After 12 years, our member Belle has won a secure council tenancy! Belle is one of our longest-standing members and had been on the housing list from 2012-2024, living using housing benefits & PIP with her daughter, under the now discontinued Bond Scheme.
After filing for homelessness in 2012, Belle says she was ‘just so relieved’ when her and her daughter moved into Hands Walk, 9 months later. Shortly after, her daughter had a bad dream that they were going to get thrown out of their home, so Belle took her to church to make her feel better. That evening, they were told after mass that all the blocks were set to be demolished as part of the regeneration. Huddling upstairs after mass in St. Anne’s church, she met with other neighbours in the area and decided to join the newly founded PEACH. ‘I went because I was scared. My daughter was scared. We only just got a home’ Belle started going to meetings regularly, she still now has her membership paper from 2013. Back then, you paid £1, and you got a card in the shape of a peach. For some residents, Church meetings were the first they had heard of the regeneration, for others it was being doorknocked. For others, it was a threat that had already been looming over their head for a decade. In 2013, Custom House was spiraling into disrepair and decay – a process of state neglect known as ‘managed decline’. Homes were becoming uninhabitable. Shops on Freemasons’s road had begun to shut. In two years the hair shop, butchers, and the fruit shop would all be gone.
Belle happily recounts getting involved with PEACH ‘we got to visit other groups, we went to the House of Lords once! Amber and I saw the kids perform a play about Tando (who later became Mears) and had a barbecue with everyone. My brother got into the Community Land Trust, and dressed up in a peach costume for an action!’
Belle had to give up her career as a SEN teacher when she fell ill in 2014 with spinal cord damage exacerbated by her scoliosis. ‘I couldn’t get involved more after I got ill and couldn’t work at the school anymore. I was in bad health for 2 years, then was looking after my mum’s care pretty constantly in the property she was living in with my sister for years after. I could only attend sporadically. I went to the peach parties when I could, the picnic, community organising training. I’ve been door-knocking and now I’m mateys with everyone’
‘I kept sending emails to the housing team and not getting anything back. This constant back and forth with housing officers for years. Nobody was attending to it. I wanted to try and start bidding but I couldn’t get in contact with anyone, my daughter went to uni. I wasn’t getting anywhere.’
‘[My home in] Hands Walk was only temporary, our landlady didn’t even have a license for 5 years between 2017-23. Because we had to have the place surveyed in 2023 – we realised we had been living with Category 1 hazards the entire time we lived in the property. Broken windows, and exposed asbestos tiles. We had electrics from the 60s that were completely unsafe. We got the new windows a year before we left, 9 years into living in the property. This was because PEACH members had had enough of mouldy windows, organised a petition with 250 signatures, and organised a sit-in of a council show home until they agreed to PEACH’s demands for safe homes. We were overjoyed to finally have mould-free windows that didn’t creak and whistle all winter.
Belle was told she had to leave the property in January 2023. ‘You’ve got to have a purpose. Last year was one of the hardest years of my life and being connected to my neighbours breathed life into me.’ I got to know my neighbours – I started teaching my neighbour’s kids on hands walk. I can’t go back to work because my health is too bad, but I started to plan lessons again for when I was feeling ok.
‘It was like a pure family, like they were pulling me through something I couldn’t pull myself through.’
‘I felt like I had been pushed from pillar to post with my health. Anything else on top of that, when it came along and we had to move out of there, it was so stressful that I had to completely dissociate myself. I had to talk myself into believing that I’d get a win out of it one way or the other. I had to believe that this was the best thing that could happen, that something better would come. I got more involved in PEACH and came to Housing Clubs. I joined a choir to help me deal with it. I thought – I needed to uplift myself and the only way I could was through the ways which always worked for me.
PEACH members supported me to write an email to Mayor Fiaz, and I got my bidding backdated from when I first filed for homelessness in 2012. This was at the same time as I was fighting for my PIP which got cancelled – later I was awarded the advanced amount and a payback of all the PIP I had missed. By October 2023, I was not in a good place. I lost the ‘fake it till you make it’ feeling. I had shingles 4 times in 8 months and was run down.
‘By the time Christmas came, 6 months ago, I was completely exhausted. I had no idea what was going to happen. Our landlady gave us the eviction just before Christmas and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was counting my blessings because my PIP had been reinstated. I believed in light – I would tell each cell of my body to get well and heal myself. I will not be limited. I kept seeing people, getting involved when I could’
‘Bang out of the blue in the middle of February I got an offer for a place which I had put in an offer for in October. I moved into the new place in March 2024. Finally, I’ve got a permanent home. I still go back to Hands Walk to teach the kids, they put a big smile on my face.
‘Sometimes when you are so sad you feel like you don’t want to see people because it will bring them down. Everyone is lovely, knowing that your neighbours know they can knock on your door anytime makes you feel really good. Even if they just want a chat. I still go and see my neighbours. We’ve been so fortunate to know PEACH and work through issues that everyone has
‘There are people suffering every second. But there are spaces in between the seconds where you can grow. Think of how we took it, we progressed, we keep giving a shoulder to other human beings – when you’re going through it and we can give shoulders that’s when doors and paths spring up out of nowhere. You have to be open to it.’
‘You should always be ready to smile at someone. It might be the thing that saves them.’
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