Faversham News columnist Mark Gardner recalls his days as a reporter in Birmingham and a lonely and ultimately destructive crusade against the 1960s tower block boom

The Kensington tower fire disaster set my thoughts back over 50 years to a colleague and campaigning journalist who waged a long and unsuccessful battle against the concept of rehousing people in high-rise blocks.

His name was Don Anderson and he was the municipal correspondent of the Birmingham Evening Despatch, a lively tabloid paper, sadly swallowed by the Evening Mail in 1963.
By the late 1950s, Birmingham had embarked on a wholesale slum clearance programme.
The solution, seen as “progressive” by the architectural establishment, was to ring the suburbs with multi-storey towers.

They were being thrown up at an incredible rate, especially to the south of the city.
Anderson, in a series of cogently argued articles, pinpointed the likely dire consequences stemming from this type of communal living. He posed a whole string of questions: What would happen in the event of severe fire? How would elderly residents cope when lifts failed? Where would children play?

He was concerned about close-knit communities being fractured and dispersed. He predicted that gang culture would thrive among the young. And just about then there were early signs of a spreading drug culture.

Anderson foresaw the replacement of two-up-two-down, back-to-back terraced homes with outside loos and communal wash-houses by new ghetto slums in towers. He was worried that concrete construction would distress in time.

These sustained and bitter attacks took their toll on Anderson’s health

Against his lone voice, albeit backed up by architects and planners who had similar concerns, was ranged the entire city council establishment. Councillors and tame “experts” dismissed his criticisms and demands that proper houses with gardens should replace the squalid and inadequate slums.

He was mocked and humiliated by leading politicians. These sustained and bitter attacks took their toll on Anderson’s health. He became obsessive and fragile, and deeply depressed as he endured vitriolic smears on his views.

Don Anderson was a sensitive man, whose concern for the fate and future of the thousands of families being consigned to high rise living was utterly genuine, and ultimately this failed crusade broke him. I was sitting beside him at a city council meeting when he snapped and suffered a nervous breakdown.

He turned to me and said “That’s it, I’ve had enough.” He stood up and walked out, never to return to the paper. It was a shocking and unjust ending to a long and distinguished career, he was a man of principle who cared too much.

The problems he forecast all materialised in the decades that followed. In recent years Birmingham has been demolishing those dreadful tower blocks, but their staunchest opponent did not live to see that overdue demise.