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Columnist recalls ex-daily colleague’s lone ‘crusade’ against high rises

A weekly newspaper columnist has recalled his former colleague’s lone “crusade” against high rise tower blocks in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy.

Former Birmingham Evening Despatch journalist Mark Gardner has recalled an ultimately unsuccessful campaign led by the regional daily’s municipal correspondent Don Anderson more than 50 years ago.

Don mounted the campaign after a wholesale slum clearance plan undertaken in Birmingham from the late 1950s onwards,.

In a series of pieces that now seem highly a prescien, he questioned what would happen to the then newly-built tower blocks in the event of fires, how elderly residents would cope when lifts failed and where children would play.

High rise tower blocks in Birmingham

High rise tower blocks in Birmingham

Mark, who now writes for the Faversham News, in Kent, remembered Don’s concern about “close-knit communities being fractured and dispersed”.

He added: “He predicted that gang culture would thrive among the young. And just about then there were early signs of a spreading drug culture. Anderson foresaw the replacement of two-up-two-down, back-to-back terraced homes with outside loos and communal wash-houses by new ghetto slums in towers. He was worried that concrete construction would distress in time.

“Against his lone voice, albeit backed up by architects and planners who had similar concerns, was ranged the entire city council establishment. Councillors and tame ‘experts’ dismissed his criticisms and demands that proper houses with gardens should replace the squalid and inadequate slums.

“He was mocked and humiliated by leading politicians. These sustained and bitter attacks took their toll on Anderson’s health. He became obsessive and fragile, and deeply depressed as he endured vitriolic smears on his views.”

Ultimately, this led to Don suffering a nervous breakdown during a council meeting at which Mark was also present.

He continued: “Don Anderson was a sensitive man, whose concern for the fate and future of the thousands of families being consigned to high rise living was utterly genuine, and ultimately this failed crusade broke him. I was sitting beside him at a city council meeting when he snapped and suffered a nervous breakdown.

“He turned to me and said ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough.’ He stood up and walked out, never to return to the paper. It was a shocking and unjust ending to a long and distinguished career, he was a man of principle who cared too much.

“The problems he forecast all materialised in the decades that followed. In recent years Birmingham has been demolishing those dreadful tower blocks, but their staunchest opponent did not live to see that overdue demise.”