14/01/2013 Inside Out East Midlands

Hello, generations of children grew up reading Ladybird books and

tonight we're in Loughborough where the story all began. They were the

books that inspired millions of children. There's something about

them that draws you in. They are pictures in the art work. They wish

you through the years. Little by little, your shelves get full of

books. We tracked down a man that started it all. Also tonight: They

called it the street of shame. have had everything next to me.

Prostitutes, all the doors have been taken off the hinges.

When the people of Pleasley Hill heard their community was going to

be regenerated, they imagined a fresh start after years of neglect.

But nearly a decade later, they're still waiting. For the last 12

months, Stuart Woodman has been finding out what life's been like

for the people who chose to stay while others moved out. This is

Nottinghamshire and the outskirts of Mansfield. Once a thriving pit

village, Pleasley Hill was a purpose built community serving the

local mine. With neat rows of terraces it changed very little for

the best part of 100 years. A place where families took pride in their

homes. But in 1983 things changed. The pit closed and the village's

fortunes changed. Gradually the area became notorious for drugs,

deprivation and anti-social behaviour. So in a radical decision

which would change the village forever, they brought in the

If the village had been left as it was and not used as a containment

career for druggies and every other bad person that they didn't want in

that area and shovel it into this area, it would still be great.

There is nothing wrong with the houses. Some of them are damp but

it is the people that don't look after them. I have had everyone

looking -- living next to me. A prostitute cum heavy rockers, they

took all the floorboards of. What can you do?

Pulling down these terraces would mean the death for a community

already on the brink. Over the last year, we have been meeting the

people who call this area home. If you were determined to stay.

didn't want to complain about it. It would bring more trouble on to

your doorstep. This part is completely dead. Despite everything,

and Richard wants to stay. He lives on one of the streets that is to be

saved. I am meeting to other families who have had enough and

, we are looking for a property to buy. -- at the moment, we are

looking for property to buy. We have never been informed what is

being built, just what is coming down. We are forgotten people.

are you moving out? We have no idea, we haven't found anywhere. It has

to be in the next three months. We will be gone and then there is

another empty one. Sad to go? I would be if I have still got my

neighbours and the people when I moved in here. Who wants to live in

a place like this? I am ready to get out. Linda, we have caught you

packing. You have been here 60 years. It must be a big wrench.

is. We don't want to leave but we have no choice. Nobody wanted to

know. We have no choice, we have to go. Do you no longer feel safe

living here? Not anymore. Last summer, there was fighting with

baseball bats and hatchets. There was blood everywhere and it is not

right. It is a sad end to the place. All the old miners who lived here

for nothing. It is all gone. Residents say it talk of

regeneration is nothing new.. Mansfield District Council claims

to be spending around a million on clearance and improvement. Plans

include 900 quality homes, shops, a pub, even a hotel. But it all seems

a long way off and some people have got tired of waiting. I'm meeting a

man behind a controversial website. Mark Jones has been asking

questions about these plans and the plight of the village. Do you think

the people and the place became stigmatised? There were times when

I was at college and people were looked down again. They were seen

as a deity area and people would laugh at accent, as well. -- dirty

area. Waugh was the relationship like with the council and the

Mayor? We didn't see him around here. As far as the of way the

people felt towards the council, it was very heated. People were very

angry. You started a bloggers and it was very critical of the council.

I didn't know what was going on. There wasn't any way of getting

information from the people. They would never get any answers. I

thought it was the only way I could get anything moving forward. Within

a year, they started to knock the place down. Two years later, it is

still knocked down. Does this embarrassment kick-start some

action? It could have happened anyway. It is a coincidence that it

will happen in one go. Barker wrote his last block it two

years ago after he decided to move away and his home was torn down.

For those determined to stay put in a struggling community, they are

angry at the slow progress of improvement.

All the decent people that were here, they would help anyone. They

have all moved to different areas. The whole community has been split

up. It is like getting a handful of pebbles on the beach and throwing

them. They have gone here and everywhere. It is what has been

done to the village that has made it the Street of shame. People have

lived here all their lives. They don't want to move. They want to

stay. It is not good. Not good at all. If they are going to do these

things, they should look at what people want. OK, it would be nice

to have a new area but it shouldn't take all these years to get round

to doing yet, should it? This is a vanishing village. Some say and I

sought no more. Some say it Nottingham's poorest people were

neglected, ignored and moved on to make way for private development.

Tony Egginton, the elected Mayor of Mansfield, has agreed to meet me. I

wanted to put the people's concerns to the man ultimately in charge of

this village's future. Before the pit shut come this was a thriving

village. It is a wonderful community, bags of community spirit

but when the pits closed, the Coal Board summer properties. Quite a

few people did access finance and purchase properties. Some went to

rogue landlords. Things have taken a turn for the worst. It has

declined. We would have hoped to have brought this on it sooner than

we had. The local paper quotes you saying they promised local

residents that work on a housing estate would begin in the next 18

months. That is eight years ago. What has happened? It is the

industry. The construction industry, the bottom went out of it. To get

developers interested has been a hell of a job. Now we are here and

ready to go. We have a contractor in place and hopefully we will be

on site in the next year. It is not just a low priority for the

district council? It has been a high priority. This is my last term

of office and a legacy I want to leave behind. I will be happy to

say I have enabled this to happen and it will be a proud place for me

to come to for the remainder of my life.

