"Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.

We urgently need to rethink - politically, imaginatively, and theoretically - what I call 'slow violence': a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all."

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor - Rob Nixon

On August 7th 2007, a fire broke out at the Limebright Joinery on Marlborough Road in Maindee, Newport. Heat from the joinery's wood burner set alight combustible materials under the mezzanine floor.

The resulting fire spread damaging a total of 14 homes in the street. Six of the houses were demolished and another three were gutted by the blaze with the exterior structures were left standing.

The South Wales Fire and Rescue Group, who conducted an investigation into the fire, deemed that nothing could "reasonably" have been done to prevent it. The fire is now infamously remembered by residents as one of the worst in the city's history since the Second World War.

In 2009 a disagreement broke out between local residents and Newport City Council. The owners of the Limebright Joinery were not found to be directly responsible for the blaze. The council informed residents of Marlborough Road - many of whom did not have insurance - that they would be collectively charged in the region of £55,000 for clearance of the entire site.

Now five years on from the blaze, the site is still yet to be cleared.

Many residents resent the council over the state that part of the street is in. Some residents are threatening a boycott of council tax until the situation is resolved. They claim the gutted houses are used as a "drug den".

Barricaded only by temporary metal fencing, it is a great concern for residents with children who play amongst the derelict buildings. Only recently a second fire in the houses was extinguished after they were used by the homeless as a makeshift shelter.

Newport - and Maindee in particular - has a large working-class population and, as is shown by the case of Marlborough Road, they have been abandoned to their fate; disenfranchised and ignored. Their situation is specific, but by no means unique. There are communities in similar situations throughout the UK.

Areas like this that are left to deteriorate out of control start to reflect the attitudes of these communities, and through no fault of their own. As a result of "working-class" stereotypes, we expect these areas to be decrepit and so we choose to ignore them. Living in these environments provokes resentment and anger within communities to the point of residents lashing out.

The Marlborough Road fire and its aftermath have been out of the news since 2009, but problems on the street continue to progress and worsen.

This is "slow violence" as neglect.