Interview Date: 26th July, 2024
C: Clara Cheung, G: Gum Cheng, S: Simon Ogden
| I: | S: | The University also bought a lot of houses on the street, and at one time, the University had a plan, a plan to knock it, knock the whole street down. So they were buying houses, really, just to acquire the whole street. But people resisted that, and there was quite a big fight, more before I lived on the street, really, in the 70s and early 80s, to stop the university's plan. And there was some, not just Harcourt Road, but Marlborough Road, and some of the streets around Mooroaks. There was quite a big campaign, and there were a couple of people who were actually councilors, who went on to the council partly for that reason, and they won that fight. And so the university had a lot of houses on the street that they owned, so they just obviously let them to students. So that increased the number of students as well. So in the 90s, you've got more and more students, less and less other people. And that kind of reached a peak point in 2010 when the university decided to sell it to all its houses. And so we said, Ah, okay, this is a great opportunity. You can start to rebalance the streets again. And so they agreed to sell them with this covenant, a legal covenant that says that they can't be occupied by landlords, and that made a massive difference to the population of the street, because 20 or so new families moved onto the street, nearly all with young kids when I was growing, no when my son was growing up there was only one other kid on the street. |
| II: | C: | So I think it is really amazing for us to find this really strong community spirit and people come together to not just, you know, take care of your own home, but also the neighbourhood. How, like, what do you think can facilitate this coming together, working together for the whole, the good of the community? |
| S: | Well, I think one thing is having a common problem, a university or housing association or council, so something that's annoying people, that brings them together. But then also, I think having a certain number of people who maybe have some experience of organizing, you know, maybe the trade unionist or, you know, some kind of political activist, and, you know, with a certain amount of time as well… | |
| C: | Knowledge, expertise, yeah, yeah, time, passion? | |
| S: | Yeah, yeah, all those things. | |
| C: | And you have, you have all of these? You're one of those who… | |
| S: | Yes I guess I'm one of those, and we’re very lucky we've had… We've had quite a lot of those people on the street. | |
| C: | Interesting. | |
| S: | And I think you need some, some kind of, it sounds a bit cynical, but you need a common enemy to kind of to get people interested, yeah. And then once you've done one thing, yeah, maybe quite a small thing, and building something else, yeah… | |
| C: | It works.. | |
| S: | So really, the two things that started it off were… have you heard of the poll tax? | |
| C: | Poll tax? | |
| S: | So when Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister in the 1980s and 90s, she brought in this new tax that was -- every house had to pay. And it was very unfair, the way it was… It was much more of a burden on poorer people than on wealthy people. When they call it poll tax, that's kind of like the states, when every house has to pay tax, and there was a campaign against that, a national campaign, where people refused to pay this tax, and then we'll have to go to go to court, and there was an anti Poll Tax Group on every street, almost. So we had an anti Poll Tax Group on our street, and that's how we started meeting together and got to know people. And then out of that, we started talking about, well, you know, the street is always dirty, you know. What can we do about that, you know? And we've got the landlords, you know, don't care. And so it kind of grew into a local street Action Group. And also around that time, there were some robberies, quite frightening events, actually, where someone just came and smashed the front window and got in the house and stole stuff, and that was quite frightening. And so we also started up a little… we didn't, we didn't call it Neighborhood Watch, but that was kind of what it was… | |
| III. | S: | ...What this point about this is, actually, this is the front page of The Star, on the top here. The headline was, ‘Vigilantes’. |
| C: | I don't get it. | |
| S: | Definitely, because they said we were walking the streets at night, and it was good to reassure these older people that they were safe. But they, The Star, made it out that we were some kind of like vigilantes, you know, going around with guns and you can see it was nothing like that. Yeah. And we wrote to the paper and said, you know, you completely misrepresented what we're trying to do. So that was kind of the start of getting the street organized. And then after that, we organized lots of well, we used to organize street cleanups because, I think a lot of people on the street were trade unionists. And originally we thought, you know, the council should be doing this. The council should be paying people to do it, you know it’s someone's job. So, so, we should make the council do it. We shouldn't do it. And then we thought, actually, you know, our kids are growing up on this street. You know, how long are we gonna have to wait before the street is cleared? So in the end, we thought, no, actually, it's more powerful to say we're gonna do it and then we're just gonna tell the council that we're doing it and kind of apply moral pressure, rather than just saying we're gonna live in a shit heap until you come and clean it up. So that was kind of a bit of a change of attitude, from just saying we're just going to complain, to no, we're going to do it, and we'll feel stronger for doing it. |
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