|
Brief narrative |
1. “Just a person in a wee flat”: Being Displaced by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow’s East End
The first story recounts the experiences of Margaret Jaconelli, a homeowner facing dispossession to make way for the Commonwealth Games` Athletes` Village. In fact, the process began some years earlier when Glasgow Council decided to `redevelop` Glasgow`s East End. The newly created wilderness was then discovered to be a suitable site for the Commonwealth Games. She has found herself left in sole occupation of a tenement block after all the other residents, who were tenants in social housing, had been moved out.
`We were only in the house a few years and the Housing Association came in and bought it back off us. Then we had to be in it another 15 years for me to go back in to buy it [back] from the Housing Association. We started renovating it for the long-term, because we’ve got four boys and we thought one of them would have wanted it. We had only owned it again for a few years and that was when they came [in 2000] and said the building’s coming down. When they came to tell us the building was coming down, they took my details and asked about what we would need in a new house [a new scheme was being built nearby], and I said I would like an apartment. They said that’s okay, and put me down for that. But then later they said we can’t give you a house, you’re not entitled to it.
You’re an owner-occupier. See if they’d given me a wee house down there, I would’ve been quite happy to go. I wouldn’t be here.
Anyway, that was us. We just had to sit tight then, and wait.`
Her account deals with the difficulties an owner faces when dealing with a local authority which fails to negotiate a deal for her removal and abandons her in a wasteland of its own creation.
`the next morning I had a letter from the Council. My lawyer wrote back and said we were willing to negotiate. Never heard any more until last week a neighbour round the corner came in and said, “Margaret, they’re compulsorily purchasing you, I’ve got the letter here with your address listed on it.”
I’ve never had any negotiations [with the Council], we’ve never sat down and talked about
money.`
`I’ve been here six years myself . . . . six years alone. The last person before me, my neighbour upstairs, she went away in 2002, round to the new houses in Dalmarnock Road they built. And I’ve been here for six years alone.`
(Source: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/931, 11 March 2010)
see also: http://gamesmonitor2014.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/double-standards-in-dalmarnock-evictions/ & http://gamesmonitor2014.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/388/ |
