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For many years I had not been able to return to my home town; bad associations, trauma, etc. When I did I could barely recognise the old district. There has been much talk of the damage from the riots a few years back, but that is nothing to what the town developers have done over the years. They ripped the soul right out of this old town. Piecemeal, residential pockets were systematically cleared away, and in their place were built trunk roads, car parks, one way systems. Main thoroughfares of antiquity and the neighbourhoods that had grown around them just levelled; to be replaced by multi carriageways, flyovers and underpasses, with numerous junctions, serving the new out of town stores and facilities. Footbridges that spanned 5 or 6 lane sections were jokingly erected to facilitate and maintain community cohesion, communities which in many cases had already been evicted. Underground walkways would get you from one zone to another but no one dares use them. Besides being pretty menacing places, they are simply not convenient. Yes the car was king back then, and everyone soon found it was simply impossible to manage without one. Now this convenience has evolved into a constant tail to tail traffic jam, with local air pollution at damaging levels. The impact on mental health is another often overlooked factor, manifesting soon enough with so many displaced persons, wider family support networks disrupted or even disbanded, social experiments which too often led to the chaos of homelessness and/or addiction issues. Racial tensions another destabilising factor, with immigrant families shoe horned into the all too often sub-standard housing which replaced ‘slum’ clearance sites. Ironically the excuse for clearances was ‘concern’ for unsanitary slum areas, along with the clean air act which was needed to tackle dirty coal of local homes and factories.  Yes it all looked very fine on the drawing-boards of the prospective developers, who of course did very well out of these lucrative building contracts. Shopping malls and tower blocks were the future, they said. Futuristic landscapes which too often soon became no go areas. The 1980’s great drive for home ownership,  along with the fallout from boom bust economic failures left many in debt and unable to keep up mortgage repayments. Properties built as social housing ending up paying private landlords exorbitant rents on sub-standard accommodation. The town did not miss out on the cladding makeover either, and so now many of these properties are lethally dangerous with leaseholders or owners unable to sell these properties. Yes we really have been had, blindsided by greed and tricksters, and badly let down by political ‘representation’.