The Gate to Nowhere

To: Chief Planning Officer, Birmingham City Council,
Re: N/01514/03/FUL Minor Amendment – Hamstead Road, Victoria Jubilee Allotments site, Handsworth.
We've been asked to comment on a “minor amendment” to application N/01514/03/FUL relating to the “omission of pedestrian access to Handsworth Park”. This access is via a gate midway along the northern border of the area of the Jubilee site - the point at which a “Green Walkway” links Crick Lane and Holly Road to the south of the site, via a play area and new allotments, to Handsworth Park. This public footpath was presented by the developer as integral to the layout of the site at the time the applicant was seeking public support. It was presented to Planning Committee in May 2004 when successfully obtaining planning approval.
Having inspected the proposed amendment, we object to it on the grounds that omitting the gate and footpath access in the original application leaves no other direct access point between Handsworth Park and the Victoria Jubilee site. This “minor amendment” will demolish the promise of a connection between Handsworth Park and the buildings, allotments, children’s play and sports areas on the Jubilee site.
Any increase in security that might be gained by the omission of the promised connection between Park and site via this gate (whose lock could be in the hands of Park Rangers as it is for other access points to the park) Is not worth the loss of permeability caused by its omission.
‘Permeability” and the avoidance of ‘severance’ contribute to Birmingham City Council’s “place shaping” responsibilities – in this case those elements that help prevent homes, allotments, sports fields and park becoming separate enclaves.
This ‘minor amendment’ is inconsistent with the principle of permeability contained in the policy document “Places for All” approved by Birmingham City Council in 2001 as Supplementary Planning Guidance for all development proposals in the city. See: http://tinyurl.com/25glr9 Furthermore, the gate, whose omission is the subject of this application, will stand opposite another gate in the new railings bordering the south edge of St.Mary’s churchyard. These gates are waypoints on a footpath that before the park lake was laid out in the 1890s - a path recorded in the archived memoirs of older residents who walked to or from from St.Mary’s Church, at first directly, and later around the lake, through Victoria Jubilee Allotments (marked by a hedged lane until 2004) and on to Soho Road. To permit this “minor amendment”, or to replace its function by a compromisethat allows only a circuitous route between park and Jubilee site, will erase even more local history.
Robert Frost (1964) said “good fences make good neighbours” but his poem began “something there is that doesn't love a wall.” Omitting a pedestrian access to Handsworth Park from the Jubilee site changes an attractive and secure part of the park’s southern border into a permanent barrier between these two areas.
We ask members of the Planning Committee to defer or reject this amendment, pending information on how the Jubilee site will be linked to Handsworth Park for the benefit of those living there and those, not necessarily residents, who will, in future years, benefit from the resources of what could prove a popular well integrated mixed-use development redounding to the credit of all involved. Yours etc., Simon Baddeley, Handsworth Allotments Information Group

Under Mount Korakiana

Another chilly blue dry day - perfect for our odd jobs. Aln came up in the late afternoon and fitted our flue. We sat enjoying the fire and the slight scent of the wood smoke drifting back through the rough hole that Lambros is coming up to finish tomorrow along with putting final touches to the roof, putting in a botched window properly, plastering and generally tidying the mess made of our upstairs last year. The weather promises to stay fine over the weekend and beyond.
* * *
E-mail makes arranging future work pleasantly easy - over a soup and bread in the Beer Bucket in Kontokali. I got a circular from the university yesterday on an agreed ‘sustainable cooling policy’. It aims to limit the use of ‘active cooling’ - air-conditioning:

With the expected increase in temperatures due to global warming the need to adapt buildings to prevent overheating and ensure acceptable working conditions will become increasingly important…The University will adopt a cooling strategy based on the ‘switch off, absorb, blow away and cool principles’ with active cooling being a last resort. (i) Switch off: Reduce internal and external heat gains by minimising gains from lighting, IT and heat producing equipment. This includes minimising the need for heat producing equipment, locating such equipment in dedicated areas, and the use of passive techniques such as solar shading. (ii) Absorb: Where practical use the thermal mass of the building to absorb heat and/or by the introduction of phase change materials (SB note: technology for collecting night cooling for use in the day) (iii) Blow away: Ensure an intelligent ventilation strategy. For example the use of night time air to cool buildings, limiting ventilation when external temperatures are greater than internal. (iv) Cool: Where cooling is unavoidable, ensure that the system used is well controlled and is designed to minimise energy use and the production of CO2

