential to be 
free to identify fully with the deprived,
even to the extent of supporting conflict 

against the local ·authority. It would thus trefuse council grants if any strings were 
being applied. This is not, however, 
pol·icy. Adventure playgrounds are few 
in Birmingham with little official encouragement 
to promote them. There is nothing 
to compare with the policy of the 
[nner London Education Authority which

1gives salary grants of up to £2,000 a year 
rto established playgrounds. 

t Two issues ensued in which the play1 
ground felt compelled to speak in a way 
', which could have been hampered by a 
concern not to offend the council. In 
1968, Powell made his "rivers of blood" 
speeches. The effect on Handsworth and 
the .playground was immediate. The com. 
mittee, feeling compelled to make its 
position clear, publicly condemned the 
anti-immigrant propaganda, engaged in 
, a correspondence with Edward Heath, 
urging him to dismiss Powell-which was 
well reported lby the press-and gave 
. support to other public demonstrations. 

The usual blacklash followed, varying
from fascist letters to those who condemned 
a voluntary body for engaging in 
, political matters. On the other hand, 
others expressed support for the positive 
steps. As the ruling Birmingham councillors 
generally supported Powell's immigration 
views, then clear·ly the play


' ground could not have taken its action 
if it had ·been in the pocket of the local 
authority. 

The rent strike in 1969 by the Balsall 

Heath tenants provoked great sympathy 

amongst some of the mothers on the

I

playground committee, simply because 
they were experiencing exactly the same 
form of deprivation. Thus their support 
of protests was also motivated by a desire 
to learn from Balsrull Heath in order 
to consider similar action in Handsworth. 
Such action was in the face of councillors' 
condemnation of the strike; indeed, 
the chairman of the housing committee 
made .plain his feelings about 
associations which gave their support. 

Whether these actions have determined 
the council's attitudes towards the play-. 
ground is hard to say. The' Children's 

Officer has given encourrugement and 
backing. Clearly the playground acts as 
a preventive agent, and Chhld Care Officers 
refer children to the playgroups and 
other activities. But otherwise little support 
is given. Letters to chairmen of 
committees may be unanswered; planning 
requests have met many obstacles 
despite the glaring need for social amenities 
in the area; the three ward councillors, 
to our knowledge, have never set 
foot in the playground. The lack of support, 
and subsequent financial insecurity, 
is the cost to an organis·ation determined 
to maintain its freedom to aot in the 
best interests of its members. 

developing social 
work functions 

Initially, the founders of the playground 
had envisaged developments in two main 
directions: an extension of the play and 
youth activities (where children would 
benefit from a permissive atmosphere, 
opportunities for creative expressions,
and rel-ationships with adults), and an 
extension of community action. In addition, 
however, other social work functions 
have been assumed. For instance: 

1. Linking. When playground children 
are taken into care a worker has continued 
to visit them even when parents 
do not. They thus provide a link bet•ween 
the child and his family, neighbourhood 
and playground. 
2. Information. The workers are used as 
"information centres" concerning the 
so:::ial services. 
3. Advocates. Sometimes workers have 
acted for residents. For instance, before 
the housing department. 
local involvement 

Inevita·bly, the question of the extent of 
local involvement is asked about anycommunity work activity. Certainly the 
playground does facilitate contact with 
the community, although perhaps not to 
the extent imagined. Sometimes parents 
send but do not bring or fetch their 


young offspring. In the summer they maysend them for the day with a sixpencefor chips to feed them. On the other 
hand contacts have been made with 
people just passing by, with neighbours 
who have got to recognise the staff, and 
by invitations into the children's homes. 

Apart from the previously mentioned decision 
which tended to limit the numbers 
and type of children using the playground, 
involvement has been handicapped 
by three other factors : A highproportion of families lack a father figure, 
who might participate ; a high rate 
of mobility means that promising relationships 
can be abruptly broken ; the 
cultural patterns of Asian immigrants, 
who are populous in the neighbourhood,
makes them reluctant to become involved 
with non-Asians, although the addition 
to the playground staff of an Indian is 
beginning to have a gradual effect. 

