Elizabeth Pascoe, a granny in her sixties with a fondness for pink cardigans, is an unlikely heroine, but she is one to me. For when Liverpool city council and a government agency told her, four years ago, that they wanted to compulsorily purchase and demolish her fine Victorian home in the Edge Lane area for no particularly good reason, Ms Pascoe chose to fight.
Sitting in her cardigan, surrounded by piles of paper, Elizabeth fought two public inquiries and two high court actions against compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), which are the battering ram of the Pathfinder regeneration schemes, the 1960s-style urban clearances reinvented by John Prescott. These still, astonishingly, grind on all over the Midlands and the North, consuming billions of public money.
Elizabeth Pascoe won a famous victory in 2006, when she proved that Liverpool council, and Mr Prescott, had acted illegally and gone beyond their statutory powers in sanctioning the acquisition and demolition of 370 Edwardian and Victorian properties, including hers, in the Edge Lane West area.
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