Community.

At the meeting ob tuesday, parish councillor, Simon Steer, stated that one of the reasons for the recent problems in the village, was because Silverton had lost a sense of community.  I think that this view has a great deal of validity although I think that the loss of community happened several decades ago and its worth looking at the reasons why.

If Silverton has lost its sense of community its worth looking at the development of the village in its historical contect/

Silverton has probably stood in iys current location for somewhere in the region of 15, 00 years, since the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, although there are a few indications that there might have been earlier settlements in the area as indicated by the  at the site, north of the village, known as 'Pigs Park'.  Silverton was probably, first a small collection of farms that developed into a way station on the road between Exeter and Tiverton where horses could be fed and watered before the long clomb up over the hill now known as Christ Cross, and later as a small market town. The settlement was mainly along the main stret  and a few lanes that ran off it, plus a few fatms.  probably nothing much changed for over a thousand years with a settled population mainly working on the land.  The population of Silverton Parish grew slowly to about 16. 00 ny the mid nineteenth centurym but declined somewhat during the agricultural depression of the 1870s.  Silverton was bypassed by the new section of the main Exeter to Tiverton road which was built in the waely 1830s. After this its market function went ionto decline and died out.

In all this time the community would have remained reletively stable with people marrying eiyjer within the village or, marrying partners from meighbouring communities such as Bradninch or Thorverton.  We know that 'Navvies' working on the new road in the 1830s had lodgings  in the village and undoubtedlt some stayed on, as did those who came to build the Exeter-Tiverton railway line in the 1870s. A number of these came from south wales and some of their  names are to be found in the village today  in the names of French and Davies Closes.  These additions to the community were not such as to make a major change in the nature of the population.  During the later part of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries there was a steady shift in employment away from the land and into the paper mills at Silverton, Hele and Stoke Canon. , Better transport links also meant better access to employment opportunities in Exeter and Tiverton.

So, by the middle of the twentieth century we have a well settled and reletively syable community where most people worked together and often were related.  Community activities involved a very large percentage of the community, even after the expansion of council housing in the village that took place largely between the nineteen twenties and the nineteen sixties in the area then known as Lily Lake with some addition of social housing at the top of Coach Road and the top of Wyndham Road in the nid nioneteen seventies.  During those  periods, nearly all social housing was let to local people.

The big changes begin in the late 1960e with the building of private estates at Sulverdale and Applemead which marked the beginning of a steady influx of people from outside the village and often from outside the county. It was at this time that the first complaints about the breakdown of community negin to be heard  and the nature of the community changes even more during the 1980s with the development of the large private estates in the lower Wyndham Road and Hederman Close off Park Road. The nature of the community is further changed by the sale of social housing, initiated by the Thatcher government which meant that former council houses were sold to outsiders and chanhes to social housing allocation policy which meant that housing remaining in council hands could, and often was allocated to those in need of it from mid devon as a whole, and sometimes well beyond.  Many of the newcomers worked in Exeter and the nature of their employment, mainly in administration meant that the character of the village moved steadily from neing mainly that of the manual working class to being  nore middle class, but that many of the newcomers, by nature of their work tended to be only resident in the village for a seletivelt short time.  Thisv  trend was intensified by the rapid decline and near extinction  of Paper making in the 1990s.  By the turn of the century many of the old village families no longer existed or, had been driven to the edges of village life. Attempts were made to shore up Silverton as a community, notably through the Silverton Weeks of the 1970s and the Street Markets that begab in the early 1990s both with some success but with Street Market depending on its survival more om people from outside the villasge rather then from those within.

The question then arises for Silverton, as for many other similar communities with a similar location close to a big city is how do you achieve, and retain, a sense of community solidarity in a community whose social inks have been changed so radically, often in the space of under one life time and whose social composition will almost certainly continue to experience rapid change, probably brought about by more housing construction  It is this struggle to  maintain a sense of community that underlies much of yje unease around the perceptions of anti social behaviour that have plagued the village in recent months and I suggest that it is an issue  that will define much of the thinking about village life in the years to come.