Raffles or the Raffles Estate is a suburb of Carlisle, Cumbria, United Kingdom. The estate consists mainly of council built and Housing association properties, and in 1994 had a population of 5,800. Nearby areas include Belle Vue, Newtown, Sandsfield Park and Morton West.
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Raffles was built during the 1920s and 1930s and was highly sought after as a place to live by council tenants of the time.[1] However, by 1994 things had changed. A report from April 1994 which appeared in The Independent on Sunday condemned the estate as a no-go area with a high level of crime. One resident was reported to have said "If you've got a problem in Raffles, get a shotgun".[2]
By the first decade of the 21st Century the once notorious housing estate had undergone significant redevelopment and modernisation.[3] The £9million redevelopment plan got underway in 2004 and saw many of the original council properties demolished and replaced with new housing stock. This was completed in three stages,[4] the last building phase being finished in 2009.
Raffles is still not without its problems, however. In 2010 Carlisle Police recovered a large haul of heroin from a house on the estate, described as one of the largest to be found in the area in recent years.[5]
Helen Grant, the current MP for Maidstone and The Weald and the Conservative Party's first black female MP, grew up in Orton Road on the estate.[6] She said in a 2008 interview with the Daily Mail that as the only black resident of the estate she was the victim of racist bullying.[7] However, in a 2010 interview she spoke fondly of her childhood, and the house in which she grew up. "I had happy memories in that house and it gave me a good start in life... There was deprivation around, there was certainly need, there was some domestic violence and there were some fights. But my memory of the square where we lived is that there was pride in people."[5]