100 days – Day 94: Apartheid Lives!

100 days – Day 94: Apartheid Lives!

 

• Multimillion Pound housing developments in London – separate entrances for the affluent and for the less well-off

 

 Left, the luxury lobby of One Commercial Street, marketed to wealthy City workers. Right, the side-alley entrance reserved for affordable housing tenants. Photographs: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

These are “poor doors”,  entrances for the low-income tenants to separate them from wealthy home buyers.   The trend, dubbed “poor doors” in the US where it began, includes separate bicycle storage spaces, rubbish disposal facilities and access for postal deliveries.

In order to win planning permissions many new developments in London are required to include affordable homes, but to get around this,  developers are installing separate access for the “plebs”.

In some properties the entrances are not only separate but also have a different look, and one City building has a hotel-style lobby for well-healed residents and a side door in an alley near trade entrances for those in affordable housing.

 

• Tartaglia –  Pasta redemption

Archbishop Philip Tartaglia and West Dunbartonshire Council have apparently had secrete meetings about a new school – a single campus Primary in Bellsmyre to replace three existing schools.

Teachers and parents have been angered by the Archdiocese’s insistence that  Catholic teachers have their own separate staff room; non Catholics their own. Oh, and the kids who will attend will have separate entrances – one for Catholic pupils; one for Protestants and children of other denominations and none.

 

Archbish Phil (who ate all the pasta) Tartaglia

 

Apartheid is alive and kicking in 21 Century Britain!