Category: housing

TOWER BLOCKS UK EDITION

Shieldfield, Newcastle, 2022 [Author’s own]

On more than one occasion, friends visiting or living in the UK from elsewhere have asked one of two (or, both) questions:

why do so few people in British cities live in apartments?

and:

why do British apartment blocks look so dystopian?

The first question is answered by the second, but when asked I struggled to give a meaningful explanation. This led me to investigate why exactly have architects and planners in Britain failed to provide comfortable, pleasant, and practical solutions to city living.

In the UK, there seems to be a real aversion to dense city living which leads to even relatively inner-city areas consisting of individual semi-detached and terraced houses, often with private gardens. In London, for example, by the outer fringes of Zone 2 (for context, the common reference point for Londoners is the London transport system, where concentric circles form six zones with Zone 1 being the centre) the streets already start to take on a suburban-esque feel. This spatial layout is normally reserved for commuter towns and outer suburbs in other European cities, not inner areas still within reasonable walkable distance to the centres of power.

In smaller British cities, the suburbanification happens much sooner. The only notable exception is perhaps Edinburgh, which is arguably the most European of British cities in terms of spatial patterns and social organisation. Very few British cities are organised in the doughnut-shape so ubiquitous (probably to the point of being near-universal) in major cities at least in Europe: the richest and nicest flats are in the city centre and are distinctly the preserve of the bourgeoisie, and the further you get from the dead centre (and presumably then, the cheaper the land becomes), the housing solutions become increasingly shabby. Only by the time you get to the outermost zones, or banlieues (hello Paris!), often you start to hit the problems that inner-city areas in the UK face.

In the UK (the pattern of which the US seems to follow), more often than not the trend is reversed. The outer areas are often where the bourgeoise lurk in their private houses with their own gardens, big driveways, seclusion, and cleaner air away from the dirt and the dangers of the inner city. Inner city areas tend to be either largely uninhabited (as in my city), full of empty properties that must be amassing capital for somebody, somewhere, or full of dystopian-looking council estates. Nowadays, the inner-city area in most provincial British cities has been used to house students in purpose-built new build (cheaply constructed, expensive to rent but student loans cover that off) after a speculative building boom and studentification in the last decade or so that brings with it its own problems.

Edinburgh Old Town, though, is full of attractive city-centre tenements that house the well-to-do. Meanwhile, the outskirts of Edinburgh are unlikely to attract the hordes that come to the UNESCO World Heritage City from all around the world each year: Cannot see them wanting to hang out in Niddrie for example, and neither Craigmillar nor Oxgangs.

Spatially speaking, then, the vast majority of cities in the UK are already radically different from mainland European counterparts. The reasons for this probably deserve a separate analysis of their own and derive from a complex set of historical factors related to our industrial and economic heritage, political organisation, and socio-cultural norms.

Spatial factors notwithstanding, this still does not answer the question as to why our tower blocks are so uninviting.

Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Tower block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Glendinning & Muthesius, 1994

To delve deeper into the question, I picked up the dense and richly illustrated compendium of the history of post-war public housing in the four nations that constitute the UK. Miles Glendinning and Muthesius, academics and architectural historians anchored at the University of Edinburgh produced this detailed guide in 1994 covering technical design, policy factors (each nation has its own political traditions, cultural norms and social specificities leading to slight-to-moderate variations in national policies), and history.

The key conclusion from the book is that the post-war modern public housing building project in the UK was an impressive project, with the building boom starting in the 1950s, peaking in the 1960s (famously, the Conservative Minister for Housing in 1963 laid out a 10-year plan for mass council house building in the UK, absolutely unthinkable in today’s imaginary) and tapering off in the 1970s before Thatcher came to power and began her radical assault on the state (this is covered in more detail in my entry on Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton). However, what started off as a grand national project to adequately house the population after the Second World War soon descended into the murky world of local politics, private interest, and sheer profiteering.

The speed with which the housing boom took hold led to inferior quality control, which Adam Curtis’ 1984 documentary Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster shines a light on in a series of interviews with major actors in the housing boom such as Cleeve Barr and Tom Akroyd. Tower blocks in the UK have also suffered from a poor reputation in terms of safety: The Ronan Point disaster where a 22-storey block collapsed in Canning Town, East London in 1968 only 2 months after it opened, killing four people, and injuring 17 in a gas explosion. This was due to poor construction and faulty design and led to the removal of gas from high-rise buildings. As Curtis illustrates, however, this actually made things worse: rising costs of energy required to fuel the new electrical appliances fitted in council homes in the wake of Ronan Point led to people using their own makeshift solutions using gas cannisters, which obviously posed a significant danger to people living in the blocks. More recently, the fire in Lakanal House in Southwark, South London in 2009 led to six deaths and upwards of 20 injured. The cause was officially down to a faulty television set, but the exterior cladding in the tower block caught fire and spread rapidly through a dozen flats, trapping residents in their buildings. The only escape route, a central stairwell, filled with smoke making it difficult for people to escape.

