Filed for Evening News, 20 March 1991
Three weeks ago I had the dubious honour of going south to a place called Grangetown on Teeside. It has the unenviable reputation of being the most polluted town in Britain. I don’t think I have ever visited a place more like hell on earth.
Death comes early in Grangetown. The premature death rate from all causes including cancers is up to 75 per cent higher than average. The number of people who die from chronic respiratory diseases like bronchitis or emphysema is between three and four times the national average. Local doctors and health workers have no doubt that the pollution is at least partly to blame.
Ten or twenty years ago local people accepted the noxious smoke, corrosive dust and huge flares that belched from the area’s vast ICI and British Steel complexes. The companies brought jobs, wealth and prosperity. There was relatively little awareness of the potential risks for health and the environment.
But now all that has changed. The jobs have gone and unemployment is approaching 50 per cent. Without the benefits local people have made it clear that they are no longer prepared to tolerate the environmental degradation, the hazards and the deaths.
The relationship between industry and the local community has deteriorated so far that those who have suffered ill-health are now investigating suing ICI and British Steel for damages. When I was there, the photographer who accompanied me knocked on a door at random and found a man who bitterly blamed ICI for his wife’s death from cancer two weeks earlier.
In contrast at the weekend I spent many hours in an up-market Glasgow hotel at a prestigious conference discussing the European Commission’s ‘Green City’ initiative. There was much fine talk about the need to green our urban areas. I pointed out that there was a very long way to go if we were talking about greening places like Grangetown.
I also took the liberty of suggesting that Glasgow itself was far from perfect. The district council environmental health department had been complacent about the dangerously high levels of air pollution from vehicle exhausts at city centre hotspots.
At the same time Strathclyde Regional Council is planning a stupid, old-fashioned and hugely destructive motorway extension through the heart of the city. It has mooted the idea of ‘Twin Bridges’ across the Clyde - a suggestion no more sensible, logical or comprehensible than the plot of ‘Twin Peaks’.
Strathclyde’s plans fly in the face of the European Commission’s own thinking on urban transport. “At present”, the Commission points out, “many cities seem to take important transport decisions in an ad hoc response to increased demand. Thus the response to increased car traffic has too often been new roads, which have in turn encouraged yet more traffic.”
In Edinburgh of course things are thankfully not so bad. It is still one of the most beautiful cities in Europe because it has so far been saved from the plague of inner city motorways. Most of its centre - excepting the horrors of the James Centre and George Square inflicted by the Scottish Office and the university - has not been destroyed by inappropriate development.
But we still have a long way to go before we can justifiably claim to be green. The vast majority of our waste is dumped on stinking landfill sites instead of being recycled. There are polluted parts of the city - such as the Granton foreshore.
Too many of our streets are still subservient to the car and the facilities for bicycles are years behind comparable cities in Germany or the Netherlands.
Greening our cities is undoubtedly a fine ideal. But it needs much more than rhetoric. It implies a fundamental change in the whole way we live our lives - where we work, where we sleep, how we commute and how we consume.
It means making some politically difficult decisions on transport, planning, pollution and development. It also means a healthier, happier and much more satisfying life. In some places - like Grangetown - it means saving lives.