Two faces of population change: Middle Row and Overtown

In 1999, we saw how the context for neighbourhood regeneration in different areas was diverging. Many northern areas and former industrial areas were seeing falling population and housing demand, while London and some other innercity areas were under housing pressure, mainly from growing minority ethnic communities and from the homeless and recent immigrants, but also, in London, from higher-income professionals. These differences, and their consequences for neighbourhood renewal, were even starker in 2001. The stories of Overtown in Knowsley and Middle Row in Birmingham illustrate the contrast.

Overtown was a white working-class area in Merseyside, dominated by estates of council housing built in the 1930s and 1940s to accommodate overspill and slum clearance from Liverpool. The decline of its manufacturing industries had led to some of the highest unemployment and deprivation levels in the country. Wards in Overtown ranked in the top 20 out of over 8,000 wards on the IMD 2000. Lack of work also precipitated population decline throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and lack of demand for council housing was exacerbated by the council’s policy of releasing land for new housebuilding, in an attempt to meet people’s housing aspirations and diversify housing choice and population.

Against this backdrop, less popular estates were vulnerable to rapid decline. When we first visited Overtown in 1999, the Saints’ Walk estate was slightly more popular than other estates in the area, although it still had no waiting list. It had been refurbished through Estate Action funding, and offered a relatively attractive environment. A residents’ association was beginning to organise community events and build community spirit. However, this estate had experienced a calamitous decline in the early 1990s, when nuisance and intimidation by drug dealers drove other residents away and made the estate a no-go area for police and for the housing refurbishment contractors. A quarter of the homes in one crescent quickly became vacant and some were seriously vandalised. The estate’s bad reputation deterred would-be residents, and it was only a combination of saturation policing, estate redesign, environmental improvements and community development activity that turned the situation around.