Within these limits, the local involvement 
operates at three points. Firstly, as users 
of the playground and its activities. This 
point may appear too obvious, but so:ne 
community centres provide services used 
by outsiders rather than the immediate 
neighbourhood. Secondly, as voluntaryleaders and organisers. The youth clubs, 
weight lifting, football, table tennis, playgroups, 
dances, local fund raising activities, 
are almost entirely in the hands of 
local residents. Thirdly, as members of 
committees. A solid majority of committee 
members live in Handsworth. 
Some, it must be added, have moved 
there because of their commitment to the 
area. 

conclusions 

I do not mean to imply that the playground 
is securely established. Its refusal 
to be tied to other bodies means that, in 
regard to financial difficulties and insecurity 
of tenure, it could fold up quiclcly.
But strength found in common action 
will not die so easily. It has shown that 
services do not only have to come bythe imposition of paternalistic outsiders. 
Rather there is potential for control by 
users ; indeed, it has been shown they 

can supply what the local authority faih 
to give. In this sense they begin to assert 
some control over their environment, ana 
therefore over their own lives. Moreover 
those involved have not been the articulate 
cream of the neighbourhood. Thfi 
imposers of services might be surpriseci 
to learn that some of the most success 
ful participants have themselves experienced 
part three accommodation eviction, 
their children on probation, and in 
general appear to be classed as unfit for 
decent coundl housing. 

Participation has stimulated the hope for 
further advance. Mothers are anxious to 
start more playgrou,ps. Joint action has 
led to a more militant, almost political 
attitude, expressed in a readiness to assert 
their rights and to stand up to officials. 
Some have mooted the need for a tenants' 
association and, hopefully, future 
developments will concentrate on housing. 
If the present occupiers of overcrowded, 
damp, non-repaired dwellings 
do claim a right to decent accommodation, 
they cannot expect a ready acceptance 
by the local authority. 

At least the needs of Soho have become 
better known, with the press, councillors 
,and MPS t:aking some notice. Just as The 
Guardian gives the impression that Not-
ting Hill is the only location of deprivation 
and community work in Britain, so 
the Midlands press used to believe it was 
confined to certain fashionable deprived 
areas in Birmingham. The second haU 
of 1969 and the beginning of 1970 has 
witnessed the focus of attention on the 
Handsworth I Soho area and the promiseof more resources. But herein lies a wider 
danger. There are other deprived areas 
in Britain as well as Soho, and the playground 
would be repeating the insularityof other community organisations if it 
called for resources for itself without 
also pointing to the widespread extent 
of deprivation. 


