Nerve 9 - The Shopping Trolley Trail

The Shopping Trolley Trail

When I moved into Norris Green in 2004, I decided that one way to get to know the area would be to do a series of walks, following different routes, and recording what I'd seen on my website, so that people reading it could add their own comments and observations. I call them Parish Walks, and on a Monday in October 2004 I set out on one which I share - in an updated form - here.

I still hadn't worked out a strategy for negotiating the worse-than-labyrinthine Norris Green estate on foot. The layout is so elusive that even lifelong residents still get disorientated, let alone freshers like me. But the moment was right to head out for a wander around the maze.

I dropped in on Vinny, a local historian and housing worker who has spent some regeneration money very wisely, producing a book and CD called 'A Brief History of Norris Green'. Like many other local folk, Vinny's concern is the growing unravelling of a sense of community, especially among the young. Vinny says, "If this history can spark off an interest in younger readers then the whole project will have been worthwhile." Vinny's (free) CD is well worth looking at for anyone who wants to know the truth about the place.

Not that the truth is always very palatable. For the rural labourers who tended the damp and boggy land when St Swithin's was established in 1425, and for today's families living on a jerry-built estate, now crumbling, times have often been tough. Today's walk took me into the unpalatable.

The story of the Boot Estate is well-known, a story of good intentions but mismanagement over seventy years which now leaves many long term residents living in roads where others have been cleared, their lovely well-kept houses and gardens sandwiched between tinned-up properties. Despite the very slow beginnings of redevelopment it is still a real mess.

I went map-less, by instinct, testing my meagre but growing sense of the area. So I wasn't quite sure of the route I took. It didn't help that in these half derelict acres, sometimes road signs are missing - sometimes the corner houses they were secured to are missing. My one marker was a shopping trolley, abandoned at the one-time junction of Monksdown and Glassonby, now a wasteland. If I return there again and the trolley is gone, I will be lost. Seems fitting - only markers of impermanence guide me around this place of deep disruption.

When I saw the trolley for the second time I knew I'd completed a circuit, and that I could spin out via a link road onto the next cycle of crumbling concrete, corrugated windows and Boot Estate blight.

These things made an impression on me en route:

People going about their business, from houses with neat gardens, pushing prams, carrying shopping, clearing rubbish, tidying up, in the face of the terrible dereliction around them.

An old man emerging from a well-kept house, the only one still occupied in a row of four, slowly shaking his head at the bright blue slogans newly-painted on the pavement outside, identifying PINHEAD as the author.

Fresh council signs on lampposts everywhere: NO TIPPING...while the whole scene of dereliction feels like a municipal tip.

A pair of trainers laced together, hanging from a telephone line way above Colesborne Road. Sign of humiliation for whoever owned them, reminded of their theft and gleeful disposal every time they pass underneath; sign of great skill or perseverance by the youngsters who dispatched them there.

I am especially impressed by this sign: 'MONKSDOWN COMMUNITY INFANT SCHOOL - WHERE EVERY CHILD IS SPECIAL'. This is brave and prophetic language in an area seemingly cast off by the city, in a square where some children rampage at night and residents have told me they live in fear. I know that sign is true as it is founded on the good practice and great commitment of the staff and the pupils there.

And lastly, what grabbed me was a tinned-up house, which I think may have been on Braithwaite Crescent. Number Ten. As soon as I saw it, in my head I juxtaposed it with a more famous Number Ten. The irony, the disparity, the sinfulness, the shame in that contrast...

Postscript:
Having read that description of the area one resident wrote to tell me that I'd made it sound like Beirut. Clearly - and especially in the current climate - it's a long way from that. But to that resident, despite the conditions they're living in, it's still special - it's home. I appreciate that, but I was scandalised by the way that people had been treated in this part of our city - abandoned to a job half done. The Shopping Trolley Trail was written in anger and protest.

John Davies lives and works in Norris Green, and blogs at http://www.johndavies.org
Vinny can be contacted at timminsvinny@hotmail.com

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