Social and community infrastructure: Lessons from Co Durham.
| Author | Natarajan, Lucy |
| Position | FOOD AND FARMING |
The Labour Party emerged from a labour movement that was active on many fronts: fighting for workers' rights and decent pay, but also providing support for the elderly, housing, cooperative food shops, and many other social and community benefits. As John Tomaney notes elsewhere in this issue, it was well over 100 years ago that the Durham Miners' Association established the Durham Aged Mineworkers' Homes Association, for miners and their families who had to leave their colliery houses when their employment in the pits ended. By the mid-twentieth century, 29 per cent of the total population of the Northern Counties was in a cooperative society. Despite the swing to Morrisonian centralisation in the post-war period, a rich array of community organisations and community infrastructure still exists across Britain. Central and local government should work in collaboration with these organisations, initiatives and communities, drawing on their situated knowledge.
In this article we report on a pilot research project undertaken by researchers at UCL in conjunction with the Durham Miners' Association, exploring social infrastructure in the former mining village of Sacriston, four miles north west of Durham City, with a population of c. 6,000. (1) It shows that despite rapid social and economic changes following colliery closure - changes experienced as decline and loss by many in the village - the community has displayed resilience and, despite lasting austerity and many obstacles, made impressive efforts to maintain and build social infrastructure.
In recent years there has been growing academic interest in long-standing and profound place-based inequalities between and within regions. These inequalities are the product of several decades of deindustrialisation and have left some places with multiple forms of social and economic deprivation. Academic studies have identified a range of social, economic and political conditions associated with these processes, including poor health outcomes (including a prevalence of 'diseases of despair'), poor educational outcomes, low levels of skills and business formation and growth, and distinctive political attitudes, most notably reflected in many places in support for Brexit. In public debate these places are often called 'left behind'; this term has become a loose, catch-all signifier grouping together different kinds of peripheral places, and potentially stigmatising their residents as passive, immobile and impoverished. Such places have been subject to a range of policy measures over many years, which have had little impact on underlying social inequalities. The current Conservative response is to talk about 'levelling up', but this agenda amounts mainly to under-powered pork-barrel politics.
One facet of our research points to the need for macro and micro political interventions to deliver the sort of strong, rooted, foundational economies that places like Sacriston had in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when their staple industry - coal -powered the nation. (2) The research also points to the profoundly interwoven nature of local economies and local communities. Working with existing community organisations, and building up social infrastructure, is vital to making better places. This should not be a top-down policy-making process, but one that is carried out in collaboration with people already working in a particular area.
In order to explore social infrastructure past, present and future, we organised two focus...
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