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When Garston’s Bankfield House community centre organised a fundraiser in 1967, they decided to aim big
Bankfield House was a community centre in Garston, Merseyside. A job advert placed in the Guardian in 1974 defines their activities pretty well: “The centre serves the dockside community of Garston, a neighbourhood with the characteristic problems of an area of social deprivation,” it read. “Programmes are provided for teenagers, senior citizens, mentally handicapped, a preschool play group, and there is extensive involvement in local community development.”
Garston still has not shrugged off that social deprivation. Linked for statistical purposes with neighbouring Speke, it remains one of the most downtrodden areas of Liverpool. Though there has been significant investment in recent years, latest figures show that 30% of Speke Garston residents of working age are unemployed, compared with a national average of 12.4%. Male life expectancy is 71.5, more than six years below the national average. Just 30.7% of students get between A* and C in five or more GCSEs, including maths and English, compared with the national average of 53.4%. Speke Garston comes in worse than the Liverpool average in every deprivation indicator concerning health, education and unemployment. It is, in short, the kind of place that could do with a decent community centre, and in Bankfield House it had one (until its landlords, the Church of England, closed it down in 2007). Continue reading...