Another Cornwall

I spent the last three days of last week banged up at Truro Crown Court, waiting for the jury to rule on the tragic "firework through the letter box" case which resulted in three teenage boys being sent to a young offenders' institute for between five and seven years.

It felt strange to be back before a High Court Judge - in a previous life I was a regular scribe on the press benches of the old Bodmin Crown Court - and on my way home on Friday evening I went for a stroll around the town's Berryfields Estate.

Back in November, when Mary Fox died in the blaze caused by the firework, the national newspapers went to town with wild stories about feral gangs of youths terrorising residents. The estate's residents, supported by local MP Dan Rogerson, were quick to point out that 99% of what the newspapers were saying was total garbage - and on the evidence of what I found on Friday evening I have to agree.

It is 30 years since I first reported from the Berryfields Estate but there are some facts which can never change. It was built more than 40 years ago specifically to house hundreds of people relocating from London (mainly East Enders); the estate was effectively separate from the main part of Bodmin and there was little or no thought given to "organic" growth of the town; the first generation of Berryfield Estate residents brought with them a sackful of socio-economic problems which Bodmin was ill-equipped to deal with; and despite winning a design award it is still ridiculously easy to get hopelessly lost.

There is some graffiti. I saw one car which probably hasn't moved for a while (owing to a shortage of wheels.) Mary Fox's house on Friday evening was still a crime scene. But that is about it.

I am not pretending that there are no problems with anti-social behaviour on the Berryfields Estate. The police have set up a local office and try to patrol, on foot, as often as possible. The estate is unlikely to feature in tourist brochures any time soon. But it is not a war zone. Most of the accents I heard were Cornish, rather than Cockney (in 1980 it was most definitely the other way round.) Not once did I feel unsafe.

Anyway the first point of this particular blog post is to suggest that improvng the health, housing and economic prospects of Berryfield Estate residents is probably not as high up the political agenda as it ought to be. The second point is to ask what design lessons have been learned from those who seek now to develop new estates, and eco towns, all over Cornwall?