* * *
I finished Kevin Andrews' The Flight of Ikaros. I’m grateful for the web friend from Ikaria and the English north country, who is making a study of Andrews, who told me of him. Andrews' writing makes his book universal, but it could be read alongside Nicholas Gage’s Eleni – the latter first, partly for the summarised history inserted to give context to the story of his mother’s murder in the village of Lia in Epirus – by any non-Greek wanting to understand the Greek Civil War. Andrew's only meets communists very briefly, on their way to prison, but spends much time in the company of those who fought against the andartes.

The understanding that is emerging – very slowly as my stolid intelligence reaches for it - is the role, only recently teased out in a number of doctoral theses focusing on small areas of Greece in the period to which Professor Mark Mazower and fellow contributors refer in his sombre and scholarly collection After the war was over, is the way the civil war, so often viewed as the first surrogate hot war spawned by the Cold War, in which ignorant armies clashed under the aegis of greater powers, was also an occasion for escalating the violence of traditional feuding between villages, families and brothers. In Kevin Andrews’ encounters across Greece during that dire period people talked less of differences over the future government of Greece – the preoccupation of the Americans and the British and, to some extent the Russians, though Stalin had graciously agreed with Churchill to cede Greece to the West at Yalta – than about the settlement of scores, revenge and retribution. This is the story of all civil wars including ours - now entertainly re-enacted as a fancy dress picnic on Bank Holidays. Imagine that here. Thucycdides wrote of it with the start of the revolt in Corfu. Its ingredients include envy, jealousy, rage, the availability of weapons and the opportune moment. These fine grain interpretations are bound to be less welcome, even 50 years later, not just because they become so tortuously detailed, but because their currency is made up of villages, streets, families, the names of individuals and the messy subjectivity of personal accounts among people whose scores, even now, remain unsettled. No wonder some say ‘leave it be’.

Andrews, who’s sense of severance at leaving for New York at the end of his fellowship in the early 1950s perhaps surpasses Lawrence Durrell’s (‘The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it’ Ch 8 Prospero’s Cell), recalled from the caique nosing past Cape Matapan towards Crete in April 1941, returned (unlike Durrell) to become a citizen of Greece, living there with his family until his end. Nicholas Gage, on the other hand, was born a Greek but, through his mother’s courage, escaped, as a child, to America to return as a man to research and tell her story.

‘History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember: that is our function’ Lawrence Durrell op cit 1945

* * *
I had a good dream last night about ordering wet work on the person who set me up over the credit card theft – only joking. Katerina came up from the bus stop yesterday afternoon with more horta for us with names like famous battles – moskalahánu, prikalíthá, zaxhouliá and zágouna. It’s chilly but sunny enough to dry washing and feel warm in the day. Katherina sighed and exclaimed ‘Krio!’ I made gesture of flexed arms ‘Stin Anglia einai zesto!’ She laughed. I might have made some doltish sense despite every tense wrong. God how I wish I could speak this lovely clever language – and a hundred others but that can wait.