Most recently, the Grenfell Tower tragedy in June 2017 killed seventy-two people and its charred remains are still there today, a mass tombstone on the West London skyline. The exterior cladding went up in flames in a matter of minutes, and the enquiry is still ongoing. Nothing has been officially confirmed as yet, but the role of government in securing procurement of this type of cladding for tower blocks across the country is the question that must be answered.

Understandably, since these disasters people in the UK have low confidence in the safety of tower blocks and this has not exactly contributed to a positive view of tower blocks. However, safety concerns are just one factor in determining why the UK has so badly executed a move to dense city living. Following comparisons with cities elsewhere in the world, and a closer look at the Tower Block project in the UK, here is what I think are the main contributing factors:

1. “An Englishman’s home is his castle”: Cultural preferences for private over public
The notion of collective and the suspicion with which anything of public value is treated in this country runs unbelievably deep. There is such a deeply held belief that public space is something to be avoided and that sharing with others is bad that I am sure paved the way to an easy roll-over into the shitty mass privatisation of public goods and the death knell of “gas and water” socialism in the Thatcher years.

We credit Thatcher with too much and she is an easy target; scratching more deeply under the surface of this wretched country and it seems that many of Thatcher’s beliefs were already alive and well. She was successful at capturing them and leaning into them, I suppose.

But that is the most depressing thing: I am increasingly finding all the things I despise about this country run millennia deep. I cannot see the way to a better and fairer future. Only the opposite – I see the signs of increased gaping inequality in a country that’s already far more unequal than most of the usual European comparators (with which we are increasingly lagging behind on pretty much all social and economic counts to the point that I’m not so sure we can treat Germany, Netherlands, France etc as a comparator anymore).

But I digress. Ruth Glass wrote in the 1960s in her collection of essays “Cliches of Urban Doom” about the Merrie England dream – the pervasive desire to live in a pastoral, all-English, quaint village community replete with thatched roof houses and a village green.

This is, of course, not a realistic depiction of 21st or even 20th century Britain, but it seems to stick in the national imaginary. The ideal is to live in a cottage of one’s own, where you can shut the front door, lock the garden gate, and keep the prying eyes of neighbours at bay. Living in an apartment, nose-to-nose with neighbours above, below, opposite, and to each side is obviously not in line with that dream. It would be far to difficult to avoid other people. Conversely, though, I introduced my Italian partner to the concept of “curtain twitching,” which to me is even more quintessentially British than the Merrie England ideal described above.

He laughed and pointed out that it is highly strange that in a country so obsessed with privacy people are damn nosy and status obsessed. He noted that in Italy, people are used to living cheek-by-jowl with neighbours, but nobody really gives two hoots about what anyone else is up to. I suppose, keeping everything in the open means that there is nothing really to hide. In contrast, British homes, with their tall hedges, front gardens and thick curtains are shrouded in mystery.

Garden City Movement of Ebenezer Howard, is a work in utopian thinking draws from the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s thinking. Howard is keen to emphasis his not socialist but not “individualist” slant – a true Fabian in the making (something I have strong opinons about but that’s for another time) – or a third way / mixed economy supporter before his time. From this standpoint he supports keeping workers apart against threat of Bolshevism. More on that later.

In 2013, Daily Mail ran an article called “Bring Back Bungalows.” A general rule I follow in life is that if the Daily Mail endorses it then “it” must be wrong. And if anything would be a mouthpiece for the Merrie England ideal, it would be the Daily Mail. I think that confirms that the paranoia of letting city-dwellers live close together might lead to revolution is still, over a century after the Bolsheviks, a subconscious preoccupation of the England ruling class.

2. Poor planning

In many UK cities, the usual skyline is overwhelming low-rise interrupted only by standalone 15-storey plus tower blocks dotted at random. This has quite a jarring effect, and the tower blocks stand out like a sore thumb.

From a spatial point of view, this is the result of a combination of land use policies and practical considerations related to the quality of the land. In Tower Blocks, Glendinning and Muthesius highlight the large degree of autonomy local councils enjoyed in planning and building in the 1960s. While the national guidelines encouraged an increased densification, likely conceived with London in the forefront of their minds, some councils such as Leeds and Newcastle preferred to expand their urban core. In clearing out the riverside slums around the riverside in Newcastle, for example, the council under T. Dan Smith’s guide developed land further out from the city, particularly around former industrial sites in the East and West of the city.

