Block 47: Regeneration

The council decided to brighten up a shabby corner of their town and so painted the two tower blocks in block 47 in bright shades of yellow, orange, purple, green and blue.  Now they're once again fit for habitation, the flats have been rented out to key and low-paid workers (emergency services, medical staff, teachers, porters, cleaners, etc.) who otherwise couldn't afford to live so close to the centre of town.  As well as being renovated outside, the buildings have been fitted with the latest solar technology (you can see it on the left-hand building's roof) and the stairs for both buildings (the orange windows on the left-hand building and the purple windows on the right-hand building) have been fitted with sprung floor stairs to harness heel strike energy, which help keep running costs low.  The same technology has been built into all the floors in the building (including the floor in the dance/aerobics studio) and the exercise machines in the gym feed generated electricity back into the building's power supply.  The units on the ground floor are rented (at a minimal cost) to start-up businesses and part of their rental agreement states that the business must directly benefit the surrounding community to help further regenerate the area without pushing up house prices.  So far, there's an artist's studio (which runs after school clubs - their graffiti club is particularly popular), a cafe (they run cooking classes for the community as well as providing a free daily meal to customers of the local food bank) and a physiotherapist (she runs community fitness classes in the left-hand building's gym in addition to her physio clinic and the local grannies love her chair-based body popping classes).  The council have now bought the two buildings next door and plan to renovate them to the same standard.  Good luck to them, I say!  (The caretaker of the buildings has a work's van, painted in the same colours as the buildings she looks after.  Snazzy, don't you think?!)