The name of this book is 'Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing'...

In summary, then... The title of my new book is Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing. It's available through the New Writing North website and also Amazon.

The book came about in late 2013 when I was invited by New Writing North and by Isos Housing, a leading social landlord in my native north east England, to investigate Isos's business and the broader story of social housing both as a modern-day 'sector' and a historical 'movement.' Illustrated with photographs by Sally Ann Norman, the book tells the 150-year history of subsidised housing in Britain, offers a case study of how a social landlord is required to operate today, and reflects, too, on what all of us could do to resolve our housing crisis.

It does affect us all - there's no escape. How the British people are going to access and afford the roofs they need over their heads will be a major socio-political problem for the foreseeable future. So for me as a writer it was a really vital, instructive experience to take a close look inside what Isos does, and to talk to its tenants about their experience of social housing – the form of provision that is feeling the keenest edge of our national housing crisis.

Probably the strongest feeling I came away with was that there are millions of people in the UK who will always need a socially rented home. Housing associations are the best-equipped vehicles to answer that need, yet what they do (and why they do it) is imperfectly understood, both by the public and politicians. Their virtues are not uniform across the sector or the length of the land; but I believe they deserve our support.

Me, in the Journal, defending social housing

Photographer Sally Ann Norman & RTK with our shared endeavour

Yesterday I continued to develop the arguments made in my new book Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing, with an article for the Newcastle Journal, given a headline just as bald as me: 'Writer Richard T Kelly on the need for social housing in the North East'. I'm told that the print edition had a picture of me on the front page with the strapline 'Leave your snobbery at the door', the idea of which appeals enormously. The feature itself ran over two full pages in the Agenda section in the middle of the paper.

Here is a pair of paragraphs as a sample of the whole:

'... By this analysis, housing only takes its place in the larger set of socio-economic problems that have beset the North East for all my life. We still routinely have the highest unemployment rate of all the English regions, and the highest proportion of employees in the public sector. Not that there are too many public sector jobs in the North East – we want all the jobs we can get. But as Lord Adonis identified in his North East Independent Economic Review of 2013, we need more (better-paid and higher-skilled) private sector employment to begin to dream of significantly more new housing.

As we know, this region still makes things and exports them, manufacturing generating about 15.5% of the region’s total Gross Value Added. Nissan, though, comprises a notably big chunk of those figures. New businesses, especially hi-tech ones, are now getting born in the North East at an encouraging rate, and people who instinctively believe that ‘not enough is done’ for the region might yet be surprised by what people in the region can do for themselves. But that growth remains a work in progress.'

