Things are finally changing on Livingston’s ghost estate.
A new neighbourhood is growing up around Kerry Mackintosh’s condemned home. Houses, being built for West Lothian Council, occupy the foot of her street in Deans South. She expects neighbours next month.
“I’m happy to see it,” she says. “Deans South is coming back to life. I’ll have neighbours and it will be the start of a proper community. It won’t be just a light in a cave. That’s what it’s felt like up here for years.”
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Kerry, 50, and her elderly neighbours, Joe and Isobel Baxter, are currently packing up to move into temporary accommodation. They will return soon as neighbours again. In new homes on a new street built by Springfield Properties as it completes the regeneration of Deans South.
It will be the home they have fought for since 2004. It’s taken longer than planned. They had hoped to move by Easter but Springfield, like all construction firms, has been hit with the knock-on of the pandemic and global materials shortages.
“I’ve waited 18 years,” says Kerry. “A few more months makes no difference. We know we are getting a new home. Springfield has kept in constant touch with us.”
She and her family are now looking for rental property, preferably in Livingston. Springfield is helping in the search. Any anxieties are being boxed up as the family readies to start a new life.
Most of us would have to think, to place exactly what we were doing in 2004.
Kerry doesn’t hesitate. That’s when she got the letter telling her that the home she’d bought only two years before - one that she was looking forward to raising children in- was condemned.
Faced with Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) and a life in debt in rented property with a young family, Kerry was determined to fight.
She took on the council. Social media had barely started when she and neighbours began highlighting their case to an ever widening world - and posting their pleas for fair treatment.
It wasn’t just about the derisory £35,000 CPO offer which, she points out, wouldn’t buy a caravan, never mind a three bedroom home in Livingston.
“It’s your home. It’s just like fighting for your child. It was my children’s home.”
Her determination has kept her going through some dark times. A feeling of being pushed to the bottom of the agenda for years. Of an ever dwindling community of neighbours fighting to have their voices heard in the seemingly endless inertia of council meetings.
At one such meeting - in summer 2019 - a fellow neighbour of Kerry's invited to address a committee greeted councillors with the reminder: “Today’s my 55th birthday. This started on my 40th.”
“There were times when I wondered if it really was going to happen. Springfield gave us hope.” Kerry reflects.
The deal finally agreed in late 2020 saw the Deans South estate sold off to Springfield. The decaying homes with their Siporex porous concrete roofs will be cleared away in the demolition programme, scheduled to start in October.
Raising a family, Kerry has spent a lot of the last 18 years also keeping the elements at bay as her home crumbled around her. “Painting, repairing, replacing. That was my life day to day, alongside the kids and the day job.”
She has a serene well-ordered home. The family’s languid cats stretch a welcome at the arrival of a visitor. They rarely venture outdoors to the knee- high grass plots and battened down empty houses that surround them.
When Kerry and her kids move out the towering cypress in her front garden will be felled and milled into garden furniture and bird tables for charity. The tree was barely the height of the fence when she moved in.
The fence - defiantly painted with slogans for more than a decade- is also partially going for recycling. Some of it will be burned though - part of the rite of passage from the old life into new for the family.
She has just repainted the fence. The number 18 - marking her years of fighting - emblazoned on one side and fresh lick of white and green, the Springfield colours, with tributes to the developer on the other.
“It’s a clean canvas for a fresh start,” says Kerry, “but I’m still putting messages up on it”.
The fence is widely recognised through its regular appearance on social media. It served as an early billboard for the Deans South homeowners who felt themselves abandoned as the world changed around them.
The bright concrete future promised by corporations was not built to last, and neither were the corporations founded to spur new towns.
West Lothian Council inherited problems. Homeowners believe it has looked for the simplest financial solution.
It is the lack of any apparent protection for all those encouraged for the last 40 years to become homeowners, only to find themselves abandoned, that angers Kerry.
Buyer beware indeed.
Kerry wants to see change. She wants to see the law protect people. When settled in her new home - not having to think constantly about painting, repairing or replacing - she plans to pursue that change.
Asked what would have happened without agreement between the council and Springfield, Kerry maintains her determination that the protests would have gone on, got bigger and louder.
As of now though she looks first to embrace the positive change. “I’m really happy and really excited that we are finally moving on to the next chapter of our life and being able to get a new house for myself and my children, but it's a bit emotional and I’m sad to leave the home that has protected us for the last 20 years.”
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