An Athens News horoscope tells me ‘its getting creepy but getting moving as the week goes on’ and that I should ‘get good luck from low-class little men up the backstairs and avoid the great and the good…’

Last night I took my new stick for a walk up the village. Lin held my gloved hand in the chill. “Left or right?” she asked at the top of our steps. “Let’s go up the village”. We strolled against the wind funnelled between the houses until we came to the wider slope that leads to the car park and bandstand and the lights of Corfu and the mainland coast twinkled between the dark shapes of swaying cypresses harking the winter breeze. ‘How could you prove to a child those lights, which look just the same, are closer than those stars?’ We strolled over the performance area by the bandstand and traced out the words on the low iron-fenced memorial to those who’d died for their country. Lights shone behind the windows of a substantial overlooking house from which hung the national flag. We walked on to where the road narrowed between small houses, some occupied some clearly not for some time. A heavy dog chained on a terrace barked suddenly and loudly as we passed and went on being noisy out of boredom. We came to the derelict music school. An earth tremor had made a crack that ran from the lintel above its third floor to the street. We started back from the second of the hairpin bends as the road starts to climb to Sokraki and the street lights end. ‘It’s got the same magic as Lydbrook’ - the village where we’ve had a home for over twenty years. On the fringe of the forest between high steep slopes sprinkled at night with lights along its steep unlit footpaths and a night sky almost free of city glow, we’ve walked on similar windy evenings and enjoyed the long village to ourselves as people sit snug indoors. Coming home we passed quietly by the new music school where a piano was being practised and the kafenion where elders were playing cards and backgammon.

Sovereign debt in the Eurozone

I bumped into David outside the village medical centre on my way up Democracy Street to use the internet at Mark and Sally's. I was aware ADEDY had called for stoppages on February 10. "The airport was closed. It's over severance compensation still unpaid after last year's privatization...and there's a national strike called for 24th February. Everyone!" Ian drove by and stopped. "I'll get the cement guy to come and give you that estimate for your balcony." "It's because there's no consensus in Parliament. The Left isn't going to play to the accountants in the EU." I bought bread at the shop; wondered if we'd be able to fly home as planned on 22 February. Meantime we must collect some firewood, do some shopping, and finish off our project to turn the downstairs dining room into a bedroom by filling in the open staircase. Lin and I had a squabble last night over fixing architrave to the opening at the bottom of the stairs. I struggled for an hour to line up three pieces of wood with their forty five degree angles and just could not get rawlplugs to stay in the right place in the uneven composition of the walls. I was cursing the unfairness of walls, wood, rawlplugs and screws while Lin read upstairs after I'd rejected her advice to use glue instead. "How the f*** do clever people do this?" I muttered as bits of plaster fell on the floor and wood and wall remained obstinately unmarried. By one in the morning I was defeated. By half one I was sullenly squeezing gobbets of brown sticky stuff from a tube onto the backs of the architrave pieces. Lin came down and to offer them up and make them fit. Then we stood in silence holding the wood to the wall as the glue set. Perfect. "Do you want a cup of coffee, Lin?"

* * *

Yesterday my email wouldn't work but Rashid at the IT Helpdesk on campus in Birmingham took over my screen - an eerie feeling - and rejigged the encryption and made everything alright. "I'm hugging you Rashid" I said over Skype as he gave me back my mouse. This connection is so vital for as I line up various bits of work in UK during March, late May and June - by which time the political landscape will look different and there'll be more news of recession and reactions to government austerity measures - and not just in Greece.

But meantime the stronger economies of Europe, especially Germany, are playing a political role stewarding the Eurozone - thus do feelings about the European dream become polarised as populations of voters in every country feel the discomfort and pain of global recession.

Back to the future: BBC 13/12/11. Greece entered Eurozone 1 Jan 2001

* * *

My mum, Barbara, in 1919 with her dad, Henry Maine

Today my mother is 93. We chatted by Skype, the continued snow and the progress of her writing "I'm up to Palestine in 1934."

With my mother in the Highlands this January

Just one more 'Out of Town'

A programme compered by his friend and colleague Fred Dinenage was coincidentally broadcast the evening that my stepfather Jack Hargreaves died on 15 March 1994. Fred when I met him at Jack's funeral in Salisbury and who knew Jack was ill at the time the programme was made, said it was typical of his professionalism that whether by luck or some magical intention it should have gone out the same night. Jack had a preference for the dangers of live TV, but this evening had been pre-recorded. Isobel, his wife of thirty years, who died in 1998, told me that though Fred had kindly sent her a tape shortly after the broadcast, she couldn't bring herself to watch it. I have not been able to find a recording - until now.

