Redbricks Online New Start 14 April 2000

Residents of a Manchester estate have found that you don't have to be dot com whizzkids to benefit from the Internet ~ Dick Frost meets the Redbricks surfers.

A council estate in Hulme, Manchester, which has had more than its fair share of inner-city problems - poverty, unemployment, drugs, crime - is pulling itself into a sophisticated online future without grants, handouts or outside assistance.

Residents of the six blocks of flats known as 'the Redbricks' are creating a virtual community with their own intranet and a shared connection to the world wide web - and the real-life community is being invigorated in the process.

They are piloting a type of project much advocated by New Labour as a way out of urban poverty and social exclusion. But what would cost the government tens of thousands of pounds is being done by people who are seriously disadvantaged.

A recent Channel 4 programme about a group of 24 families who briefly went on the net revealed that one of the participants ran up a phone bill of £75 in one week, while it cost £1,500 a piece to set up the project with computers.

Ninety Redbricks flats, a fifth of the total, are online and pay £3 a week to use their intranet and the Internet. There are no phone bills or hidden costs, and most use renovated computers bought from Luton-based Recycle-IT! and installed for around £100 each. The £3 covers the leased line to the Internet - £300 a month - and helps pay off the setting up costs.

The Redbricks story effectively began two years ago when Nigel Stewart, a director of an internet service provider, moved to the estate. He and a handful of IT-literate friends and local people worked out that, if they could find 30 subscribers, they could lease a 64Kb net connection and set up an intranet.

With £4,000 for two servers, but doing the cabling and other work themselves, they would need only £3 a week for each connection. So they did it.

They have since spun off a company which is selling the lessons they have learned to councils and neighbourhoods countrywide as a process of urban regeneration through information technology under community control.

'What we have proved is that any 30 people without capital, who agree to save £3 a week for 12 weeks, can go to a credit union and borrow enough capital to start up,' says Nigel. And if they keep paying £3 a week, at the end of two years they will have had free internet use and they will have cleared off their commitment to the credit union."

'It didn't work like that for us because we didn't have 30 people to start off with and we hadn't done it before, so I put some money in and we got some loans from a credit union to help people buy the computers, and we are developing a LETSystem [Local exchange trading system] and we played a few other games."

Those figures leave little room for error. Grants or a low-interest loan would make it easier to start this kind of project, but doing it the hard way has strengthened the community and allowed organic growth - meeting people's different needs and interests, says project manager Cae Gests.

Take-up is growing rapidly. Manchester Permaculture Group is making a city garden on a stretch of reclaimed road on the estate, bulk-buying organic vegetables and soon, it hopes, electricity. All these activities are developing faster through being online, says organiser Rob Squires. He finds the net saves him a lot of time and legwork, as does librarian John Rummery, secretary of the local tenants' association. He has used it to email everyone on the estate a questionnaire about pest infestation.

Several residents contribute to the project by installing cabling or helping to reclaim computers - something Joannie Carmichael has learned to do. She is also being trained to install computers and her two teenage daughters surf the net to help with their school work.

The intranet has a mentoring line and a 'shout' mechanism for sending messages to all users at the same time. People use it to contact neighbours instead of phoning, and it recently helped alert residents when someone was mugged.

There are plans to install cameras to create a neighbourhood watch, which is always on watch - while being, like the system as a whole, under residents' control.

But resident control has caused a few headaches too. Manchester Council's housing department objected to Redbricks' decision to run cabling through lofts and between blocks of flats. The solution has been to switch to radio communication - a mast on one of the roofs, installed this month, will allow subscribers to link without a physical connection. It will also boost the capacity of the scheme, allowing more people to join.

For Nick Cleary, the Redbricks intranet is even more valuable than her connection to the internet, which she uses in her studies for an English degree at Manchester Metropolitan University. 'I have lived on council estates all my life but this is the first time I have felt part of a community,' she says.