Reading the book was a genuine pleasure and a fully absorbing experience, not least due to Boughton’s engaging style and the well-structured approach which strikes the perfect balance between empirics, anecdotal evidence, and historical account. Throughout the journey from Victorian filth to Grenfell, I was struck by six key observations:
1. The paternalistic approach to organising society.
Despite noble origins, from the inception of council housing in Britain to the current prevailing neo-Victorian attitudes of what the working class need to do to improve their living conditions in the face of such things as economic stagnation, lack of significant government spending for the best part of half a century, a shrinking economy, 30 years of flat-lining wages, out-of-control house prices and lack of any regulation in the private rental market leading to high rents and poor quality, a top-down approach from the political establishment has pervaded. Often, without having done any background work to engage with those who will live in the homes to identify their real needs, even the most well-meaning ideological designs have back-fired spectacularly.
For example, the Garden City movement and New Towns of the 1950s were designed to give the working classes access to green spaces and reduced urban density which was considered to promise a healthier way of live. The work of Frederick Gibberd, the master planner of the new town Harlow, in Essex, was informed by the idea that “[…] English urbanism prefers segregation of home and work, which enjoys open-air exercise, which has an innate love of nature” (p.82). However, had Gibberd and other master planners and chief city architects consulted with the prospective housing tenants, they would have discovered that in the new two-storey dwellings with large green spaces between, the new inhabitants “instead of feeling themselves secure within an environment devoted to their convenience and pleasure, find themselves marooned in a desert of grass verges and concrete roadways.” (p.83).
Although today following the Localism Act 2011, Section 122 introduces a legal requirement to consult with local communities before submitting planning applications for specific developments, this comes with its own set of failings and inadequacies. Consultation is a totally different beast to co-design, and there are ways and means to dilute the consultation process. While introducing an act to include communities in decision-making, it falls way short of the mark in terms of designing cities to meet the real needs of communities, not developers or landowners.
2. Does it need to be so complicated?
The management of supply, use, and distribution of social housing is a complex undertaking regardless of parliamentary system, local context, or political ideology. Social housing programmes in the UK were as complex to manage as successful social housing programmes in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s, 1980s Vienna or the Million Project in Sweden of the 1965-74.
However, from the 1980s onwards the legal structure for managing social housing in the UK became far more complex than anything ever seen before elsewhere in Europe. For all the neoliberal ideology of “rolling back the state,” governance structures and creating clear lines of responsibility for specific matters became far more complex than that of the various state-managed institutions and bodies.
While the Right to Buy scheme was expanded in 1980, councils and local authorities faced harsh restrictions on their powers to build new social housing. It took only 3 years for this to have an impact, and between 1980 to 1983 the volume of social housing built in the UK had halved. Meanwhile, powers that previously belonged solely to local authorities to manage the pipeline of social housing as well as existing stock were transferred to a myriad of housing associations and Arms’ Length Management Organisations (ALMOs), backed up by private finance rather than state budget. This was codified in the 1988 Housing Act.
The introduction of new layers of governance and lack of uniformity across the country created a diffuse network and fragmented landscape. This system of complex interplay between state and private sector in a non-uniform way, often through incredibly dense networks, makes it almost impossible to discern interrelations between different actors.
Creating complexity in this way is a means to spread out accountability and makes it impossible to pinpoint blame for any failures on one specific actors. The Grenfell fiasco is a living example of how such a fragmented landscape can lead to tragedy without any real political consequences.
3. The public and private sphere and how space is conceptualised
The most striking element of social housing in Britain compared with the European mainland is how quickly urban planners, architects, city councillors and others with decision-making powers over housing jumped on the vision of the ideal dwelling as a private space secluded from others. Building vertically would create compact housing arrangements with greater possibility of using shared spaces and building communities and the potential for spaces of solidarity. Instead, however, British urban designers preferred cottage estates with one or two-storey houses or low-rise blocks, each with private gardens.
Whether this is a reaction to the horror and misery of the slums which were part and parcel of British industrial cities until the mass slum clearances of the 1930s remains to be seen. Ensuring that space is divided up into private sections comes with a price. The cottage estates and single-family semi-detached houses were unaffordable for many working-class families, and the sprawling nature of building dwellings in this way meant that quantities were limited due to spatial factors. Therefore, the more affluent working classes moved out to the suburbs, while the poorer remained in inner city areas creating a class-based social segregation.
4. The role of youth in shaping modern London.
The experimental and sociologically-minded period of re-building Britain in the mid 20th century was driven by proponents of an incredibly tender age, often recently graduated from design schools. From the perspective of someone aged 35 flailing around in a career that has not really started yet after a number of false starts and interludes of further education, this is a fascinating discovery. Today, even the greased wheels of nepotism and the most connected individual is still not trusted to do much more than make coffee and take charge of the proverbial photocopying until at least age 30. Countless internships, paid and unpaid, stints overseas getting “international experience,” and various post-graduate career development moves are part and parcel of those born in the 1980s onwards. While this may sound a development in the right direction, a meritocratic approach based on experience and “earning your stripes”, it should of course be heavily caveated. The playing field today is certainly not level: those with social and economic capital will advance up the career ladder further and quicker than those starting at the very bottom.
In 1960s Camden, the Whittington Estate was conceptualised and planned by Peter Tábori, at the time a student in his mid-twenties at Regent Street Polytechnic. The estate, which was his final-year project, was carefully designed to meet the needs of its inhabitants: play areas for children, pedestrian decks, areas to meet with neighbours, estate shopping centres. It was criticised at the time for being too ideological, which reflected not so much on the design of the estate itself but a social criticism of the estate as a concept (p.61).
