Would these few crazy estates about Craigavon be considered the exception rather than the norm for towns about that area ?
Portadown always seemed to get the bad publicity during the troubles. Do the towns of Portadown, Craigavon and Lurgan have their own identity or are they linked as the one urban area ?
They all have their own identity. The plan in the 60s when Craigavon was built was to develop the space between Lurgan and Portadown and link the whole lot up to form a new city. They built half of what was planned, and half of what they built was demolished. Some of my earliest memories are of being driven through Craigavon in the late 70s after the big population increase failed to show up. Acre after acre of derelict housing estates, tiles falling off the roofs, any window that wasn't boarded up was smashed, graffiti everywhere. It was like Beiruit.
It had a lot of other problems too, like radical new ideas about housing being implemented on a large scale without proper testing. There was an estate called Ridgeway (now long since demolished) where the walls might as well have been made of cardboard, they reckon you could hear the conversation next door as if it were in your own living room.
The bit about segregated bike/pedestrian paths was nice in theory and it looks great on a summer's day, but in reality it's hard to beat a proper street where there's plenty of people about to keep an eye on things. You wouldn't want to go down some of them bike paths late at night, you'd be taking your life in your hands.