Durham Big Debate: A resilience test for the North East

Last month I had two distinctive engagements at the Durham Book Festival: the first being the furthering of my nefarious plot to re-infect the modern world with Late Victorian Gothic (for a report on which see here); the second the presentation of an essay commissioned from me by the Festival and addressing the prospects for the economy of North East England in the depressed years that lie ahead. That essay was published locally as a pamphlet, and its text is available online here.
I discussed the essay's various arguments in a panel event on Saturday October 22, chaired by the FT’s Chris Tighe, at which I was privileged to sit down and reason alongside Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, Paul Woolston (chair of the North East Local Economic Partnership) and Professor John Tomaney from the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. I found the session very energetic, with some good pointed contributions from the floor, though inevitably more dimensions to the debate were opened up than could be adequately explored within the time-slot.
I spent several months mulling over/interviewing for/writing up the essay, an absorbing experience. Can I summarise my findings? Well, I suppose I came to my brief feeling – as I had when I last addressed the subject for Prospect back in 2008 – that the North East is blessed by its industrious heritage, its natural resources, and its people, with all their rightly legendary qualities of resilience; and yet also beset by its particular and substantive share in Britain’s long twentieth-century decline. Even in 2008, as one sensed the tide going out again, it was easier to feel buoyed by the benefits the region had enjoyed from new kinds of jobs, urban regeneration, better living standards. Today, with UK PLC in such a hole, one has to worry for a region under a government that undervalues its strengths and doesn’t believe in ‘regions’ anyway; a government, moreover, that is offering a ‘growth plan’ not unreasonably described by David Miliband (that’s the MP for South Shields) as ‘risibly, depressingly thin.’
We’ve known for long enough that British business needs to innovate more in profitable new growth sectors and to export more of that innovation to emerging markets. Apparently our main innovation goes in the fields of market research, advertising and branding, management consultancy... Not what my granddad would have called ‘proper work’, though a living, for sure. But if your chief skills are selling hot air and processing bullshit you can’t claim surprise if your former ‘emerging market’ then becomes your master.
The thing people in the South East especially like to forget about the North East is that it still makes stuff and exports it: fine and bulk chemicals and pharmaceuticals; tracks and cast armour for tanks; diggers, and a whole lot of cars at Nissan. The North East’s subsea sector has had global stature for three decades. (The transoceanic fibre-optic cables that enable our keen use of the internet are there thanks to seabed trenching technology originated at the firm of SMD in Wallsend.) Hitachi is readying to turn out bi-mode train carriages in Durham; the blast furnace at the former Corus steelworks in Redcar has re-fired under new ownership.
Lest people be unaware, the North East now does both metal-bashing and key-pushing. (Witness the FTSE-measured success of the Sage software group, an inspiration to the region’s recent rash of digital technology start-ups.) It has several world-class universities capable of translating research into commerce, most impressively in life sciences. In all the North East has notable comparative advantages, skills that aren’t so prevalent in the rest of the world; not to mention indigenous raw materials, gold beneath its feet, an entirely plausible claim to be the hub of any future low carbon/clean energy economy.
True, the region is deficient in financial services (but then lately that sector has stuck us with its own ‘dependency’, and attendant strife.) The North East has rather weightier assets, which could yet make a hefty contribution to ‘rebalancing’ the national economy.
The challenge for North East business is how to be sufficiently nimble and entrepreneurial at a time when a state-dependent outlook appears forlorn. Traditionally the region has viewed entrepreneurs as rather rare birds. Throughout the last century the done thing for North Easterners was to work for someone else, whether the Coal Board or British Steel, ICI or the Department of Work and Pensions. And yet it wasn’t ‘working for someone else’ that begat the North East’s great industrial heritage: the entrepreneurial honour-roll of Armstrong, Palmer, Merz, Reyrolle – inspired engineers who made big things happen out of little, beginning with a wager.
Heavy industry has its own fiery kind of historical romance; yet in the era of The Apprentice we know that business innovation can take lighter but still lucrative forms. Consider the more recent North East success story that is Greggs (est. 1951), which chose not to remain a ‘traditional’ baker, pleasant as that may have seemed – and a good job too, otherwise the big supermarkets would have eaten it alive. Instead it was Greggs that did the consuming, of other smaller companies, and built a new brand as a first-rate seller of takeaway food that still does a fair bit of baking.
Much as I enjoy a sausage roll, I don’t propose that the Greggs business model has universal application. But I do believe Greggs offers a useful model of ethos and drive, of seeking out the best available niche in a market that could do with a bit of entrepreneurial development, ‘a properly-engineered solution.’ Spare capacity in our economy is there to be unleashed within our Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But one can’t wag one’s finger at them, demand that they speculate to accumulate, adapt or else die. Innovation is expensive, and rarely yields a fast profit. Hiring and training aren’t cheap either, and in the North East as around the UK the skills employers require are not being readily met by the labour pool.
Right now it would seem only government can provide the impetus to the far-sighted investment in innovation and infrastructure that we know we need. Adam Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, has made eloquent calls for a state investment bank that will bypass our tarnished banking sector and lend directly to businesses. Training (and re-training) schemes in hi-tech engineering, digital and green energy vocations would not be wasted. And renewed claims for infrastructure spending, good old-fashioned ‘capital projects’, have force to them: they will create jobs, and remedy a long national deficiency. From transport links to power lines to superfast broadband... we are going to need these things if we’re to have any sort of future.
A Conservative-led government is always liable to be leery of ‘industrial policy’, with its connotations of Labour, a pre-Thatcher era and a North where it has few friends. But I believe a forward-looking Tory ought to think fully on what the state can do as an engine for economic growth, not merely a dispenser of hardship funds. And as a potential engine room for such growth, the North East is fully stocked with tools and resources.
Then again, the excellent analyst/blogger Chris Dillow has been brave enough to propose that maybe no policy fix is possible, since long-term growth “is determined by factors which governments cannot control, such as entrepreneurial spirit or the rate of monetizable innovation.” But it’s those very ungovernable factors in which one is therefore forced to invest whatever hope one has lying around spare...

Gordon Burn 1948-2009

It’s a very hard thing to think that Gordon Burn is no longer with us. One of England’s foremost prose stylists, Gordon wrote so finely and insightfully on so many diverse subjects – the reader never quite sure on what topic his plenary mind would next alight - that one feels a sharp and singular sorrow knowing that we’ll not get any more of his brilliant books. So consummately did he tell the stories of two appalling serial murderers (Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West) that he was sometimes labelled a True Crime specialist. ‘I slightly bridle’, he told me, ‘because the implication is that you’re some nutter who’s obsessed with violence. I’m not at all.’ Indeed he wasn't.