This led to the construction of tower blocks on cleared brownfield sites, previously used for mining. As such, the structural property of the land is rather poor. Much of the land in the North East mining country, for example, is like Swiss cheese. I live right next to one of these T. Dan Smith’s tower blocks and looking out of my living room window I can see that each house is my street is at a slightly different level, creating a somewhat Tim Burton-esque vibe. Subsidence is a way of life here. At the end of the street a 20-storey tower block looms over us, on a former mine shaft. The tower blocks were built on any spot that was deemed sufficiently structurally sounds, which leads to a sporadic landscape.

These one-off tower blocks look quite different to the rows of squat tower blocks that tend to be grouped together, among more medium-sized (4-6 storey) buildings in other European cities. This gives a more gradual skyline, as opposed to the contrasting scale of a single 20-storey block erupting from a sea of 2-storey homes.

3. Political stigmatism and the collective imaginary

The lack of continuity between the tower blocks and their surrounding areas did create fertile conditions for those up to no good to thrive. Rather than landscaping the areas around the tower blocks, the 1950s-1970s tower blocks are usually surrounded by concrete. In addition, many of the visionary architects of the time had these ideas of “playful” passages, walkways in the sky, nooks, and crannies for people to walk around (all concrete, of course), and concrete common areas to sit outside. I’m sure these were designed with the aim of creating a pleasant environment for tower block dwellers, who had no access to their own outside space, but the effect is really quite the opposite.

Instead of vibrant, lively places they became convenient locations for dodgy dealings, with their hidden corners and networks of alleyways, underpasses, and passages.

The situation was made so much worse by Thatcher’s assault on the social housing sector and mass sell-off of council blocks, which led to a sort of social engineering and negative feedback loop. Oscar Newman’s defensible space theory also had a disproportionate and unfounded influence on housing theory in the UK from the 1970s onwards. Newman’s theory, focused on the now-demolished Prutt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, posits that the more private a space is, the more control and influence the resident has over it. He notes that where space is collective, since it belongs to no specific individual then it is likely to attract criminal behaviour. This completely flies in the face of the Greek and Roman architectural theories that prized common space (Agora and the Forum, really the forerunner in some respects of the post-renaissance Italian piazza) and the opportunity for city dwellers to intermingle in neutral territory. Defensible space draws on the most Anglo-centric phobia of the collective, which is seen as suspicious and dangerous as people simply cannot be trusted to look after what is not directly theirs.

Following this, housing in the Anglo world aims to physically defend itself from outsiders and plays into fear of the unknown. Even today, the Secured by Design in the UK is a police initiative that aims to improve the security of buildings by fitting them with surveillance devices such as CCTV systems and bars over windows. This has led to some highly unwelcoming and quite frankly intimidating architecture. Anna Minton, author of Ground Control, described it as “oppressive,” and I certainly tend to agree.

4. Value engineering

Vitruvius, the Roman architect, and engineer who wrote De Architectura (the collection of ten books on architecture written in 1st century BC), notes in Book I that no expense should be spared on materials required for building, especially not public buildings. Fast forward a couple of millennia, and we see that for all the current government’s talk about one of the three Vitruvian principles, Venustas (beauty) even enshrining it in the latest raft of planning reforms (see Building Better, Building Beautiful bluuurk), they conveniently forgot the point old V repeatedly hammered home about not being cheap and skimping on quality.

This is not just our current government, of course, but cheapness and cost-saving (for the masses that is, of course profit for the few is the mantra of the day) took first place over utility quality, comfort, and even safety long ago. Glendinning and Muthesius’ Tower Block tome offers some insight into the world of value engineering, and why it leads to mediocre quality. Essentially, value engineering means that if a cheaper alternative is available to a solution, then the cheapest one must be procured.

Looking at how the Tower Blocks of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even more so, the new builds of the 1990s and early 21st century one can really see value engineering at work. Certainly, the Venustas bit was lost here as well. Adam Curtis’ documentary, available on YouTube in its full glory, The Great British Housing Disaster, certainly gives an illustration of what cost cutting and shoddy workmanship leads to. And of course there were also tragic consequences, not only Grenfell (cheap cladding and surely corruption to an as-yet unknown quality in government procurement processes), but also Ronan Point, the tower block in East London that collapsed in 1968 a mere two months after it opened and also Lakanal House, again in London in 2009 which caught fire and it was shown that the fire escape routes were simply a long way short of sufficient.

