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Brickbats for estate
• A FRIEND has sent me the obituary of Harry Brack, a long-time Islington resident, (Campaigner who fought ‘barracks for workers’, October 9).
Harry didn’t just think that the Packington estate provided barracks for the workers, but he could see it as conducive to alienation and riots. “Just think of the workers raining down bricks from those overhead walkways onto the police underneath,” he said. “They don’t realise what they are building!”
The local Labour Party was terrified by the increasing gentrification of Islington and was quite determined to destroy those Victorian terraces. If they stayed, they reasoned, then the middle classes would come in and vote Tory and they would be out.
They didn’t realise it would be worse than that – the middle classes were champagne socialists and got rid of them anyway!
My goodness, how Harry and his supporters were vilified by the then Labour Party. And the ‘socialists’ that followed them were even more unpalatable.
Joy Lowe
Ex-resident, now living in Surbiton |
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