In the London Borough of Camden of the 1960s a full third of the Labour council were under 40 years old (p 59). It also had a young team of urban planners and designers under Borough Architect Sydney Cook. One of his team, Neave Brown, was commissioned in 1969 to design the Alexandra Road Estate aged just 40 years old.
South of the river, the story was similar. The London Borough of Lambeth’s Chief Architect, Ted Hollamby, was just 40 when he was appointed Chief Architect of the London Borough of Hammersmith and a few years later, moved to the equivalent role in Lambeth. By his mid-30s, he had already delivered the Brandon Estate, once the tallest point in the capital (p. 155).
London Borough of Southwark’s Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich, was designed by Kate Macintosh in 1972, when she was just 26 years old (p.147). The imposing double-ziggurat style structure, following a few modifications throughout the years to improve safety measures according to various ideologies and zeitgeists, still stands today and is considered to be a fine structure when compared with other large-scale social housing built around the same time.
On the one hand, it could be easy to dismiss some of the less successful examples of mass social housing projects, poorly designed system-builds and failed urban design initiatives developed in the post-war period by young architects as examples of inexperience and the naivety of youth. At the same time, however, perhaps the youthfulness brought an ideological breath of fresh air in a time of rapid social change. The perspectives of middle-class, middle-aged Oxbridge educated, white, male architects and planners perhaps do not always reflect the needs of wider society. Does this sound familiar?
5. The role of progressive politics in shaping modern London.
There is (or was, I think it was shattered once and for all following the 2019 general election) a misconception in the UK that northern areas vote red and the south votes blue. This completely overlooks the role and legacy of radical politics and the labour movement in London. While it is assumed that Newcastle, or Liverpool, or Manchester will remain steadfastly Labour, London rarely comes to mind in the national imaginary as the country’s bastion of red. However successive general and local election results from Tower Hamlets, Camden, Islington, Lewisham, Newham and other inner London boroughs show a long line of unbroken red.
In the 1950s and 1960s, one could find card-carrying communists such as Ted Hollamby having decision-making authority in significant positions of power over the urban environment. This is unthinkable today: recall the viciousness with which Corbyn was treated by the media and his own party alike, and the purge of the left from the Labour party continues to advance under Starmer’s watch.
In 2021, unless you have the interests of capital at heart, it’s very difficult to get close to the levers of power. Boughton brings us a glimpse of the past to show that it was not always thus, and this brings a glimmer of hope for the future as well.
6. The human cost of gentrification.
The term gentrification, coined by Ruth Glass in her 1964 work London: Aspects of change is applied to the process of transformation of a poor neighbourhood in cities by the process of middle- and upper-middle income groups buying properties in such neighbourhoods and upgrading them.
Today, the term is no longer confined the realms of urban sociology and is widely used and understood across a broad spectrum. However, the modern usage has somewhat diluted the violence with which the gentrification (and its ugly sister regeneration) process takes place: it often conjures up images of independent eateries and craft beer micropubs in newly vibrant neighbourhoods that were once stagnant. It glosses over the displacement process in practical terms: unable to meet rising rents, families or elderly residents are often forced out from the place they call home, where they are part of networks that has often formed over years and even decades.
These connections and networks, the fragile social fabric that provide the building blocks of a community, are destroyed practically overnight by the gentrification process. Boughton points to the Hendon Waterside scheme in North London (p. 275), where secure council housing tenants from the West Hendon estate have been “decanted” to alternative tower blocks elsewhere. Neighbours and friends have been forcibly moved away from each other, to a new block of inferior quality to the tenants’ original homes. Leaseholders have been given compensation that does not match the cost of renting in the area in today’s rental rates. Many of the original inhabitants of the estate have simply moved away, worn out by the physical and emotional upheaval of the process.
A similar story is outlined in other cases all over London: Carpenter’s Estate in Newham, West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates in Hammersmith, the New Era Estate in Hoxton, and Northwold Estate in Hackney for example. While London is the site of conflict for most of the displacement processes, due to a combination of population growth and the value of land a property, other cities in the UK are not immune. Most recently, Manchester is in the throes of a massive property boom which has displaced thousands of the city’s poorest.
While these examples all have their own specific features and character, they all have one thing in common: tenants, once supported by the state, are now being aggressively pushed aside to create space for private companies to extract more rent and increase their capital. Through these case studies, Boughton illustrates clearly how the gentrification process, and the housing crisis more generally, is down to a political choice rather than an economic necessity. Final chapter brings us to Grenfell, and starkly brings together everything that has failed in the – hackneyed though this phrase is – neoliberal political project (I cringe now as I write this) in the UK over the past 30 years. The mass privatisation of national assets since the late 1970s onwards has ensured accountability and responsibilities are diffuse and intangible. Most chillingly has been the total absence of redistributed wealth and the clear focus on leveraging profit for a tiny minority over absolutely everything else, including – and especially, human lives.
Boughton shows us that good-quality housing as a social good was an obvious and rational pursuit at the dawn of the first council estate in 1900. Tracing the journey through a socialist-led national effort to raise the standard of living to today, where making humane and socially-oriented choices is no longer seen as a viable option by our increasingly flailing political system. A radical overhaul is once again required to solve the housing crisis in any meaningful way and this requires levelling the playing field in all aspects of society, not only housing.
Kinosthetica 