Durham: the good, the bad and the ugly

[shewhomust]

durham_rambler is at a meeting: the sixth in three days, and, I hope, the last of the week. Right now he is chairing a consultation exercise, at which the Neighbourhood Planning Forum asks the people of Durham City for their views, from which the NPF will then construct a planning policy for Durham (if you want to know more, it's on the NPF website). I am excused attendance, because I was at the previous meeting last week; tonight's meeting is a repeat, for the benefit of the overflow of people who could not be fitted in to the Town Hall last time round. Now I need to pull together my thoughts, and answer the NPF's questionnaire.

There are three questions: What is good about the Durham City centre area? What is bad about the Durham City centre area? What needs to change? My plan is to draft my answers here, and then I'll have a record...

What is good about the Durham City centre area?

• Its heritage, obviously. The world-class medieval centre, but also the heritage of Durham as the focus of a mining area (Redhills, the Old Miners' Hall, the North Road Methodist chapel, the viaduct, Old Shire Hall...), not just the buildings but the living tradition of the Gala.



• Its situation: it's a small city, but within easy reach of Newcastle-Gateshead, Sunderland, Darlington for shops and entertainment, Weardale and the coast for leisure. Durham can't compete with larger towns, but it can benefit from them.



• Despite a lot of building (particularly beside the river) green spaces still survive in the centre of the city: the river banks around the peninsula, the Sands and across to Crook Hall, Flass Vale, around the South Road colleges...



• The indoor market has some excellent shops, and offers the best shopping in Durham; in addition, there are some very good small shops.

What is bad about the Durham City centre area?

• The University brings undoubted benefits to the city, but it is surely by now too big to be accommodated in a small city, and it does not do enough to reduce the harm that results from this. Too many houses have been removed from the housing market to be let to students, too many brownfield sites are becoming unavailable for general and affordable housing because they are being developed as PBSAs, too many areas are becoming uninhabitable for families and other permanent residents. This social change is not being planned, but is being allowed to happen piecemeal, driven by private profits.



• The so-called 'vibrant night-time economy': a drink-fuelled culture encouraged by those who are making a lot of money out of it. It damages the community, it damages the participants. Presumably the university still has alternative entertainments to offer to students, but what is there for the young people who still live in the city (assuming there still are some) to do?



• The city's economy suffers because so high a proportion of the residents are only here for half the year: shops and other businesses have to make their profits in term-time. Yet rents and rates are high. Restaurants can hope to make up for the absent students by catering to tourists, but everyday shops cannot.



• Many of the shops which ought to be contributing to a living city centre are on out-of-town sites. Meanwhile, the city centre suffers from empty shops, and an excess of charity shops (and I love charity shops; but we have more than is healthy).



• The Old Miners' Hall, the Count's House, the broken paving stones and patched roadways, Neville's Cross itself: it seems easier to fund large and pointless projects than to pay for maintenance.



• The North Road is not a taxi rank.

What needs to change?

• The university must take more responsibility for housing its students. It boast of being a collegiate university, and should act like one. More students should be accommodated in colleges, and PBSAs should be brought within the college system, with the level of surveillance and pastoral care that implies.



• The council needs to stop approving planning applications piecemeal, and begin to plan for how much student accommodation is needed, and where.



• HMOs are not residential properties, they are a business, and should be treated as such.



• It is too late for the Council to use an Article 4 Direction to ensure balanced communities; their stated aim that no area should be more than 10% student houses cannot be met by preventing further conversions. We need to look for ways to return houses to family occupation, reversing any changes which have been made to adapt them for multiple occupancy. Perhaps the council could set up or partner a Housing Association with this aim.



• Durham needs development which recognises its strengths and is sensitive to its nature. It is a small city, and care must be taken not to overdevelop it in a way or to an extent which is harmful to its potential as a tourist destination. Resources should be put into the maintenance which will make it a more attractive place to be, and to an information centre which can persuade visitors to extend their stay in Dueham.



• No amount of Prince Bishops shopping streets will enable Durham to rival the Metro Centre as a retail destination: but it could accommodate the mix of galleries, small shops and cafés that draws visitors to Corbridge.

I could go on, but perhaps I'd better not. I know that as soon as I've pressed 'submit' on the questionnaire, I'll think of something essential I've missed out, but it's time to take that chance...

Comments

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Agreed on all fronts. I remember how long it took for there to be a decent grocery store within easy walking of the town centre (the Tesco quickie on North Road is not much more than a glorified convenience store). I don't know if more real-food places have opened (as opposed to pasty shops) since we lived there?

I also remember how difficult it was for J and me to find a place to let when we'd first moved there; almost every place we saw in DH1 was only to be let to students. It was maddening.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It's easy for people who don't know Durham to look at the University, the Cathedral, even County Hall, and think it's a very middle class city: I think that's why Waitrose decided to open here. And then they discover that many of the people who work in those places don't live in the city, and many more go elsewhere to shop. That's quite apart from students who have a different pattern of expenditure, and aren't here for hallf the year anyway...

Many of the people who shop in Durham come in from the pit villages on the bus, and they don't shop at Waitrose.

hmm...