Tony has two years to achieve his legacy. After demolition is don't

come up won a short row of terraces is all that will remain, an island

in the middle of hundreds of new homes, built on farmers' fields and

the past. Barry has been offered one of few

houses not being bulldozed. His nearest neighbours, Linda Grubey

and Paul Johnson, finally did a deal with the council. They could

afford a modest home closer to Mansfield. I am settled again. I am

somewhere that I don't have to worry about anything. I just have

to get on with my life. You had to fight for compensation, didn't you?

We had to fight for a decent amount of money. What they offered you the

first time, you couldn't have bought a one-bedroomed house. That

is all we want, somewhere to live for the rest of row years and

hopefully I have caught it. -- -- And all the residents have since

moved out of Pleasley Hill and demolition will be finished in the

The Ladybird books we all know and love were published on this street

right here in Loughborough. Books like this one certainly helped

millions of us to read, including me! Printers, Wills and Hepworth,

had been producing things like car catalogues but that all changed

with an idea from one of their own sales team and to think, they

weren't even interested at first! The television set is familiar

through homes throughout the world. Many boys like to play football.

Everyone in England knows that the Fifth of November is Bonfire Night.

If you were young in the '60s and '70s, you'll remember these. But

the man who had the idea was ignored for years. I can remember

my father going round worried that it wouldn't work. The gamble was

launching the reading scheme featuring Peter and Jane. It is

still alive and well, Peter and Jane are still teaching many to

read every year. The Ladybird factory has gone but they will

forever be linked with Loughborough in Leicestershire. The tales are

still being told. The rest of the crew were in the rowing boat!

There's also a big market in Ladybird nostalgia and a new way of

telling the stories. Can you see the Tiger? It takes you back,

details in the art work which put you through the years. Everybody in

this country will have come across It all began in this Derbyshire

market town. A commercial salesman called Douglas Keen had a big idea.

He lived in Heanor with his wife and mother-in-law and enrolled them

both into his plan. My father had the idea there of doing educational

books for children. They were the sort of thing that adults could use

as well. These would be stories to capture every child's imagination

about the world they lived in. Books unlike the Ladybird

children's books Wills and Hepworth churned out in Loughborough during

wartime to keep the printers busy when commercial work fell away.

did and -- he was not making them until the 1940s, and then they

decided to make some books to keep things going until the end of the

war. But Douglas Keen's plan for the Ladybird brand was slapped down.

They told him to go away and This was from the accountant, Jim

Clegg. "it is not anticipated that book will form a major part of our

turnover after the ceasefire has been sounded and while not wishing

to discourage your interest in books, it would be wiser to focus

your interest on the commercial side are printed, the car market,

for example". A Douglas Keen was not easily put off. He made use of

his mother-in-law's ability at art. She'd studied at art school in

Derby and put together a prototype He was going around thinking this

was the right thing to do, to convince them? And this came about?

Yes. This is the prototype he put together to convince the directors.

My father had a lot of books on beds so I imagine he sorted out the

format and gave the her a picture to work from. My mother did the

little black and white illustrations of the nests and the

eggs and the setting for the nest, and my father wrote the text.

hard work paid off. Wills and Hepworth changed their tune. "I

must say at first that however lukewarm up my suggestion was two

years ago, I am now 100% in favour of publishing this book". As you

can see, it looked for all intents and purposes remarkably similar.

The start off getting a book and you think, I remember that, and

then you think I would like to collect the set. Ladybird books

come in numbered sets so a bit of you liked ticking boxes. Helen Day

has ticked every box. She has the lot. A love of books generated from

learning from them and remembering them. She still has one from her

childhood among the collection. can look at one of the pictures

today, and remember looking at that so deeply as a child. Long before

the Romans conquered Britain, men have lived in these islands for

hundreds of years. adequate policemen are on duty day and night.

Some people were often attacked by Helen also has a collection of

original art from some of the books. The artwork in the '60s and '70s is

what made the books stand out. From his new family home in Stratford,

Douglas Keen commissioned the artists himself. They were quite

exotic for the 1950s. John Berry, for example, smoked and had been

divorced and had a sports car. It was all rather exotic. One of the

artists was Martin Aitchison who had worked for Barnes Wallis

sketching plans for the Dam Busters mission. Profoundly deaf since

youth, Martin - who is 93 - still paints. He had done work for Eagle

Comics but was initially turned And so he was taken on to

illustrate the Ladbyird Key Words reading scheme. This was a huge

task based on the theory by William Murray that 12 words account for a

quarter of those we use in the This is fun, says Peter. Yes, this

is fun, said Jane. William Murray had developed the theory of Key

Words and had written several books about it and I think he had one

unsuccessful attempt with another publisher who wanted to produce a

reading scheme but had fallen through. Initially he was quite

reluctant to try again but my father managed to convince him.