, JH: Just one more 'Out of Town' ~ 15 March 1994 from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.\

A week ago Ian Wegg, who'd traced me through the internet, kindly sent me a DVD containing the whole programme, along with other films he'd recorded off air, including an Out of Town episode from 1980 and a tribute assembled by Fred Dinenage that aired on 28 March '94.

I’ve edited Ian's recording to show the 'special' of Out of Town that JH agreed to make for the broadcast, though the series had ended 13 years earlier, just before Southern Television lost its franchise. In this film, mentioned in one of Jack's obituaries, his shed is not the usual studio rig, but the real shed at his last home, Raven Cottage, near Belchalwell in Dorset. Who was behind the camera then? I don't know. The broadcast includes a reunion between Jack and his companion entertainers on ‘How!’ - the children’s series he invented.

I was on a train when the programme went out. A few hours earlier I'd been beside Jack’s hospital bed with Bay, my sister. He was in a coma; had been far away since he'd arrived at the Hospital a few days earlier; already becoming part of everything, even though he seemed so palpably there and just in heavy sleep. At moments I’d wanted to raise my voice and shake him awake but he was a long way off. All the same we spoke to him in case he might have heard us somewhere in some last liminal space. Perhaps our voices hovered on a riverbank as he gazed at a rise or heard us by the edge of some wintry wood in the evening or imagined all of us, Bay and me and Mum, in the suspended time of dreams, strolling up Regent Street together after seeing a film in Leicester Square long ago, feeling it was now. Perhaps our murmurs by his bed fused with our childhood chatter in one river - Lambourn, Winterbourne, Kennet, Enborne, Itchen and Stour flowing together. Perhaps I’d imagined him a little boy again remembering his mother and father and brothers and the bullnose Morris days long before he knew us; long before the war and its intensities, Fleet Street, television studios, advertising agencies, cities of the plain and their dangerous women.

Perhaps all these were fleeting together to drift on the surface like the sun's reflection on a cold chalk stream hiding for a moment the clean gravel, crayfish, caddis tubes and mayfly larvae, miller’s thumbs and brown trout suspended in the invisible current, with water crowfoot and emerald starwort stroking their golden scales.

Bay and me had eaten in Dorchester, then caught the train together and talked about Jack and Mum and our own children and us. It was the longest we’d been together for ages. I left Bay at Southampton so she could go on to London, phoning her husband Gabe to say she was on her way. “I think we’ll be back quite soon“ she’d said. Isobel rang me just after I’d got home to Birmingham saying Jack slipped away as the nurses turned him in the bed at 8-o-clock that evening when my train was somewhere between Banbury and Leamington Spa.

** ** ** This Thursday Paul Peacock, who wrote Jack's biography, drove down from Waterfoot in Yorkshire, collected me from Handsworth, and we drove on to Gloucestershire to Rock Cottage in Lydbrook, our small house in the Forest of Dean beside a path that curves up the side of Bell Hill away from the road and car access. It needs tender loving care after thirty years. We're hoping Paul and his family will take this on in return for the time they spend there. Rock Cottage from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

*** *** Teacherdude's Grill & BBQ posts an irritated commentary ...

What we see is yet another example of how 'access journalism' reduces reporters to little more than stenographers and cheer leaders for those in power and that by making so many compromises to gain access to their subject the whole point of a newspaper interview is subverted...

...on a syndicated Guardian piece by Helen Smith from the island of Poros about George Papandreou on the irony of a Socialist PM dismantling the Hellenic welfare state:

"As long as I feel I am doing what I think is right and just for my country, for the Greek people, that is enough for me. Saving Greece from this crisis was the first thing on the agenda. We are now on a much more normalised road." But he also concedes that the path ahead is strewn with difficulties. After months of angry protests and bloody violence, culminating in the deaths of three bank employees in May, it is clear that the Greek people are not prepared to take austerity lying down. For many, the recent respite is the lull before the storm – with worsening recession, galloping unemployment and mounting dissent within Papandreou's own party looming on the horizon. He accepts that in a nation where almost a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line, communication could be better. In the months ahead, as measures really begin to bite, there will, he says, be greater urgency to "get out more into the neighbourhoods and countryside" to convey the message that Greeks must bite the bullet of austerity in return for seeing their country emerge reinvigorated out of the crisis.

