New Homes for South-Ribble

[filmoss]

Yeah I think Brenda did work there ! We used to go cruising in that car around Manchester it was a big novelty for a lad of 17 like me ! He was into drag racing and he actually won the European Top Fuel drag racing championship in 2004 in his rookie year ! Quite an achievement ! Those top fuel burners are 6000bhp and can reach 100mph in less than a second !!

[noel]

I thought they were Paul and Brenda or am I mistaken? There was also Lynn and John neighbours, I think he was a window cleaner too. It was Thornton Avenue they were almost opposite not Fylde Ave. by the way.

[filmoss]

It was Paul and Brenda. Paul Smith was known as Smax Smith !

[joe bloggs]

i think this is a good idea how many homless people are there ? have any of you been homeless ? and then there are homeless people who are sleeping on floors of friends homes rather than arguing about people building homes for them why not look into the policies of letting homes out i can talk from experience i was homeless threw no fault of my own and as i was a single dad i had no help from no one we need homes for the homeless and yes i would not mind them in my area there is more and more people being born each year and the population is growing rapidly if we dnt build new homes then were are people suppose to go

[noel]

Welcome to the forum Joe ( Chris). Homeless people are those who can't afford a home I would have thought. How will building a home they can't afford, help? There are thousands of empty houses in the area without building more. Population is increasing mainly due to immigration. Maybe the powers that be should address that issue.

[Caroline]

Welcome, Chris, thanks for your interesting point. If more houses are built it might drive prices down and make them affordable to those in need.

[anacortesdamp]

Maybe it's time for the local council to go back to the 1950's and start building estates like Wade Hall and Broadfield to house those who can't afford to buy. It worked back then, why not now!

Of course, it would need design overview. As I remember, there was a council estate somewhere where over 400 houses were built before someone realised that there was no door connecting the kitchen/dining area to the front of the house!

This might be the only way to get housing to a level where working families at the bottom of the totem pole could get a home, rather than being at the mercy of commercial landlords. As a matter of interest, how many of the houses on Broadfield and Wade Hall are still Council subsidised? We've been away too long to have a good feel for that.

[Peter Harris]

I remember several visits ago I went to a place near the Black Bull and went in a house (newish) that had the crazy feature of having the wall of the neighbours house six inches in front of their kitchen window. When I looked outside the design had kind of dovetailed lots of identical houses symetrically to maximise the house space in the tiny land area available. It looked wierd but in talking to people it became obvious that with the green belt situation, there ain't too much housing land available, you'd think the house prices would be booming, but other factors will be at play.

In Perth, most youngsters will never own a house and many fathers will pass on the family debt to the children, a bit like in Japan but for different reasons. The average house price in Perth is around AUD 500 000 and you have to pay an upfront cash "stamp duty" of around AUD 50 000 to ther State Government on top of your deposit, so kids need to save AUD 100 000 before even getting into the game - hard ask when many are on 30-50K pa. It's only oil and gas and mining that's booming, the rest ticks over unaffected. By the way, the stamp duty does not get added to the house price.

[noel]

My youngest son's renting and says he'll never be able to afford to get on the housing ladder. Every patch of green land seems to be under threat now. Houses are being built on the land between Farington Lodge and the railway, facing the old BTR site on one side and the main line railway the other. 60 years ago all this land including the BTR site was farming land. The old L&B site is now a large estate, plans afoot to build houses on the old LM foundry site, bottom of Hall Lane now has an additional estate next to the woods,we live on the old so called "Painters Fields". Where will it all end? Where will the wildlife go?

[Colin Damp]

Just now read these submissions. Oh, dear!

Noel says "they" are "filling in all the green areas". Since when was Leyland Motors' old test track a "green area"? He goes on to say of manufacturing "I thought that's how money was made". Well, after the Industrial Revolution - and in some parts of the country - maybe.

But I "emigrated" to Devon in 1977, and I have to tell you that here, and more especially in neighbouring Cornwall, manufacturing isn't and never has been a major source of wealth or employment.

What made Plymouth (where I've lived for 35 years now) prosperous was trade - imports and exports through it's deep-water port. Ship repairing played an inevitable part, as it did in Falmouth and Penzance. In Plymouth it did lead to the establishment of the Royal Naval Dockyard, the city's main employer until the 1990s. But what remains of that remains a service industry.

These ports were important and prosperous from the 1600s onwards, centuries before the development of industry which made Lancashire wealthy and world-renowned. The same goes, for that matter, for London.

Today, the biggest employer in Plymouth (population upwards of 250,000) is the university - closely followed, I admit, by Princess Yachts, whose products range in price from about £150,000 to £2.5 to £3million and not surprisingly are mainly for export.

Because of all this, the South West didn't suffer from the industrial decline of the 80s and 90s which affected areas of the country which relied heavily on manufacturing, and the region's biggest source of income and employment today is agriculture, closely followed by tourism.

So making things is not the only money is, or ever was, made.

Rant over!

Brother Frank says the population of Leyland when he left for America in the 60s was 17,000. Well, maybe, though I think that's an underestimate. The figure of 23,000 comes to mind for those years - swelled by the Central Lancs New Town developments to nearer 40,000 when I left in the late 70s.

I must admit, though, that when I saw the prices of the houses built on the old Mayfield I, too, wondered where people were getting the sort of money to buy them, and where they worked and in what occupations. All commuters to Manchester?

But then I remember a friend remarking, when they built the detached houses in Worden Lane overlooking the park, "£3,000 for a house in Leyland? They're MAD!"