Harlow: a mixture of pride and brutishness

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 16

Harlow: a mixture of pride and brutishness

By

DENNIS BARKER

in the “Guardian,” London

There are signs of brutishness. On the narrow concrete bridge between the multistorey car park and the shopping centre. One is a graffiti man’s head labelled “Ellard.” Mr Ellard is shown with a cross gashed on his face and a knife sticking out of the side of his head.

A woman shopper of 61 stood by this artistry and said: “I am not surprised. I don’t particularly like living here. In the shops, the assistants — and it’s mostly young people — don’t seem interested in serving you. They are surly. You get much better service if you go over to the old shops in Bishops Stortford. There isn’t that sort of spirit here.” Harlow New Town has been celebrating, if that is the word, the thirtieth birthday of its designation. This comes in the middle of the controversy over the advantages of new towns and at a time when the British Government is trying to wind down their rate of expansion. I went to Harlow to listen to the official and the unofficial line on the excellences of the town (one of the very first of the new towns in Britain after the war). The official and the unofficial version bore as much resemblance to one another as a smile and a headache. The central car park is huge and magnificent and seldom unpleasantly full in the daytime. At night it becomes a menacing, unlit cavern which some people say it is best to avoid. TTiere is this Jekyll and Hyde feeling about much of Harlow. The showcases of merchandise on the concrete bridge are elegant enough for the West End but mostly and strangely empty. One of the escalators is out of action, except as a receptacle for fag ends. “I have been here 21 years and I like the house I am

living in,” said a 54-year-old woman shopper. “It has three bedrooms and we pay the deveolpment corporation £lO a week rent, which is fair. But I don’t feel there is a good atmosphere in public places. You have to take what comes. There is quite a lot of vandalism.” I went in search of lunch

in the middle of Harlow. They say there are 16 restaurants in the town, but some are in shops and the others seem to be hiding. I was still looking when I came across another dissatisfied housewife. This one was 65. “I lived in this place before it became a new town,” she said, “in Potter Street. It was like a village. I didn’t have to lock my door. Since the new town came, I have been broken into eight times. “I am not exactly against the new town, but I am against the hooliganism. There are plenty of facilities for the young, too, so it isn't that. This is a town for the younger generation, not for mine.” Was this just the disgruntlement of age? After finding my way past some of the public statues (25 littered about public places, including three Henry Moores) I was able to put it to the test in the front bar of the new Playhouse Theare, a venue eagerly sought as a cultural oasis. Here young people from Harlow Technical College congregate. “No atmosphere,” said a 22-year-old girl student, “at least, not a friendly one. The parents are all right, but the second generation you just cannot get on with. They don’t want to know or care. Thev haven’t got enough to occupy their minds. Their idea of entertainment is emptying dustbins out over the street.” The police in this town of 80,000 people understandably play down the vandalism

angle. An inspector told the story of the National Front slogans which began appearing on walls about a year ago. “Eventually,” he said, “we found two 13-year-old girls at three in the morning, writing signs for the National Front all over the show, ffhat was all it was. They didn’t know what they were doing. They did about £4OO worth of damage. They were not prosecuted." Used as he was to local conditions, this police officer appeared to think that provided there was no political motive, it was hardly remarkable that two 13-year-olds should be up at three in the morning doing damage. The whole affair was, of course, a single instance, but the fact is that the number of instances of criminal damage (about £2O in value) has risen steeply in the last four years, the time in which figures have been kept in their present form. In 1973 there were 1026 instances, in 1974, 1530 and in 1975, 1713. Last year there were 2197. Harlow is a living machine, often an inventive one, but even after 30 years the most strident community efforts have not made it a community in the eyes of all its people. It is true that some of the design doesn’t help (those of houses on sloped sites like warders’ cottages) but there are some pleasant aspects too: on the broad grass greenswards of the Edinburgh Way Industrial Estate daffodils and red tulips grow. The hang-ups are psychological and social rather than architectural and they exist in spite of a lot of commendable community striving. Bert Phelps, chairman of Harlow District Council, is sure that the new town’s status was an incentive to social action. “When I first came into Harlow in about 1953, there were hardly any

paving stones and no street lighting. So we set up a residents’ committee. I went around knocking on doors, collecting shillings off people. We set up our own residents’ association. The same sort of thing was taking place all over the town. We formed a joint residents’ association which put pressure on the council and the development corporation. 1 never felt this desire for action when I lived in Walthamstow in London.” There has been considerable formalised caring in Harlow. Old people have free bus fares, or TV licences, or an allowance for heating (any two of the three). There are voluntary wardens who look after old people in their own homes and other wardens in old people’s communal residences. There is a permanent site for Gypsies. Young people are special beneficiaries. A skating rink is being considered. There is a ski slope, there is a sports centre used by 6000 people a week, and there are 80 junior and 80 senior local football league teams. Every week-end 2000 people are actively engaged playing football.

It is a forest, or a quagmire of people’s art. A new leisure centre is being discussed with a theatre for about 1000, double the size of the auditorium at the Playhouse which is not big enough to take big concerts. At the development corporation offices, they are proud of their creations and talk with technocratic confidence even of the "common rooms’’ in the various subareas of the town. They insist that vandalism must be seen

in perspective. Mr Len White, the social development officer, spent an hour proving that the vandalism which some people saw subjectively was an optical illusion. It was true that the Henry Moore Family Group had made headlines, but that was only because some

children had drawn a moustache on it. It was true that the baby’s head in the group had been knocked off; but instances like that were because the-’ had scattered so many statues about, not in lofty positions, but where they were accessible to the people. All this is in the realm of dispute and will continue to be. A fresh dispute may arise over the argument that the Government’s decision to restrict the growth of Harlow will actually aggravate hooliganism, no reduce it. The argument goes like this: 15 or so years ago, there was a glut of babies that earned Harlow the nickname of Pram Town. This “bulge” is

looking for jobs and soon it will be looking for homes. And all this will be at a time when, for the first time, Harlow firms are not always able to find jobs for the young.

In theory, this could produce more tension. But in a self-consciously self-directed community like Harlow the theory does not always become the practice. Directions can be consciously changed, for the broad mass, if not for the odd drop-out. At one time they announced a two-sex European-type public lavatory as the first in Britain, but that did not happen. Perhaps the build-up of second generation tension will not happen either. Perhaps.