More about the drastic Hellenic Pensions Bill from Athens News 8 July 2011 - a piece by Dimitris Yannopoulos about the extent and range of this legislation driven by Andreas Loverdos - Ανδρέας Λοβέρδος - and on YouTube a strong speech to the Hellenic Parliament on 6 July 2010, with signing, received with applause and with five reminders from the President of the House, Philippos Petsalnikos, I think, on time limits....and from Athens News Agency 19 July 2010:

Employment minister Andreas Loverdos on Friday tabled a draft bill on reforming Greece's pension system for the public sector in Parliament. Among the key features of the new bill is that it equalises retirement age for men and women, gradually abolishing rights previously held by women to retire at an earlier age if they had at least one child under 18 or had three or more children. For a brief transitional period between 2011-2013, both men and women will have the right to retire at a younger age based on these rules, increasing from 50 years to 52 in 2011 and 55 in 2012, while from 2013 onward the age of retirement for both groups will be 65, regardless of other factors. Age of retirement will also equalised for men and women with adult or no children based on the new bill. Women in the public sector currently have the right to retire at 60 years, compared to 65 for men. Under the new rules, both men and women will be able to retire at 61 in 2011, at 63 in 2012 and at 65 from 2013 onward. The exception will be men and women with handicapped children, where from 2011 the age of retirement will remain at 50 years for women, while it will be lowered from 65 to 50 years for men. Apart from the above, for pensions above 1,400 euros per month, the bill brings back the LAFKA fee and introduces the new "Pensioners Solidarity Contribution' ranging from 3-10 percent. It also places those hired in the public sector from 2011 in the unified IKA pension system and equates the status of public-sector pensioners with those of the private sector in other ways, establishing the same system of a 'welfare' and contributions-based pension for the public sector from 2015, while it abolishes the right to pension for unwed adult daughters with the exception of those that are judged incompetent or are still students.

... and more details of the depth and range of austerity measures from Athens News - 12 July 2010:

• Benefits for public sector workers not already scrapped will be reduced by 8%, while wages for state enterprises employees will be cut by 3%
• Annual holiday bonuses only for civil servants earning up to €3000 per month are capped at €1000 (250 for Christmas, 250 for Easter and 500 for summer holiday)
• Annual holiday bonuses for public sector pensioners capped at €800 (200 for Christmas, 200 for Easter and 400 for summer holiday)
• Holiday bonuses axed for civil servants and public sector pensioners earning more than €3000 per month
• Current public sector salaries and pensions frozen for at least 3 years
• The second installment of a handout to low-income workers is scrapped
• All 'high-pension earners' of €1400 euros or more will experience reductions (LAFKA) of 5-10%, depending on pension brackets, which range from €1400 to €3000 or more
• Pensions calculated on the basis of full-career earnings and eventually capped at €2500
• Drastic revision in private sector labour relations, impacting minimum salaries, mass layoff limits, collective bargaining arbitration and severance pay cuts
VAT increases from 21% to 23% for all commercial goods, and from 10% to 11% on basic goods and public utilities
Special excise taxes on fuel, alcohol and tobacco taxes raised by 10%
• lllegal construction and open-space penalty taxes
• Special annual levy on very profitable enterprises
• Increased taxes and licence fees for electronic and gambling games
• Increases in the objective valuation of buildings
• The Public Investment Programme will be reduced by €1.5 billion over the next year