from King Hill to the 
quatting association 
Jim Radford 
vfost of the campaigns I have been con-
tected with, centering on homeless hostels 
tnd housing, have had a number of 
Jfects and aims other than the primary1bject. In particular they have aH in-
.luded opposing and exposing, two il\us-
ons that seem to be very common 
mong members of the Labour Party. 
lhe first of these is the belief that legis-
ation in itself achieves something, and 
hat once an act has been passed you:an take its implementation for granted.
;econd, is the trusting faith in the know-
edgeableness of experts and profession-
.ls, that makes so many people accept 
hat the aHematives, presented to them 
'Y politicians, social workers and offi-
:ials are the only ones that are prac-
icable. 
loth the King Hill hostel campaign and 
he current squatting activities, provide 
lassie examples of how these assump-
ions were challenged and exposed by 
lirect action. When the post war Labour 
;overnment .passed the National Assist-
Act in 1948, it was hailed as a great 
.dvance in social legislation. The act 
,]aced a legal obligation on local author-
ties to provide temporary accommoda-
ion for families who 'became homeless, 
.nd required them to submit a scheme 
o the Minister detailing how they in-
ended to organise this. We were told 
hat the Labour party had "abolished 
he workhouse", and all those who had 
1een involved in drafting and steeringhe act through parliament, .patted them-
elves on the back before turning their 
ttention to something else. 
have read the scheme that was sub-
nitted by the Kent County Council at 
hat time. Like all such documents, it is 
vritten in legalistic jargon and liberaHyuded with qualifications and provisos,
uch as "where the council considers it 
ecessary", "wherever practicable" or 
wherever circumstances permit". One 
•aragraph sticks in my mind. It read: 
these improvements will also include 
e provision of additional services, 
menities and requisites, and such other 
1atters as wHl be conducive to the com-
ort, happiness and well being of the 
residents therein, and the obtainment of 
a pleasant, normal, homelike atmos-
phere." No doulbt the Kent CountyCouncil copywriters also patted them-
selves on the back after producing this 
marvellous scheme, and then, like their 
parliamentary counterparts, promptlyforgot about it. 
Seventeen years I·ater I saw how both 
the act and that scheme were being im-
plemented in Kent, when I went to KingHill hostel. Miles away from shops and 
schools, a;bout 40 "families" were livingin dilapidated wooden huts behind a high 
wire fence. Physical conditions were ap-
palling. Ahl cooking had to 'be done on 
antiquated solid fuel stoves. The ground 
was a sea of mud and there was no out-
side lighting. Residents were being illeg-
ally overcharged (7-!d a unit) for elec-
tricity and the distance from centres of 
population made it virtuaLly impossible 
for them to seek alternative accommoda-
Non. Far worse than the physical con-
ditions, however, was the atmosphere of 
fear ·and unhappiness that .pervaded the 
hostel. Discipline was st·rict. Floors had 
to be washed and polished before 11 am. 
Visitors were allowed in at weekends 
only. No alcohol was .permitted and no 
pets. The rules, prominently displayedeverywhere, made it quite clear that if 
anyone was found drunk, or if anyone's 
husband was found in the hostel, the 
whole family would be turned out! 
I discovered, what the council's detailed 
scheme had neglected to mention, that in 
Kent homeless families consisted of 
women and young children only! Hus-
tbands and children over 16 were told to 
fend for themselves! 
I also discovered that every woman in 
the hostel was living in desperate fear 
of losing her children altogether. Be-
cause, again without mentioning it in 
their scheme, the county council had 
arbitrarily defined "temporary" to mean 
for a limited period only, and after three 
months each family was turned out into 
the street. This meant that in many cases 
the children were taken into compulsory 
care, and for 15 years approximately 100 
children a year had been taken from 
from King Hill to the 
quatting association 
Jim Radford 
vfost of the campaigns I have been con-
tected with, centering on homeless hostels 
tnd housing, have had a number of 
Jfects and aims other than the primary1bject. In particular they have aH in-
.luded opposing and exposing, two il\us-
ons that seem to be very common 
mong members of the Labour Party. 
lhe first of these is the belief that legis-
ation in itself achieves something, and 
hat once an act has been passed you:an take its implementation for granted.
;econd, is the trusting faith in the know-
edgeableness of experts and profession-
.ls, that makes so many people accept 
hat the aHematives, presented to them 
'Y politicians, social workers and offi-
:ials are the only ones that are prac-
icable. 
loth the King Hill hostel campaign and 
he current squatting activities, provide 
lassie examples of how these assump-
ions were challenged and exposed by 
lirect action. When the post war Labour 
;overnment .passed the National Assist-
Act in 1948, it was hailed as a great 
.dvance in social legislation. The act 
,]aced a legal obligation on local author-
ties to provide temporary accommoda-
ion for families who 'became homeless, 
.nd required them to submit a scheme 
o the Minister detailing how they in-
ended to organise this. We were told 
hat the Labour party had "abolished 
he workhouse", and all those who had 
1een involved in drafting and steeringhe act through parliament, .patted them-
elves on the back before turning their 
ttention to something else. 
have read the scheme that was sub-
nitted by the Kent County Council at 
hat time. Like all such documents, it is 
vritten in legalistic jargon and liberaHyuded with qualifications and provisos,
uch as "where the council considers it 
ecessary", "wherever practicable" or 
wherever circumstances permit". One 
•aragraph sticks in my mind. It read: 
these improvements will also include 
e provision of additional services, 
menities and requisites, and such other 
1atters as wHl be conducive to the com-
ort, happiness and well being of the 
residents therein, and the obtainment of 
a pleasant, normal, homelike atmos-
phere." No doulbt the Kent CountyCouncil copywriters also patted them-
selves on the back after producing this 
marvellous scheme, and then, like their 
parliamentary counterparts, promptlyforgot about it. 
Seventeen years I·ater I saw how both 
the act and that scheme were being im-
plemented in Kent, when I went to KingHill hostel. Miles away from shops and 
schools, a;bout 40 "families" were livingin dilapidated wooden huts behind a high 
wire fence. Physical conditions were ap-
palling. Ahl cooking had to 'be done on 
antiquated solid fuel stoves. The ground 
was a sea of mud and there was no out-
side lighting. Residents were being illeg-
ally overcharged (7-!d a unit) for elec-
tricity and the distance from centres of 
population made it virtuaLly impossible 
for them to seek alternative accommoda-
Non. Far worse than the physical con-
ditions, however, was the atmosphere of 
fear ·and unhappiness that .pervaded the 
hostel. Discipline was st·rict. Floors had 
to be washed and polished before 11 am. 
Visitors were allowed in at weekends 
only. No alcohol was .permitted and no 
pets. The rules, prominently displayedeverywhere, made it quite clear that if 
anyone was found drunk, or if anyone's 
husband was found in the hostel, the 
whole family would be turned out! 
I discovered, what the council's detailed 
scheme had neglected to mention, that in 
Kent homeless families consisted of 
women and young children only! Hus-
tbands and children over 16 were told to 
fend for themselves! 
I also discovered that every woman in 
the hostel was living in desperate fear 
of losing her children altogether. Be-
cause, again without mentioning it in 
their scheme, the county council had 
arbitrarily defined "temporary" to mean 
for a limited period only, and after three 
months each family was turned out into 
the street. This meant that in many cases 
the children were taken into compulsory 
care, and for 15 years approximately 100 
children a year had been taken from 

