Everyone is stealing glances at the large clock on the wall: twenty past four. It has been a very long day in the council chamber. Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, the new proposal document has been discussed, revised and eventually approved.
Sensing the mood, the council leader calls a short tea and/or cigarette break. Ten minutes later, the meeting reconvenes to discuss the last detail of the document. The councillors return to their seats, and the representatives from the North Riverside Business and Community Association shuffle into the benches at the back of the chamber. Today, in honour of the final day of discussion, they have brought their famous banner with them. On the left hand side is the word NO, bright red and very large, next to three statements:
NO! TO CLOSING BUSINESSES
NO! TO UNAFFORDABLE NEW HOUSING
NO! TO THE NEW PLAN FOR THE NORTH RIVERSIDE
Residents and local business owners were quick to form the NRBCA in response to the first tentative consultation on redeveloping the area. Since then, they have met every Wednesday evening in the function room upstairs at the Anchor to discuss the council’s plans and distribute T-shirts. Garages and fabricators and pubs and cafés that have been open for generations, and survived the closing of the docks, were suddenly under threat from a document that imagined a future very different from their past.
It was beyond their power to stop the proposal entirely, but the representatives from the NRBCA made their voices heard in the council chamber, abridging chapters and diluting commitments. The result was seventy two pages of surveys, observations and noncommittal suggestions. But despite their efforts there was one thing, unwritten but present on every page, that the NRBCA couldn’t remove: the creeping sense that change was inevitable.
The council leader, weary, stands up. He is only a few years away from a carriage clock and a cottage somewhere far away from here. With his thick-rimmed glasses and stern black suit he looks out of place next to the NRBCA members, in their jeans and T-shirts. But thirty years ago that was him in the benches, a local business owner standing up for his community after the devastation of the war. A lot has changed. He sees nothing he can identify with in the men and women from the NRBCA. They all want the same thing, but to them everything is so simple, and to him it is so complicated. Their position fits neatly on a T-shirt but a seventy-two page document still falls short of explaining his.
He clears his throat and speaks to the chamber: “Now we come to the final item on today’s agenda, item 47: the frontispiece and title of our document. Our design team has prepared three options for you to choose from. You should have them in front of you.”
The chamber fills with the sound of shuffling paper. In the benches at the back, the members of the NRBCG are handed printouts to share. Then everyone is silent as they consider the options: