IMAGINE the plight of 91-year-old widow Mrs Lynette Holden. If someone comes to visit her, she has to go down seven flights of stairs to let them in and then climb seven flights back up again.

At her age, she ought not be subjected to such a trial.

But does it not provide a small, but telling snapshot of what life can be like in the high-rise flats - the notorious tower blocks which, in some cases, are so unlettable that the council has given up and decided to knock them down?

But consider this: Mrs Holden has lived happily at her flat in Pendle House at Larkhill, Blackburn, for more than 33 years ago.

It is only in the past 12 months, she says, that things have begin to go downhill.

The security intercom to the front door is hardly ever working and sometimes the lifts are out of action - forcing her to make those tiring treks up and down so many stairs and preventing district nurses from getting in to see her.

But, while the council responds with a new intercom system - one, alas, beset by "teething problems" - and blames vandals for the problems with the lifts, do we not sense how the quality of life for good, decent tenants like Mrs Holden has been eroded not by ungovernable events or maintenance hiccoughs, but by the council's own attitude and policy to these properties? Unlike some other high-rises were the Larkhill Flats not generally occupied by a stable community of similar tenants - mainly older folk?

Has not the letting policy, admitting single young people, broken up that community, causing some tenants to move out and the other ones to suffer noise, crime and vandalism?

And have not the problems been added to - and maintenance suffered - by the removal of resident caretakers at the flats?

Thus, a short-sighted, cost-cutting policy has contributed to the run-down and begun to make Larkhill's flats, like others elsewhere, a high-rise sink estate where no-one wants to live.

But what of the council's duty to decent tenants like Mrs Holden - and the supposedly behave-or-you-are-out tough tenancy agreements it imposes on newcomers?

Or is it that, looking at offloading their council houses completely, they are no longer really interested - so that, in the tower blocks, once-pleasant life slides from grim to grimmer?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.