their parents in this way, many of them 
for good. This was happening with the 
Minister of Health's knowledge, in spite 
of his stated view that "temporary accommodation" 
within the meaning of the 
act, meant until permanent accommodation 
was available. 

As a general rule I believe in exploring 
what are called "the proper channels" 
before resorting to direct action, but at 
King Hill this had already been done 
by many people, including MPs, over a 
long period, and there was no time for 
further delay. Families were facing eviction 
and dissolution. To save them it was 
necessary to organise immediate resistance, 
and that is exactly what we did. 

You may remember what happened. It 
received a great deal of publicity at the 
time. We formed an organisation that 
consisted of most families in the hostel 
and their menfolk, and a number of 
people, like myself, from outside. The 
husbands moved into the hostel in defiance 
of the rules and announced their 
intention of preventing any attempt at 
eviction. We took down the old workhouse 
rules and elected a residents' committee 
that virtuaHy controlled the hostel 
throughout the 12 months the campaign 
lasted. The officials who were supposed 
to be running the place admitted that the 
whole thing had 'been taken out of their 
hands. 

The campaign was imaginative and determined. 
It combined various kinds of 
direct action with every form of conventional 
pressure. It was the sheer weight 
of continuous ·adverse publicity that finally 
broke down the Kent County Council's 
resistance and forced them to give 
way, with the result that the rules were 
change, husbands and sons were admitted, 
the three months' rule was no 
longer enforced and physical conditions 
were greatly improved. As far as I know, 
since August 1965 not one child has been 
taken into compulsory care from KingHill. 

Throughout this struggle, those of us 
who were not ourselves homeless, were 
accused by the council of being trouble 

makers, who were manipulating the 
homeless for political ends. It is certainly 
true that we played a large partand that our experience and skills were 
needed, but we might never have heard! 
of King Hill if one man had not decided 
to make a stand. If Stan Daniels had 
allowed his wife and children to be 
turned out of the hostel, instead of moving 
in with them to build a barricade, the 
old system might still be in operation in 
Kent. Without publicity 100 children 
a year might still 1be forcibly parted from 
their mothers. 

During 1965 not only the atmospherebut the attitudes and behaviour of the 
people in King Hill changed visibly. For 
the first time people were being encouraged 
to make decisions for themselves, 
and there was this tremendous feelingthat we were together, doing something 
important. Self respect blossomed with 
the realisation that they were capable of 
organisation and that they could fightinjustice, and I know that the experience 
has had a lasting effect on some of those 
who lived through it. One of the KingHiH huSibands, for instance, four yearslater, travelled all the way from outer 
Kent to Redbridge for a squatting demonstration. 
He is completely non-political, 
·but he has learnt the value of 
solidarity. 

After King HiH there were a number of 
other hostel campaigns. The publicity 
we had received and the awareness 
that this kind of action could succeed, 
encouraged .families in other hostels to 
resist and outsiders to involve themselves. 

