We join a regeneration fact-finding tour as the Renew inquiry visits Newcastle

But the work of the inquiry is now continuing to come up with a detailed strategy for regeneration. Today’s tour sees the inquiry visit older regeneration sites, and some more recent ones, to understand the benefits – as well as the challenges to delivering them.

So, what can Cleadon Park, the first site we visit, teach us about dealing with the UK’s increasingly dated and decaying housing stock?

Garden village principles

More than a century ago, military planners recognised that living conditions created the foundation for later health, summed up in the pithy observation attributed to the politician Richard Reiss: “You cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes”, a reference to how the military classified fitness at that time.

South Shields – a Tyneside industrial town best known for coal, shipbuilding and more recently as the home of one-quarter of Little Mix – could have been the poster child of such a slogan. Even today, decades after the last shipyards and mines closed, healthy life expectancy remains about five years less than the English average.

Cleadon Park was supposed to address this.

“Initially, it was the place to be,” says Michael Farr, executive director of assets and growth at housing association Bernicia, who in the early 2000s was working for Enterprise 5 Housing Association. Enterprise 5 was one of the partners in the site’s regeneration alongside Bellway Homes and South Tyneside Council, where Mr Farr also worked for more than a decade.

“This was an estate built on garden village principles: the houses had big gardens, there were sites for allotments, and even inside toilets, which made them very desirable.

“But in the ’70s and ’80s it started to deteriorate. There were issues with disorder and criminal activity associated with drugs, and the quality of the housing was deteriorating.

“The council had a decision on whether to renovate in situ, or to look at a regeneration scheme in terms of demolition.”

Faced with the prospect of a mammoth refurbishing bill to bring accommodation up to spec after the Decent Homes Standard was introduced in the early 2000s, South Tyneside Council opted for more drastic measures.

Initial proposals would have focused on demolishing and rebuilding social homes, leaving privately owned properties largely untouched, but this was later revised to see more than half of the estate – about 500 homes – levelled and replaced with 750 properties for sale and rent.

The local authority had changed tack after deciding the original plans “weren’t radical enough”, Mr Farr says.

But for many of the site’s existing owner-occupiers, they had gone too far. According to Mr Farr, one public meeting on the scheme had to be ended after just a few minutes, when a local authority councillor offered to conclude a particularly heated discussion with a resident in a nearby car park.

Some at South Shields Town Hall feared things were becoming “too hot to handle” and, worried they might feel the heat at the ballot box come polling day, considered kicking it into the long grass.

But the ward councillors for the area were prepared to stand firm.

“The important thing was involving the community, to... make it possible for people to come back and for families to live close to each other”

“These local councillors could very easily have lost their seats on the basis of what we were doing,” Mr Farr says. “Demolishing houses is not always something people want to see, but they had the bravery to see it through.

“And that leadership is really important, having people who will say, ‘We need this, it could get a bit hairy, but we will see it through because it’s the right thing to do.’”

While convincing the borough’s planning committee to grant the seal of approval had presented one challenge, the brains behind the plans then had to work on bringing the residents themselves around to the idea. 

The development partnership was officially formed in 2003 and work started on the demolition of 538 properties in July 2004. The first properties were completed just two years later, in 2006, but the fifth and final phase of the scheme was not finished until 2017.

“For two years, prior to laying a brick, we had to get the local community on board,” Mr Farr remembers. “And gradually, we started to make inroads, acquiring the properties and decanting people out to other parts of South Shields.

“What we ended up with was a plan with five or six different phases, which we thought would take six or seven years to demolish and rebuild near-on 750 homes. That was naive. It took us twice that time to complete the scheme. What you’re left with is an estate that I think stands the test of time.”

It is easy to see why: in 2000, Cleadon Park was in the top 2% of most-deprived council wards nationally. It had a 33% unemployment rate, and 80% of five to 11-year-olds were eligible for free school meals.

Remembering the scene in 2001, when plans were being drawn up, Paul Fiddaman, chief executive of Karbon Homes, which is now responsible for about 200 homes on the site, says: “If you had walked around, you would have seen rows of boarded-up houses, a reputation that no one wanted to live here, and crime and disorder [that] was very difficult to control.”

In the early 2000s, Mr Fiddaman was at PwC, where he worked with South Tyneside Council on early development plans for the Cleadon Park regeneration.

The contrast now is stark as we tour the estate: streets are clean, homes are well maintained, and the area is a desirable place to live once more – a recently vacated bungalow just minutes walk from Cleadon Park Primary Care Centre (which also hosts a GP and library, the addition of which has also been cited as a factor in the project’s success) has already received more than 200 bids from prospective tenants when we visit.

A tracking survey that polled more than 450 households found that one-fifth more people considered Cleadon Park a “great place to live” in 2010 than in 2006. Years later, the scheme’s champions claim this is in no small part due to efforts to preserve the existing community formed on the original estate.

“A regeneration scheme means different things to different people, but for it to work in its totality, you have to look at the physical, social and the economic”

“Sometimes we think it’s just about building homes, but it’s not,” says Andrea Roberts, supported housing officer at South Tyneside Council.

“We could see that sense of community was there and it’s important to keep that, so the important thing was involving the community, to keep that community and make it possible for people to come back and for families to live close to each other.”

The sheer scale of the £132m project meant that bosses were able to maintain a permanent presence on site throughout, which proved invaluable in keeping costs down and building confidence in the scheme. 

According to Mr Farr, once the owner-occupiers had been persuaded, the rest of the community was “all for it”. For Tracy Harrison, chief executive of the Northern Housing Consortium, “if you are not on site and accessible to tenants and proactively providing information, then disinformation will fill that void”.

Ms Roberts remembers “several characters on the estate who were very supportive and passionate about creating a better future for their children”. These individuals in turn became “very effective spies”, particularly in helping to thwart attempts by a local landlord to buy properties before they could be taken over by developers.