PAM Donnellan has a personal interest in seeing Boscombe get better.

The £125,000-a-year chief executive of Bournemouth council lives in the area seen as the drugs capital of Dorset.

“I like an urban environment. I like the edge you get,” said Mrs Donnellan, who lived in London for decades.

She once worked in social services at Haringey council. So it is perhaps not surprising that she has never felt unsafe in Boscombe.

There has been major spending in the area but its reputation remains.

Mrs Donnellan agreed to walk the area with the Daily Echo and talk about how progress is going.

She was partly attracted to Boscombe by the number of younger people.

Her flat is near Sainsburys, she shops locally and eats at restaurants like Urban Beach and Marco Polo.

She said visiting friends have noticed improvements to public spaces and a decline in beggars since she moved down in 2002.

“Boscombe Chine gardens are just excellent. You see them full of youngsters playing football,” she said.

“They would have been on the streets, probably causing trouble.”

The Boscombe Neighbourhood Management team spent £3.4 million on Boscombe over its seven-year lifetime.

But Mrs Donnellan said: “We don’t have the sort of money and neither can we access the sort of government funding which could enable an absolutely major transformation.

“It’s wrong to think there’s always money around that we can get hold of.

“We are pretty good at getting hold of everything we possibly can.”

She acknowledged the precinct could have a “slightly sinister” feeling at night as we turned into Roumelia Lane, which epitomises the two-sided nature of Boscombe. The council has helped private investors build smart new offices and flats. And there is a charming Italian cafe run by the even more charming Rosa.

But it was here that MP Tobias Ellwood was allegedly assaulted and a nightclubber suffered a near fatal stab wound to the head.

The lane is having CCTV installed and a new police sub-office. Mrs Donnellan said: “We should not allow certain streets to become no-go areas where people don’t feel comfortable.”

Some traders think the council is not terribly helpful, citing its response to the closure of the Ashley Road railway bridge by Network Rail as an example.

But she thinks the shops are doing better than people expected in the recession.

She added: “There’s a lot of people who have traded here for many years who have seen the changes and are behind what we are doing.”

She said the new surf reef was giving Boscombe a “unique selling point”, supporting attempts to encourage young people to raise families in the area.

Twenty-five per cent of the area’s population changes every two years and 50 per cent of people live in private rentals.

Winning grant money for affordable housing and attracting people committed to raising families would give Boscombe greater stability.

We walked up Walpole Road, towards the spot where student Luke Campbell was found dead from stab wounds in 2008.

She said the police were working hard to head off any London-style gang culture developing; and quickly added that she did not believe that kind of problem existed here.

Boscombe’s biggest detractors over crime are residents of other areas.

The council is working with Bournemouth University to study better ways of marketing the area.

And it hopes to tap into the commercial potential of the area’s artistic community and make it a “cultural hub”.

That is the kind of ambitious talk that sounds reasonable to many residents but can be dismissed as unrealistic and even ridiculous by some critics.

Mrs Donnellan’s London experiences make her think some people get the problems out of proportion.

She said: “I do sometimes think people’s perspectives get a bit distorted. I am tempted to ask: What are you comparing us to?

“Some people need to be a bit more realistic.

“If you live and work in an urban area, sometimes you have got to think a bit about safety.”