Monday 12 July 2010

Hey, Why Waste Two Tragic Deaths?

The two recent deaths of young children crushed in security gates is a salient reminder to ensure that if you have such gates, or plan to have them installed, best to ensure it’s from a reputable company and all the required safety systems are in working order.

Unless you are Jonathan Glancey, the Guardian's architecture and design correspondent, that is.
He simply sees an opportunity to advance his agenda:
Local people say both sets of gates – guarding new, yet far from "exclusive", estates – have existed solely to stop residents' cars from being stolen. Perhaps they have. And yet, surely, the safest form of street, and thus housing, is a permeable one, supervised – naturally and subtly – by people walking up and down it.
Clearly, the people who have these installed think otherwise.

Perhaps the fate of so many people who have faced car thieves only to end up under their own cars, and thrn on a mortuary slab, is foremost in their minds?

When did this new generation of gated estates emerge? I'm not too sure, although I remember them sprouting promiscuously in London's Docklands during the late 1980s, those yuppie years when Porsche-driving young City types brandishing mobile phones the size of bricks bore down on the newly shipless docks. They liked the idea of living by the Thames and close to the financial towers of Canary Wharf; they also feared the locals.

So, yuppie "apartment" blocks (a "flat" would never do) were tucked away behind gates, CCTV cameras and guard-posts.

Those ghastly, horrible yuppies! Who do they think they are, flaunting their wealth?
Just asking for it, aren’t they, Jonathan…
Today, there is barely a town worth the name in Britain – let alone elsewhere in the world – free from gated estates, gated car parks, gated malls, gated streets. It's as if we've all become scared, or simply suspicious, of one another and that the best thing we can do for our own good is to tell everyone else to stay well away.
Well, clearly there’s little point in expecting the police or justice system to do anything about it, is there..?
What has happened to us? How can such paranoia, and shortsighted urban planning and design, be worth the death of two little girls?
The two children died either because the safety mechanisms that should have been employed were missing or non-functional, or perhaps because there was a design fault. We don’t know. We won’t know, until the inquests.

We DO know that all across the country, thousands of children have NOT been crushed to death by gates that function as they are supposed to.

But let’s not let that stop us advancing our ‘rich people are just awful’ agenda, eh?

Still, at least you aren't shouting for a ban, like some people...

6 comments:

banned said...

As was pointed out in the Telegraph last week; housing associations that if gated communities were good enough for the rich folks then they were good enough for their clients too.

They got the cheap versions though, which is why they kill people.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Personally speaking I feel it's a reflection on the Guraniad tendency to not jail criminals turns people to make the outside of their property look like the inside of a jail.

Want less gated communities? Permanently Jail the anti-social.

Greencoat said...

This is a favourite theme from the Left: let criminals roam free and then demonise anyone who takes evasive action.

On the grounds that the latter, natch, are all grind-the-poor capitalists who deserve a crowbar through the front door if not the head.

MTG said...

"...to not jail criminals turns people to make the outside of their property look like the inside of a jail."

I lost about £7K in three separate thefts, all of which were totally ignored by police after I duly reported them. When I complained to a senior officer that the sum of police action had been the issue of crime numbers, he had the temerity to suggest the possibility I could be inventing thefts and wasting police time to make false insurance claims!

It was the realisation my losses were of no interest to police that finally drove me to the high expense of a pair of these potentially lethal, automated 'prison gates' - with the matching side gate, intercom, CCTV, night lights, movement triggered floodlighting.......the security bills went on and on and on.

Today, my home looks less residential than it does HMP, AntiCitizenOne - but as a direct result of police disinterest in theft. Yet when out driving, I arouse quite another fiscal fascination. Who amongst us has not heard that friendly ice breaker "This your car, mate?"

Dave H said...

That's logic for you: an incident on a Housing Association property, where the gates only existed "solely to stop residents' cars from being stolen" forms the pretext for some ape, sorry, journalist, to rant against the arrangements of the affluent. I rather think that fuckwit's ideological knickers are showing.

Here's another suggestion for the writer of that article: the residents should get rid of their cars; then A) they won't need the gates and B) their children are less likely to get run over. Saves the Polar Bears too. It's all good.

After all, is the selfish need for personal mobility 'worth the lives' of about 150 children in the UK each year?

I recall the widespread joy when using a mobile while driving became a specific offence. The local paper gleefully reported the number of prosecutions. That was at a time when only the wealthy could afford mobiles. Oddly, the same behaviour became much less of a sin as the price fell.

JuliaM said...

"They got the cheap versions though..."

They must be subject to the same regulations though. So, is it the installation that's going awry?

"Personally speaking I feel it's a reflection on the Guraniad tendency to not jail criminals turns people to make the outside of their property look like the inside of a jail."

Spot on!

"This is a favourite theme from the Left: let criminals roam free and then demonise anyone who takes evasive action. "

As in the fact that the only person in the UK who seems able to get a gun, no questions asked, is...err, a criminal?

"When I complained to a senior officer that the sum of police action had been the issue of crime numbers, he had the temerity to suggest the possibility I could be inventing thefts and wasting police time to make false insurance claims!"

Splendid customer service, what?

"Who amongst us has not heard that friendly ice breaker "This your car, mate?""

Me for one!

I guess females don't get that a lot. Or I'm driving the wrong cars!

"That was at a time when only the wealthy could afford mobiles."

Oh, there is indeed a big current of envy running through this story...