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

lots to consider

Re: hmm...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Mainly of local interest, I'm afraid, unless you see similar problems where you live?

Re: hmm...

[pigshitpoet.livejournal.com]

unfortunately where i live is not this progressive, retirement capital of canada

land of the newly wed and nearly dead...
that's white rock!

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Really, this, particularly:
•The so-called 'vibrant night-time economy': a drink-fuelled culture encouraged by those who are making a lot of money out of it
and that, too:
it seems easier to fund large and pointless projects than to pay for maintenance
should be distributed to 'the authorities' in towns and cities world- or at least Europe-wide (dunno about Athens, they seem to have acute worries of more than one kind but who hasn't and probably it applies there too).

Lots of things about where I live (Bordeaux; LJ will lead you to me via google) are good reasons to do so but the above you mention, reason to move away.
Last night, La Future de la Nation as M. Cro Magnon has named the hordes of drunken students and underage language course visitors (we watch them nightly from our windows as they keep us/me from sleeping except sometimes sunday, monday and tuesday nights, even wednesdays; it is only the occasional roar and bottle thrown whereas the neighbourhouse wastebins are being overturned every night, the contents spread out on the pavement to the sporty pleasure of the cleaning men) found a pile of pocket books that had already been thrown on the street in the daytime and found they needed spreading. I can find no better illustration to the problem.
The tourists are a very mixed, rather set kind of set of visitors, usually families but also a lot of groups of adults interested in the heritage of this town including its wine that seems to be drunk in a more civilised manner.
Of course,
we don't have the 'college culture' nor system of English speaking countries but I must say, there are such a number of activities to take part of, many many for free such as good concerts of every kind in any genre, even the buses in Gironde/Aquitania can be taken for such small sums to visit sites of interest such as both la Brede and the beach; that it shouldn't be that hard to find something else to do with one's time as future hope of the nation than pillaging the Streets toward the clubs what is after all still also place where 'normal' people live, some of whom have to go to work in the daytime.
Truly a matter of education (in the French sense;), I believe.
We partied too when I was younger (I sometimes still do!) and tried to study, simultaneously. We went to discoes, bars, clubs but we didn't usually behave in such ways that police or firefighters had to be called to save the city, in fact we went home with the last train or sometimes night bus (which only appeared as a later phenomenon, when I started going out places closed at around one o'clock due to some then law), kind of quietly because we were not better people but trained by parents to behave in such ways that kept us out of cells.
Here,
the party people are (especially when the sun shines so I have come to love when it rains, nights; gives'em a nice good shower!) still screaming and shouting and throwing bottles and wastebins about at seven in the morning when M. Cro Magnon has long gone off to work and I am having my coffee which I can't in peace&quiet except today for it rained tonight.

I'd choose you as President, I would. Don't care what party you represent but take care to call it something populistic, please;) End of rant and sorry about doing it here but your fault for inspiring me to...no: it was the student pack!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I'd make a terrible President.

I'm surprised that you share our problems with the 'party people' - we think of it as peculiarly Anglo-Saxon...

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I regard it as what Mae West said on the subject; "since women have run men for centuries it should be easy for them to run a country", look at Angie! Or maybe rather not...then there is always Hillary and that South-American gaucha doing deals in that ruined horsewomanshipcounty because she had too much beef and red wine, speaking of I feel like some just now.

Oh, I could go on and on about the Party People (best narrative on the same title to be found here: http://sabotabby.livejournal.com/1280524.html I mean, you could be each other's Ministerinnen for Interior Affairs if I may do the decoration;)) but who would I be to talk your ears off...here the perpetual party has just restarted (bongo drumming included) because it is thursday, the sun is shining upon all and the weekend has to be approached (plastic) bottle (hard liquor mixed with lemonade) in hand.
Only for those in doubt, there are always the rows of dealers waiting which is what really fuels economy we all know, drug money is good to pay off debts with for whole countries and anyway their parents have too much money coming from God knows where and definitely give their young'uns too much, thinking this will make them improve themselves. ...to be continued, I'm afraid but I shall now spare you as I know you have to prepare a few speeches, I think.
Can't wait to hear you;)

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

One of my almae matres, UKC, which also claims to be collegiate, has created much the same problems in Canterbury especially since the huge expansion of CCU. Canterbury really isn't big enough for two unis!

I don't think anywhere that has a student population really thinks about the potential outcomes of student ghettoes.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Since the universities became money-making businesses, why should they think about the fall-out from their expansion? This is how capitalism works.

And I know there is an HMO lobby which brings together residents from university cities - but Canterbury might be an interesting one to add to the list (I haven't been there since I was a child, and don't know how directly comparable it might be to Durham, but, interesting...)

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I so agree that it should be a large Corbridge rather than a small Newcastle. I would shop there more often if it were. I note it doesn't really have a good deli. I think it needs a Waitrose but not in the previous site.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, the future of the Gates is anyone's guess at the moment: though its advantage as a site for a supermarket is that it has parking. But if Waiutrose were minded to try again, where would you recommend them to go?