Who cares if it’s art? The Granby Triangle's endorsement by the Turner Prize is still priceless

It seems to me as if Unesco has come along and labelled the area a World Heritage Site

On a gloriously hot day in the summer of 1989, I sat with my best friend on her bedroom windowsill, our legs dangling in the sun, listening to the reggae music in the street below. The area was full of people gossiping, singing, debating, shopping. The phrase “thriving community” is a cliché but this community was just that. Eight years earlier, the same streets were the scene of the Toxteth riots. When I went back to my friend’s childhood home for an article I was writing on the 2010 election, there were rows of boarded-up houses, earmarked for demolition. Yesterday, these streets won the Turner Prize.

Who cares whether or not the work of Assemble, the prize-winning collective of architects who are transforming the Granby Triangle in Liverpool, is art? Winning the Turner Prize is a seal of approval for an area that was – variously – condemned, written off, ignored and then packaged up by national and local government to be sold off to developers. If it wasn’t for the resilience of stalwart local residents who refused to move, the Granby Triangle – or Granby Four Streets as it is known under Assemble’s work – would be a different, soulless place. The £25,000 prize money will make a huge difference to Assemble’s work. But the victory seems to me as if Unesco has come along to this patch of Liverpool and labelled it a World Heritage Site, and that is priceless.

It is priceless to long-standing Granby residents like Ismail Dualeh, whom I interviewed in 2010. I don’t know whether he still lives there, but I hope he is able to share the enjoyment of this Turner Prize victory. At the time, the 74-year-old – who had lived there since coming to Britain from Somalia in 1968 – summed up the paradox of living in the Granby Triangle: “Once the anarchy [of the riots] went away, it was beautiful around here. On a beautiful day like today, I wake up to the sun coming through the windows. But then I smell the rats from the homes across the street.”

There were rats because in houses where residents had moved out, the council just left them empty. Then, in a gargantuan act of folly by the last Labour government, John Prescott introduced the Pathfinder scheme in 2002, through which inner city areas like Granby would be “redeveloped”. In this context the term “redevelopment” is monstrously misleading, because the plan in Toxteth was to demolish these handsome Victorian homes, with large bay windows that let the sun and reggae music stream in, and replace them with fewer, smaller houses with even smaller windows – and no wide doorsteps where you could stop a while to chat. Pathfinder undermined the concept of “home”: its plans involved mere “units”.

Assemble’s victory is important because it recognises that excellent urban redevelopment does not always have to come from the top-down, from the state or private property firms, but from the community up. This is not an argument about left versus right, but rather an example of where the state does more harm than good. The Granby Triangle, and more widely Toxteth, was mistreated by the state over three decades: in the 1980s, when the Thatcher government regarded it as the epicentre of evil after the riots; in the 1990s, when the local council ignored it and spent Whitehall money on regenerating the city centre of Liverpool, while failing to fix the streetlights in Granby; and in the 2000s, when the Blair government tried to sell it off. This makes the achievement of Assemble, along with the indefatigability of local residents, all the more remarkable.

It is also important because it places a premium on art for social good. Past Turner winners have been controversial, but they have also been money-spinners for artist and collector. Now real people, and wider society, get a dividend from this transaction, because when Assemble sell one of their terracotta lampshades or other pieces of art, the money goes back into the project.

This government can go on all it likes about the “Northern Powerhouse” or the “Midlands Engine” – macro schemes that are big on rhetoric but dubious on delivery. Often it is at community level – a handful of streets – where society is strongest and most resilient. This Turner Prize victory is unlikely to halt the pace of “gentrification” in urban areas of other cities, particularly London, where communities are being replaced by basement kitchens and loft extensions. But it is a victory for the most fundamental thing: home.