If one word could sum up the documentary that the BBC made about the Riddings estate in 1990, that word would be ‘hopelessness’.
Not even a wedding can lift the mood: after capturing a downbeat meal of chicken sandwiches and canned lager, the excerpt finishes with a shot of two little bridesmaids dancing in front of a dilapidated semi, their pink sashes whirling behind them. The message seems clear: when the party’s over and the girls get older, they’ll soon see there’s nothing to celebrate here.
Children feature prominently in the film. Children with cockroach bites, toddlers who eat more chips than green vegetables, a little girl whose heart condition is made worse by the lack of central heating in her house. The viewer feels these are children with bleak lives and worse futures.
Just what those futures might be is suggested by the interviews with older people on the estate. A mother with two small boys, a survivor of domestic abuse, talks of her experiences of prostitution. She’d always go back to it if she needed cash, she says, because ‘the money is just so easy’.
In another interview, a grieving widow describes the difficulty of raising her sons after their father died. We see one of her boys talking to a probation officer about how he has spent five consecutive Christmases in prison. He has a method for ensuring that burglaries go smoothly: throw a brick through the window and if nobody comes to the door you can be sure that everyone’s out.
The issue of money and how to get more of it comes up again and again. ‘If you’ve got no money you’ve got to steal,’ says another young burglar, declaring that it’s not worth getting a job because he’d only earn £10 a week more than he is getting on the dole.
This suggestion that people on the estate are workshy is taken up by a working family who insist they would always prefer to know they had earned their cash and are angry with people who ‘get up at two or three o’clock’ because they don’t have jobs. They are shown eating home-grown vegetables and complain that people call them ‘posh’ because they look after their garden.
Yet even they feel trapped by the system, unable to leave the estate where nobody would live ‘unless you forced them’. The council won’t rehouse them because they don’t have enough points, but getting a mortgage is beyond their wildest dreams.
The documentary closes with a woman surveying the wreckage of her living room. She has come home to find it trashed by burglars. ‘They must have done it for a laugh,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got nowt worth stealing.’
Even now local people remember that documentary as unfair and offensive. What isn’t disputed, though, is that it contributed to a reputation of the area as the worst part of Kirklees - as one local resident told us, a ‘dumping ground’.
That reputation for crime and poverty contrasts with longstanding residents’ memories of Riddings and Brackenhall as close-knit communities. But even the area’s greatest defenders accept that crime was widespread.
In the years after that documentary life got worse rather than better - Brackenhall hit the headlines for disturbances in July 1992 and September 1993, and in 1995 the infamous Maypole pub - already closed once and reopened as the Phoenix - shut for good.
By the time DBI came on the scene, 200 homes in Brackenhall were boarded up and people were leaving the area as fast as they were being housed there. It was clear something drastic needed to happen.
Not even a wedding can lift the mood: after capturing a downbeat meal of chicken sandwiches and canned lager, the excerpt finishes with a shot of two little bridesmaids dancing in front of a dilapidated semi, their pink sashes whirling behind them. The message seems clear: when the party’s over and the girls get older, they’ll soon see there’s nothing to celebrate here.
Children feature prominently in the film. Children with cockroach bites, toddlers who eat more chips than green vegetables, a little girl whose heart condition is made worse by the lack of central heating in her house. The viewer feels these are children with bleak lives and worse futures.
Just what those futures might be is suggested by the interviews with older people on the estate. A mother with two small boys, a survivor of domestic abuse, talks of her experiences of prostitution. She’d always go back to it if she needed cash, she says, because ‘the money is just so easy’.
In another interview, a grieving widow describes the difficulty of raising her sons after their father died. We see one of her boys talking to a probation officer about how he has spent five consecutive Christmases in prison. He has a method for ensuring that burglaries go smoothly: throw a brick through the window and if nobody comes to the door you can be sure that everyone’s out.
The issue of money and how to get more of it comes up again and again. ‘If you’ve got no money you’ve got to steal,’ says another young burglar, declaring that it’s not worth getting a job because he’d only earn £10 a week more than he is getting on the dole.
This suggestion that people on the estate are workshy is taken up by a working family who insist they would always prefer to know they had earned their cash and are angry with people who ‘get up at two or three o’clock’ because they don’t have jobs. They are shown eating home-grown vegetables and complain that people call them ‘posh’ because they look after their garden.
Yet even they feel trapped by the system, unable to leave the estate where nobody would live ‘unless you forced them’. The council won’t rehouse them because they don’t have enough points, but getting a mortgage is beyond their wildest dreams.
The documentary closes with a woman surveying the wreckage of her living room. She has come home to find it trashed by burglars. ‘They must have done it for a laugh,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got nowt worth stealing.’
Even now local people remember that documentary as unfair and offensive. What isn’t disputed, though, is that it contributed to a reputation of the area as the worst part of Kirklees - as one local resident told us, a ‘dumping ground’.
That reputation for crime and poverty contrasts with longstanding residents’ memories of Riddings and Brackenhall as close-knit communities. But even the area’s greatest defenders accept that crime was widespread.
In the years after that documentary life got worse rather than better - Brackenhall hit the headlines for disturbances in July 1992 and September 1993, and in 1995 the infamous Maypole pub - already closed once and reopened as the Phoenix - shut for good.
By the time DBI came on the scene, 200 homes in Brackenhall were boarded up and people were leaving the area as fast as they were being housed there. It was clear something drastic needed to happen.
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