It was noticeable that in these similar 
campaigns, King Hill paid a substantial 
bonus. Other authorities had learnt from 
Kent's mistakes and were concerned to 
avoid a sustained confrontation. What 
had taken twelve months in Kent was 
often achieved in a matter of weeks elsewhere. 
Especially where the local authorities 
discovered or believed, that they 
were dealing with the same people. 

These local campaigns have achieved a 
great deal and there is a need for many 
more. In Croydon, for instance, the 


council stiLl insist on their right to evict 
homeless families f.rom welfare accommodation 
after six weeks ! But, as the 
official figures for homeless families rose 
inexorably year by year, those of us who 
had involved ourselves in this kind of 
activity began to consider wider possibilities 
and bolder action. 

Squatting had often been discussed. We 
had considered it at Newington Lodge, 
and at A!bridge ; but in the thick of 
these separate battles we had never found 
time to fully research the legal niceties, 
or to organise it. We knew of the suc:.:
essrful precedent in 1946, however, and 
as we established more and more contacts 
with homeless and near homeless 
families in the slums and hostels of London, 
the subject came up with increasing 
frequency; until in November 1968 we 
decided that the time had come to attempt 
this dramatic form of direct action . 

We knew that there were 500,000 emptybuildings in this country and from our 
own dbservat:ion in the London boroughsthere are enough empty houses to house 
all London's homeless. At various times 
we have suggested their use to local 
authorities, but the answer had aiwaysbeen no. 

We did not set out to organise a largecampaign. We simply decided to find out 
~hether or not such a campaign was pos-
Sible by squatting a few families who 
were themselves keen to do it. They were 
families with everything to gain from 
squatting and literally nothing to lose. 
One family had been in hostels for 
almost 11 years. We hoped that if we 
were successful it might trigger off sponeaneous 
squatting on a scale similar to 
1946 and with the same worthwhile 

result. 

Throughout these campaigns we have 
often been charged with persuad1ng and 
mfluencing the homeless, with encouragmg 
them to do things that they would 
not otherwise do. I suppose there is some 
truth in this since we have put ideas and 
alternatives to people that no one else 
had offered them and we have offered a 
kind of help that no one else would 

give, but this is the limit of our encouragement. 
Obviously I can only speak for 
myself and the groups I am involved 
with, but we have never attempted to 
persuade anyone to squat or to join in 
direct action if they did not want to do 
so, or if they themselves were not convinced 
that it was the most sensible 
thing to do in the circumstances. 

So we began with the token occupationof a luxury block in Wanstead, where 
many of the flats had been empty for 
years. Then, after another demonstration 
squat in Ley;tonstone while the NottingHill squatters rehoused Maggie O'Shannon, 
we moved into Redbridge for the 
major !battle. 

We had some difficulty initially in convincing 
the police and local authorities 
that we were not breaking any criminal 
law, and that they themselves would be 
guilty of an offence if they attempted to 
evict us without a court order. And even 
when this was clearly understood we still 
had to face violent and ill.legal attacks 
f.rom a gang of so called bailiffs, hired 
by Redbridge Council. However, we 
showed ourselves capable of dealing with 
every counter used against us, whether 
in the courts or in the streets, and, as at 
Kin.g Hill, we were able to conduct a 
continuous campaign in which our most 
potent weapon was constant pU'blicity. 

the level of success 

It has not developed in quite the way 
we had hoped. Homeless fami!lies have 
not taken up squatting spontane9usly on 
any scale. But we have, I think, achieved 
some very considerable successes. In 
Redbridge we had to deal with a council 
who were adamant in refusing to listen 
to our suggestion that their empty houses, 
many of which were going to be empty 
for five years or more, could easily be 
used for homeless families, and we had 
the same pattern of legal action and denunciation, 
even though we repeatedlyoffered .to discuss practical solutions with 
the council. It was only after they had 
spent thousands of pounds deliberatelywrecking houses to keep us out, and the 


pressure of public opm10n had called a 
halt to the use of illegal violence by their 
"bailiffs" that Redbridge Council finallycaved in. And on 26 July 1969 theyagreed to make use of the 1,000 emptyhouses that would be acquired because 
of their redevelopment plans. 

Since then we have seen that other local 
authorities are much more ready to listen 
to reason. The GLC have agreed to hand 
over 2,000 empty houses to voluntaryhousing associations ; many more local 
councils have announced their intention 
to levy half rates on empty properties,
and in Lewisham, the council have accepted 
completely the proposal that we 
put to Redbridge at the very beginning 
of the campaign! 

