A perfect warm and sunny day in July for a day out in Anfield. A place where we’ll be spending a lot of our time soon as me and Jayne Lawless of Coming Home Liverpool go on site with our next 18 houses. Today though is a day of rest, much talk and some play.
Into Stanley Park.
A wedding about to take place. Perfect day for it.
American Talk Show host Jimmy Dore talks up the Labour Party Manifesto.
Jimmy Dore, US Talk Show host.
So here’s the thing. Jayne Lawless and I are talking politics during a brief gap in talking about Coming Home Liverpool, which we run together. And Jayne is enthusing about something by someone called Jimmy Dore that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook. But which she can’t send to me because of my outright refusal to have anything to do with Facebook.
“You’ve got to see it Ronnie, you’ve absolutely got to see it. Go home, find it on your computer, find it anywhere and watch it!”
So I do and it’s brilliant. A point by point discussion on the brilliance and straightforwardness of the UK Labour Party’s Manifesto. An unexpected delight, coming as it does from the United States, but a delight nonetheless.
Except its 21 minutes long.
“It would make a great Labour Party political broadcast if it could be edited down to much, much shorter” I tell Jayne.
“So ask him. Ask Jimmy if he minds you doing an edit?”
Listen to this blog post on BBC Radio Merseyside here.
Home, the place where you can grow up happily, knowing it’s always going to be your home. Welcome home this little one from us at Coming Home Liverpool.
No apologies at all for not having written much on here lately, Jayne Lawless and I have been busy. As the two partners in Coming Home Liverpool we’ve been busy creating our first home for a family in North Liverpool. And now it’s done and they’re all moved in. On a fair rent and a permanent tenancy.
Yesterday there was a celebration at the house. A celebration you can listen to from the links at the top and the foot of this post. Continue reading
Coming Home Liverpool is in the Big Issue North.
“Jayne Lawless and Coming Home Liverpool co-founder Ronnie Hughes are in a jovial mood, surrounded by the green and grey walls of their adopted property – the first, they hope, of many empty houses they are going to convert into affordable homes.
There are around 600,000 empty properties in the country, and 9,000 in Liverpool. Often the owners cannot afford to bring them back into use. Yet Liverpool, like the rest of the country, faces an acute shortage of homes.
This house, on City Road in Walton, is owned by Clare Kinsella, who had inherited it from her late father. She could not afford to do it up, especially because she had been ripped off for £20,000 by previous builders. So she faced either going into further debt to refurbish it or selling it for less than market value.
But when she met Hughes at a social housing conference – he first worked in housing 40 years ago and was recently involved in the Granby 4 Streets redevelopment for which the architects won the Turner Prize – Coming Home Liverpool had found its first homeowner.”
This has been a really good week for us at Coming Home Liverpool. We’ve met a lot of interesting people in our search for empty homes to work on, work is going well at the home in City Road Walton where we’re on site and, well, we’re enjoying ourselves getting our new idea going.
And a particular thing we’re both enjoying is working with our friend, Liverpool street photographer Jane MacNeil. We’ve commissioned Jane to spend some days with us and see what she gets. None of us know precisely what we’ll do with Jane’s photographs, but we will do something creative over time, so I don’t want to use up too many of them on here.
Jayne Lawless by Jane MacNeil.
All days are special, especially this one. So I decide I’ll walk around and photograph it, as I tend to do.
Walking to work in fact on a gorgeous blue day.
Friday 20th January, 2017. Yes, the day the world gets a chauvinist thug as President of the USA.
Thinking about this as I walk into The Mystery.
And deciding the day is too special and beautiful to spoil it with any more thoughts of him.
Me and an urban goal.
We want to find all the empty homes in Liverpool, with your help. 
We want to map all the empty homes and get people living in them as soon as possible.
So we need your help. Continue reading
