In a comment on the Express and Echo website today in regard to the Silverton section 30 affair a correspondant commented that they would rather live on Exeter's notorious Burthouse Lane estate then in our own dear village. This attracted some amused responses on the 'What's On In Silverton' facebook page, including a somewhgat ironic comment from yours truly, but there is an interesting contrast involved here.
Thr Burthouse Lane housing estate is a large public housing estate that lies on the south side of Exeter, It was largely vuilt in the post war period to house those who were noved out of Exeter's historic West Quarter after it recieved heavy bomb damage during the blitz by the Luftwaffe during the second world war. It was fhe result a rather nore drastic form of slum clearence then elsewhere, but it has, in common with estates like Pollock or Castlemilk in Glasgow the fact that often close knit, working class communities were uprooted and moved to outlying estates. Over the years after the war, and in the period since, Burnthouse Lane aquired, sometimes rightly and sometimes not, a reputation for being a hotbed of crime and not the sort of place one would venture at night. Whats interesting is that, over the years and for all its undoubted troubles, Burnthouse Lane has retained a sort of community solidarity and self organisation that many other similar areas lost long ago.
As described on this blog previously, Silverton lost its old sense of community long ago and, because of the transient nature of much of its current, and increasingly middle class population, is forever engagrd in a struggle to hold on to a new one. There seems to be little continuity to what happens in the village these days with many having little, or no knowledge of what went on here before they came. Much of the automatic denigration of Estates such as Burnthouse Lane, noth here and elsewhere often has distinct class overtones but its not the black and white situation that some would have us believe.
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