What would Pigeon Percy think of our changing city?

HERE’S a thought. Next time you’re about to tell someone that Derby isn’t what it used to be, consider this: for all the design atrocities you might think have been perpetrated by more recent planners – it could have been a whole lot worse.
Imagine it. The entire city centre demolished, to be replaced by an industrial area. Almost every building from The Spot to Derby Cathedral razed to the ground to make way for a 150ft-wide road lined by seven-storey blocks. Elevated roadways along the entire length of Albert Street, over part of Victoria Street and into Green Lane, and over East Street and St Peter’s Churchyard.
Horrible thought, isn’t it? But, at various times in Derby’s modern story, any of these might have come about.
The idea to flatten the old town centre and replace shops and houses with industrial units was floated just after the First World War.
It was a vision of how Derby might look after the Second World War that had Alderman Will Raynes telling the Evening Telegraph in 1942: “I would like to stand on The Spot and, looking down St Peter’s Street, get a clear and unimpeded view of the beautiful tower of the Cathedral.”
And it’s as recently as 1963 that Derby’s councillors considered a plan to criss-cross the town centre with elevated roads and a figure-eight inner ring road. Oh, and build some high-rise council flats on The Spot.
So is it time to cut the current planners some slack? OK, probably not. But, as I said, it could have been a lot worse.
In the meantime, my mention, a couple of weeks ago, of the perpetually drunk and disorderly James McCormick prompted Alan Hitchcock of Chaddesden to recall the day that well-known magistrates’ clerk, Arthur Exton, suggested to McCormick that, considering the amount of money he had paid in fines, had he stayed reasonably sober, then the Irishman could probably have bought his own pub.
Several readers mentioned Pigeon Percy as a worthy inclusion in my pantheon of well-known local characters. Of course, Pigeon Percy – so called because he fed Derby’s feral pigeons – wasn’t a drunk. He just shuffled along all day, with a nub end quivering on his bottom lip.
He was almost part of the street furniture, but I never heard him speak one word. However, the late Stan Tacey, who worked at Bemrose’s printers and was, for many years, scorer to Derbyshire County Cricket Club, once told me how Percy was sitting on his own front doorstep one fine summer’s day, watching workmen file back into a nearby factory after their dinner break.
“Look at that silly lot,” he told Stan, “and they reckon I’m barmy.”
Percy would often keep Florrie Birtles company. Florrie was an Evening Telegraph newspaper seller whose pitch was the steps of the Boots building on the corner of St Peter’s Street and East Street.
In those days, there were no little red boxes to protect sellers from the worst of Derby’s weather, so Florrie was often absent, having nipped across the road to the Green Man in St Peter’s Churchyard. The morose Percy was left to oversee a kind of honour system. whereby people were expected to leave the few coppers for their newspaper inside her paper-bag.
Come to think of it, Florrie was just as likely to be in the pub on a warm summer’s day, so the weather probably didn’t have much to do with it.
I wonder what she and Percy would make of Derby today. They’d certainly agree that it isn’t what it used to be. But they might reflect that it could have been worse.