This was simply, that if the council would 
allow us to use the houses we would 
organise to do this responsibly and efficiently, 
and that we would undertake 
to vacate them when they were genuinelyrequired for demolition. 

In Lewisham this agreement is workingwell. The council are co-operating fullyand families are being moved in almost 
every week. Clearly this is the way in 
which the squatting movement can develop. 


If enough people become involved, they 
can make local authorities accept them, 
and work with them, to use the e emptyhouses. This may be reformist to those 
who like to think they are revolutionaries, 
it is also success. It was inevitable 
tha.t we should be absorbed and that is 
fine witt! me as long as our arguments 
are being accepted and our proposalsadopted. 

It means that we can achieve the majoraim of ensuring empty houses are used 
to alleviate the misery of homelessness 
and bad housing, as well as the secondary 
aim of demonstrating to everyone 
concerned, that if people care enough, 
they can think and act for themselves, 
and that it is possible to put forward and 
in ist, on alternatives, that officialdom 
and bureaucracy does not present us 
with ; to organise and do things on their 

own that the authorities will have tc 
accept. 

Direct action is only justifiable as a Ia 
resort and only then, if it makes sense 
Squatting does. 


abian society 


te Fa~bian Society exists to further 
;;ialist education and research. It is 
lliated to the Labour Party, both na


•nally and locally, and embraces all 
a.des of Socialist opinion within its 
rlks-left, right and centre. 
1ce 1884 the Fabian Society has en-
Ued thoughtful socialists who are prered 
to discuss the essential questions 
democratic socialism and relate them 
practical plans for building socialism 

a changing world. 

:yond this the Society has no collective 
•licy. n puts forward no resolutions of 
political character, but it is not an 
ganisation of armchair socialists. Its 
~mbers are active in their Lalbour 
.rties, Trade Unions and Co-operatives. 
1ey are representative of the labour 
Jvement, practical people concerned to 
1dy and discuss problems that matter. 

1e Society is organised nationally and 
;;ally. The national Society, directed 
· an elected Executive Committee, pub-
hes pamphlets, and holds schools and 
nferences of many kinds. Local Socie:
s-th'ere are some 80 of them-are 
lf governing and are lively centres of 
>;eussion and also undertake research. 

1quiries about membership should be 
nt to the General Secretary, Fabian 
teiety, 11 Dartmouth Street, London, 
V1 ; telephone 01-930 3077. 

>Ver design, Jonathan Green-Armytage;
pograpby, Geoffrey Cannon. Printed by 
1e Walrus Press Ltd. (ro), 769 Harrow 
>ad, Sudbury, Wembley, Middlesex. 

N 7163 0400 7. 

the authors 

John Banks is a Principal in the Child-
ren's Department Development Group in 
the Home Office with special responsibility 
for .the organisation of the Community 
Development Project. He was 
previously concerned with development 
work in schools curricula at the Schools 
Council. 

Ray Gosling is a writer and lives in Nottingham. 
He works in a tenants' association. 


Robin Guthrie is Social DevelopmentOfficer with the Peterborough Development 
Corporation. He was formerlyWarden of Cambridge House, the settlement 
in South London. 

Bob Holman is a Lecturer in Social Administration 
at Birmingham University 
and has been actively concerned in community 
work in Handsworth, Birmingham. 


Anne Lapping is a journalist and works 
for New Society. 

Jan O'Malley is a member of the Not-
ting Hill Community Workshop. Her 
contribution was prepared and approvedby a group of members of the Workshop. 
The Workshop grew out of discussions 
within the peace movement and 
was established in permanent premises in 
Notting Hill in 1966. It is committed to 
working for radical change alongsidelocal organisations, accessible to the 
whole community. 

Jim Radford is an agita!tor living in 
Beckenham. He was a founder member 
of the London squatters. 

Martin Rein is Professor of Social Policy 
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
and has recently written Social 
policy: issues of choice and change 

(Random House). 

Dorothy Runnicles is a. Lectl~rer and 
Field Worker in Commumty Social Work 
and works for the National Institute for 
Social Work Training at their Southwark 
Community Project. 


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283 Lord Kennet Controlling our environment 3s 

284 Alf Morris Value added tax: a tax on the consumer 3s 
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