Apparently Douglas Keen loved a boffin, he loved people who would

be dedicated and got engaged in the conversations and I think William

Murray was quite reluctant to start Because it was a teaching set, over

30 new books had to be be launched at once. They piled up in the

warehouse and concerned staff in Loughborough. He was worried

because they built up so much stock and that meant things were not

selling and I remember him saying, they had never seen things like

this, and he said, this is deliberate: We need to bring up

this level of stock before we do it. A just imagine that Campbell and

looking at them. -- just imagine that gamble. To date, they've sold

80 million copies. They are still being used today. The artwork was

all created from original photographs. To make the stories

work, Martin Aithcison had to find his own models. He spotted Jane

Sometimes fate played a hand in the People At Work was another of

Douglas Keen's innovations. And looking at the pictures now they

take you back to a different era. The illustrations pin-down this

sense of that time. The policeman, for example, in the People At Work

series, was not the Cup Lee Dixon of Dock Green, laughing policeman

that he would expect. Much more a guardian of society and almost an

anonymous figure. Even in the most bland and boring book, something

about the art work which made you think there was more to it than met

"motor cars were first made in England just before 1,900. Apart

from the bodies and engines, the The popularity is undimmed. The

many car-related books were featured last year at the Heritage

Motor Centre in Warwickshire with Even from the start, something

retrospective about those books. If you look at the pictures in the

1960s, they probably better represent the 1950s. There are

something inherent in nostalgia, even in Ladybird at its most keen

to be current. In Leicestershire, museum curators know the worth of

featuring the books. Ladybird was a huge part of Loughborough's working

life, and even social life. Thousands of people worked in

Ladybird in the time they were based in Loughborough. It comes

with the territory, that to cover major working places and also play

so that had an influence throughout the country because everybody of a

certain age is familiar with Ladybird books. And there have been

factual books so well written that they've been used in a practical

way by adults. 10 been How It Works book about cars were used by Thames

Valley Police and they were going over to patrol cars and they wanted

officers to understand what went on Trilogy, population, rainfall and

land-use map. Each of the following small maps opposite gives us

specialised information about our country. The Understanding Maps was

used by the army. And How It Works: The Computer was widely used by a

lot of firms, in fact by IBM to tell the start about how computers

work. There is something about computers that is both fascinating

and alarming. There was a backlash though. Some said the pictures were

sexist and out-of-date. It began to be perceived as to roll specific.

The children were allocated duties based on whether they were a boy or

a girl. Martin Aitchison was commissioned to redraw his work in

Nostalgia today means the pictures Martin painted are still popular.

We are still using the same illustrations so that retro feel to

Peter and Jane is very much as it was in the 70s when they were in

the street again. -- illustrated again. Ladybird presses closed in

Loughborough 14 years ago. They are now part of London-based Penguin.

Today in Loughborough's newly- refurbished library it's Ladybird

Live, a reading roadshow for pre- school children. It was a sad time

when the factory closed here in Loughborough but now the home is in

London for Penguin Books but we are very much enjoy a be involved in

the community. Douglas Keen retired when Ladybird were first sold to

the publishers Pearson in the seventies. And in his retirement

wrote a book himself. One again ahead of his time. It was about

saving the planet. Bury radical to be talking about ecology to a

popular market and children at that time. -- very radical. So specimen

only, first ever, 1945. Helen Day You take people to see what can be

achieved. Right up to date. Those same Ladybird books are now

readable as an app on a smartphones and tablets. To reach those

children, we must look at these different platforms. Lots of older

generation people are getting nostalgic about it, recording their

own sound effects which is fantastic but also using it with

their children which is brilliant because it is bringing everything

full circle. This was when she was about eight. Douglas Keen's own

granddaughters also tried to make their own Ladybird books. One has

gone on to make a career illustrating children's books. An

art legacy which began on a kitchen Gosh, it takes you back, doesn't

it? And great to see those brilliant books have got a future

thanks to Douglas Keen and it's the centenary of his birth this year.

That's it from Loughborough. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.

We do blood pressure, we do defibrilation if you collapse in

front of us. It's all free. It's on the NHS. You've all paid for it.

Just come and choose which one you'd like. Next week, it's the

biggest shake-up in the history of the NHS, so what will it mean for

patients and doctors? GP and comedian Phil Hammond sets out his

stall. This is what the biggest shake-up in the history of the NHS

is all about giving local doctors, nurses and patients the chance to

call the shots and shop around for the best care.

With "choice" the buzz word, Rob Sissons asks what difference will

it really make to your life in the East Midlands? It's very difficult

for patients because you're not really aware of who is better than

And Ben Jackson is back in the saddle again. There are days, let