The citizens of Hespeler are proud of their community’s history and architectural heritage.
That is evident from the many historical plaques and monuments erected throughout the village, but local author and historian Paul Langan is concerned that those plaques may be all that’s left of the village’s heritage buildings if development plans proceed unchecked.
“It’s grown a lot and in the last couple years, there has been a lot of emphasis on more growth,” said Langan. “The Ford Government has weakened the environmental and heritage legislation so, basically growth can happen unrestrained and that leads to problems.”
Langan has lived in Hespeler since 1996 and has written several books on the history of Cambridge.
His 130-year-old home on Queen Street backs onto the Speed River and is steps away from some of the village’s oldest and most historically significant buildings.
“What caused me to get out of neutral from just writing history books, is we had a heritage block, 2 to 10 Queen Street West (the Glick Block), with over a hundred years of history and it got torn down,” he said. “Nobody, not the citizens, the committees that are supposed to review heritage at City Hall, the advocacy group that is supposed to protect or fight for it, certainly our city councillors, nobody went to bat. It was gone like that.”
Langan describes the present “Hespeler-sauga” approach to growth as counter-intuitive if the end goal is to provide affordable housing and attract new residents to the village.
“They are putting up all these expensive condos and apartments,” he said. “People are moving here for that small town feeling and they are tearing down the small town. So, that was kind of a wake-up call that if a person wants to sell their property, wants to wipe out a heritage building, there is nothing to stop it.”
Langan is calling for more community involvement in development decisions and has written a booklet, Hespeler; A sustainable community moving forward, detailing his concerns and ideas for mobilizing local groups to protect what’s left of Hespeler’s architectural heritage.
“That is just one aspect of the book, but we have to look at heritage preservation, reuse of heritage buildings and not a narrow-minded approach,” he said. “It’s always cheaper to put up a drywall building than to preserve a heritage building so, the excuse that it costs more is true. Crap costs less.”
Langan’s entry into social activism is relatively new but he has been socially active in the community for decades.
“I have been in minor sports for over 20 years, and I was the founder of the volleyball club in town,” he said. “We went from eight kids to 1,000. The second largest youth organization in Cambridge. So, I have been around in the community in the grassroots for a long time.”
He said demand for community facilities is growing with each new resident, but the village doesn’t even have the infrastructure to serve the present population.
“We have the same community centre when we had 4,000 people as we have for 20,000 people,” he said. “If we have no physical infrastructure for our community, all ages, youth to seniors, then we’re in trouble because we are sitting at home on our computers complaining.”
Langan has scheduled a townhall-style meeting April 2 at the Hespeler Legion for concerned community members to meet and mobilize their efforts. He is offering a free copy of his booklet to the first 40 people that register and attend the meeting.
“The book focuses on all these non-profits that are doing good work in the community that need help because they exist based on volunteers,” he said. “So, it starts off, ‘Look at all the good things we’re doing. We need help.’ Then we ask for suggestions for improvement. Certainly, heritage preservation is one.”
Langan stresses that this type of community mobilization is not a novel idea.
“A subtitle to this in my mind is ‘Yes We Can',” he said. “I give examples for my suggestions of other places in Canada where they’ve done it. So, it’s not like I’m making this stuff up. No, it’s been done before.”
Langan hopes to tap into the village pride Hespeler is known for and inject some good old fashion community spirit and positivity into the process.
“It is so easy to just be negative and I’ve been on that bandwagon,” he said. “The whole thing about the booklet is, it’s positive. Here are real positive solutions, instead of complaining. That’s what I feel good about. Here are the good things we’re doing, but here’s how it could be better.”
To learn more about Langan's efforts to preserve local history vist: http://paullangan.com