When I spoke to Gordon last summer for an essay I was writing about the literature of the North East, he offered me an amused and amusing list of ‘the qualities – good and bad – that we have come to associate with the N.E.: hard-grafting, plain-spoken, open, canny, dogged, leftish, laddish, nostalgic, sentimental, chippy, suffering fools not at all, happy to appear dafter / less genned-up than one is, built-in bullshit-detector on permanent full alert…’ Needless to say, I think that was not a bad summary of Gordon’s own personal qualities, aside from his writerly gifts. I will always remember interviewing him and David Peace for Esquire in April 2008, beneath the pearl-strung chandeliers of an incongruously posh restaurant serving a French menu devised by a Japanese chef. Within minutes of our being seated, Gordon, looking just a bit twinkly, let it be known he would have much preferred a pie and a pint in the pub down the road.

Gordon was born and grew up in the west of Newcastle, only a short hop from St James’s Park and the brewery. His adolescent imagination was fired by the famous mid-1960s ‘scene’ created by poet Tom Pickard at Morden Towers (where Basil Bunting’s career began its second life.) But Gordon’s chief inspiration has been America (first Capote and Mailer; later Ford and Carver), and he felt the pull down to London. So he left Newcastle aged 18, and only renewed his tie to the place in recent years, with the passing of his mother and father. Around this same time he wrote his first overtly ‘north-east’ book, The North of England Home Service, a reflection on the changing face of Tyneside, and also a sort of homage to the Northern Novel – John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow – that he had belatedly begun to read with pleasure: ‘this’, he said, ‘after 25 years of loving American writing.’

Reviewing it for the Independent, Sean O’Brien felt that Gordon had captured ‘exactly the mixture of pride and insecurity which characterises this most resilient and fiercely defended of English working-class cultures at the moment when its coherence and integrity may be truly under threat.’Gordon was a prize-winning novelist who openly disdained the usual staidness of the ‘literary novel.’ Certainly he was not a man given to magic realism. ‘I can see the point in reading Dickens and Jane Austen’, he told me. ‘But ‘literary fiction’ seems to be me increasingly pointless… Until I wrote a novel I’d had no interest in novels whatsoever. I’ve no interest in the imagination. I would always fall asleep within two pages of a novel, or ten minutes at the pictures… I still do.’

He was being mischievous, of course, for he simply had his own definition of imagination and its uses, loaned from an esteemed literary source: ‘There was a quote by John Berger that I had in mind all the time I was writing Born Yesterday – that imagination is not, as most people think, the ability to invent, it’s the ability to disclose what already exists.’

Gordon’s lodestar in writing terms was the New Journalism of the 1960s, as exemplified in the pages of American Esquire: home to Mailer and Tom Wolfe and such seminal pieces as Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ where the writer-as-participant-observer would write the story as it actually appeared to them, rather than as a gig preordained by journalistic and narrative conventions. As Gordon described it, ‘it was taking real life and writing about it in a kind of poetic way or a way that had the resonance of fiction. There was a thrill to having real life written about with some art involved in it. All the techniques I learned about the novel were through reading Wolfe, Talese, Mailer. And it was through them talking about their techniques that I realised what novelistic techniques were, without reading any novels...’

His last major deployment of these techniques was 2007’s Born Yesterday, a New Journalism ‘novel’ in which he both recorded and subtly transformed his responses to the dismal British summer of 2007 and its appropriately lousy lead news stories – of floods, failed bombings, and a lost little girl with a flawed eye, a condition she happened to share with the new Prime Minister. With a novelist’s eye he inhabited and explored and articulated these stories more powerfully than any 24-hour rolling news camera; and he had a modest theory as to why, one he had learned on the job while getting to know the close relatives of the 'Yorkshire Ripper': ‘You get these huge news stories, and basically nobody knows anything that’s really happening because the news agenda is so tiny and narrow, set by two or three people or media organisations, and everybody goes along that line. I always like to come at things from some kind of oblique angle, or to find a person or a situation that’s been ignored that you’ve got a good feeling is important to the story, so you just chase that down or try to find if your gut interest is true or not...'

Gordon liked to enlist V.S. Naipaul to his argument that non-fiction is more interesting than the novel, fiction a distortion of reality: ‘Naipaul says that people who write stuff that is, basically, the material for TV drama – they’re assuming they know the world already, there’s no need to investigate it any further, so they make up a story and stick it on top of the real world. Whereas he, Naipaul, finds the real narrative of life so endlessly enthralling that it’s arrogant to say ‘I know the world now.’ And that’s where I stand. Life is poetic in ways that are never covered by the word ‘poetry.’ Everybody rubs up against things in passing that touch them profoundly in a second – in a railway station or a pub, wherever.’

Gordon's particular brand of poetry is all over the extraordinary body of work he's left us, which I trust is about to be re-examined and enjoyed afresh by readers old and new. His personality, which I think he deftly managed to conceal a lot of the time, is in there too - writing can't hide that stuff - and I trust readers will also discern all those Great North Eastern qualities of his in spades.