Rain

We are surrounded by mist, thunder, and the pleasant sound – for us who trust our roof – of rain pattering, occasionally drumming, on the tiles, flecking the windows, drops dribbling at random down the pane, water streaming from the gutters down the paths to the drains. I get up with a light heart to do easy routines – restarting the stove until it roars merrily, wearing my long raincoat to rescue a lineful of washing from the garden, spinning it and hanging it to dry on a frame by the stove, bringing in wood kept covered and dry and feeding the fire that is no longer smoking, cleaning a pan that had soaked overnight in the kitchen, making myself porridge topped with dark sugar and cream, and calling Lin to wake for a mug of coffee. There’s a Bal Masque for in the Agricultural Co-op tonight on the lower road. We’d seen chairs being delivered. Natasha showed us her costume as we chatted over the fence yesterday. Then on 14 February there will be Carnivali in the village.

Yesterday Lin and I started work filling in the staircase in preparation for closing it altogether from the room through which it passes which we are making into a bedroom. The room next to the kitchen is to be a downstairs dining room, conveniently next to the kitchen and cooler in hot weather.

* * *

Lee Southall at Handsworth Park has circulated a nice poster advertising one of my history tours of the Park on Sunday 21 March. I fear he and his colleagues are under terrific pressure to make and take big cuts in their budgets, and their own jobs. I've written to local councillors across Handsworth and Perry Barr:

Dear Councillors and friends

Handsworth Park under threat from new

proposals for re-organising Ranger Services

These proposed changes to the management of Birmingham’s treasured parks – in particular Handsworth Park - are very troubling, especially as they include reduction in the Ranger Services.

As someone involved in writing the history of Handsworth Park and, with many others, campaigning for its restoration since the 1980s, I learned a lot about the contribution of parks to city life – especially their indirect contribution to health and education and the resulting contribution to community safety. It did not take long for my researches to catch up with something that the public has long known, that you cannot realise the public good of parks without park keepers – now the Ranger Service. Crime, like fire, prevented is very difficult to measure, thus the peacekeeping role of the Rangers in all our parks cannot, in a time of desperate purse tightening, be accurately assessed against the cost to the city of their wages. That failure in accounting practice will bear very directly on all who have come to enjoy what for the last 10 years has seen a renaissance in public parks.

As an almost daily visitor to Handsworth park before and after the Rangers arrived about ten years ago I, and others in my position, can attest to the 1001 incidents that might have gone from petty to serious which have been nipped in the bud merely by the presence of a ranger patrolling, let alone their many direct interventions that have prevented crimes in the park. In addition, our Rangers, in liaison with teachers, local police and community support officers, have participated in a whole range of actions with schools designed to catch potential problems long before they become those that once allowed our public parks to deteriorate into spaces from which the larger public – young and old - were barred by crime and anti-social behaviour.

We hope very much that local councillors and our MPs will be able to come together to press for damage limitation, especially as it was understood as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant for the restoration of Handsworth Park that revenue for its continued maintenance and staffing was guaranteed for at least 10 years from the time of the grant. There are still still a few years to run, By cutting back on services especially the ranger service in Handsworth Park the Council may be acting contrary to its agreement with the Heritage Lottery Fund. Can councillors please make urgent enquiries this and make appropriate representations?

I would also appreciate knowing whether we must anticipate any collateral impact on the opening and managing of the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments next to Handsworth Park. Best wishes, Simon

* * *

My talk at the Durrell School about relations between the British and the Ionians in the 19th century went well mainly because an indulgent audience of friends put up with me struggling to cover more information than needed for a 20 minute talk about Lord High Commissioners and the British Protectorate. I managed to cover all but Gladstone, whose role was well filled in during questions by Richard Pine who'd invited me to do the talk. Despite my detours we had a good hour of discussion about character and motives of quite a few of the participants in that 48 year episode in which the Ionians hoped they'd got a Protectorate while the British, with notable exceptions (Nugent, Seaton, Gladstone) assumed they had a colonial possession, getting down to why the British were here in the first place and whether the British, when they left in 1864, were pushed or chose to jump, and the shrewd politics of the Ionian Radicals about whom I’ve learned so much from Eleni Calligas’ work

Slides for my talk - pause the film to read the small writing; click on the image to get full screen on YouTube

Paul came with Lula. There were at least two other Greeks in the audience, which was good, as well as Irish. I felt I’d traversed some mined ground unscathed with kind remarks from a full house on a chilly winter’s evening. The thing is the honour of being invited to give such a talk after being here only a few years. The subject gets richer as I learn more about it. On the way back to our car in the Spaniada we heard a Scops owl hooting right over our head in one of the trees that line the esplanade. Lin, to my relief, said “That wasn’t too bad. I could've kicked you when you went off on one of your diversions.”

Afterwards Richard took us for a meal. “Nothing special. Just basic” “Suits us” Lin sat in a corner by a shuttered window onto Theotoki Street. “That's where Lawrence Durrell used to sit” said Richard. A French tourist had once thrust a copy of Prospero's Cell through this window and asked the author to sign it. We had beef and potatoes, chicken and chips and the local red. “So what of the economy?” I asked.

“Papandreou, having consulted with Samaras, spoke to the country on TV last night. ‘We are in for very tough times. We must all work together otherwise – the abyss.’” We realized the biggest cuts must be in the Hellenic public sector. “KKE won’t buy this. They have significant seats in parliament.” “So?” With a left unwilling to back a one nation response to the problems of the economy there'll be demonstrations. The EU watches; the Greek diaspora too. I mentioned my concern at the news that Birmingham City Council is to make big cuts in its Park Ranger Service. “Well they’ve done that in California...and without rangers the state might close Yosemite National Park”.

* * *

DEMOCRACY STREET AS SHARED SPACE

On main roads people drive fast, tailgate, overtake on bends and hoot to hurry up dawdlers, yet when Lin stops the car on Democracy Street, in a spot even narrower than the rest of the road through the village , above the steps down to our house so we can unload before she goes on to a parking space, other drivers who happen to come along – in either direction - will invariably wait politely. All along Democracy Street, as it winds through the village, drivers have learned just where to give way (wider spots we now know), wave another car on or proceed themselves, making judgements about width, sometimes folding in their mirrors to clear a wall, yet very seldom inconveniencing those on foot. Democracy Street, along with the narrow sinuous main streets of other villages is a shared space – an idea about roads being laboriously recovered in settings where for decades politicians and professionals have favoured the view that roads are for cars and sidewalks or pavements for those on foot – building in traffic lights and occasional crossing spaces to allow pedestrians to enter, at least briefly, a space separated off for people in cars. Thus it is on Corfu’s main roads and indeed on their pavements where despite prohibitions drivers, who would noisily resent a similar encroachment by walkers on their space, will often park their cars. In the middle of many villages here there are often no pavements. Network of narrow streets are often plaka’d to remind visitors that the space between houses are to be shared by everyone on foot, cycle, scooter, car, truck and bus; that indeed walkers are also ‘traffic’ - a word that in the years of the combustion engine has defaulted to exclude cyclists, horses, donkeys and people on foot, moving, sitting or leaning on walls. Everyone can own the street and it generally works, with opportunities for regular acts of civility as people negotiate their way through. Civility that is the essence of this process is largely abandoned on main roads. The human-to-human negotiation of Democracy Street is replaced by automatic regulation of the highway. It was long ago discovered that you can’t use eyes to engage politely with another human once both of you are likely to be passing each other above a certain speed – about 15mph maximum. Thus is the shared space of the village abandoned to the individualised space of the open road. Human eye and the repertoire of non-verbal language that lubricated social interaction was replaced by traffic lights, warning signs, designated crossings, barriers and remote surveillance by camera. What was worse, though it hasn’t happened in many villages here, is that the so-called ‘open road’ instead of just running between communities, was often forced through them, and motorised traffic was encouraged to speed through newly widened and straightened roads between demolished homes, getting their drivers more swiftly from A to B but blighting those settlements that lie between (see: community severance and shared space). * * * * Lin, unable to sleep in the early hours, rose and watched the dawn. That very bright light on the Albanian shore had been out for several days but is there again now.