5. Anti-urbanism and prioritisation of fast and private mobility

The latter is not unique to the UK, of course, but the instinctively anti-urban sentiment seems to run deeper here than elsewhere (see point 1). The UK was last modernised really in the 1950s and 1960s, after much of the industrial cities were flattened during WWII. Reconstruction coincided with the rise of the private car, and our cities are certainly engineered in an extremely car-centric way. Coventry, which was heavily bombed, is perhaps the most shocking example of this I have seen. Busy arterial roads cut through inner city areas, making it exceedingly difficult to get around by foot.

A society heavily reliant on private mobility and where public transport has been heavily stigmatised and heavily cut back in recent decades, making it costly, disjointed, and inconvenient (Thatcher famously said that anyone on a bus over aged 25 is a failure), doesn’t lend itself well to housing that has little to no private car facilities, as many of the mid-century tower blocks do. Coupled with a cultural preference for private space and an own garden, individual houses preferably with a drive or a private garage attached are much desired. Car parking solutions are indeed a factor when people here seek to buy their own home.

6. Lack of private outdoor space

One thing that the UK severely misunderstands is the concept of the balcony. Where private homes and private gardens are secured, I suppose this has the impact of downgrading any other solutions of private space in more collective living arrangements. Tower blocks in the UK rarely have balconies available for residents’ use, and even new builds tend to use the misleadingly named “Juliet balconies” (aka bars over the windows to stop people jumping out, I think, I cannot see any other function they might serve). As a result, tower block living is deemed wholly undesirable as there is no individual access to outside space.

Balconies fulfil a much greater role in Italy, France, Spain, and other countries particularly in the South of Europe. This alone probably warrants a separate entry in its own right.

8. Scale

Scale in the UK is strange. Until recently, even London had a relatively low skyline compared to cities of a comparable size elsewhere in the world. Still today most provincial cities consist largely of low-rise buildings, punctuated discordantly by enormous tower blocks. Scale is important, and it is underrated. Too tall, and without the right frames of reference, then it is out of whack with surroundings and creates a hostile, dystopic atmosphere.

In the film the Human Scale, Jan Gehl outlines how scale can be achieved to balance the need for dense living with a comfortable and welcoming city-feel. Around eight storeys is the perfect dimension for the human brain, as long as the buildings are anchored to street-level somehow. This can be achieved by adding trees, or fitting ground floors with balconies or canopies covering shop fronts and cafes. It is something that the average Brit is eager to romanticise about large European cities, and indeed many mainland European cities do achieve the balance of dense and cosy. Here, with a suspicion of public space and no traditional street culture to speak of (beyond booze-fuelled mania, but that is a different story), it is something distinctly lacking in British cities.

Our low-rise cities coupled with inhumanly scaled buildings definitely contribute to a sterile and unforgiving street environment, even more marked in cities that have recently undergone a vertical building boom such as Manchester, London, and Birmingham. Rather than a sense of convivial street life, the overwhelming feeling is that of the ever-increasing blood-sucking grip of the financial sector is never far away.

9. Lack of maintenance

The individual flats inside the tower blocks (at least the ones I have seen) tend to be quite roomy on average, certainly bigger than the standard new builds aimed at working or middle-classes. Indeed, in the 1950s-1960s much thought was put into spatial standards and how much space residents would need to go about their day-to-day in their dwellings. Local council housing teams tended to employ sociologists who would make calculations based on family size, demographics, and various other factors and ended up with a generous square metreage by today’s standards. When families first moved into the new tower blocks from their cramped, overcrowded inner city terraces and slum areas, they were surely quite taken by the relatively high standard of dwelling they had newly acquired.

However, a cursory glance today shows that not much in the way of modernisation has really taken place since the 1960s. Lift shafts are often in a poor state, interior décor has barely been touched apart from perhaps a new lick of paint every now and again, and broken windows, intercom systems, and doors seem to be a relatively standard feature of the old tower blocks.

Surely if maintenance cycles had been rolled out on the regular and the flats were modernised incrementally and equipped with modern technology as it evolved, they’d be much better places to live. But no, most of them still seem to be stuck in the 1960s and after more than half a century of wear and tear that hardly leads to a desirable place to live.

10. … Perhaps they are back in vogue?

That said, apartment living – as opposed to living in a “block of flats,” carefully distinguished by property developer marketing-speak, seems to be making a comeback. Luxury apartments (a far cry in aesthetic from the classic “block of flats” but I would argue that quality of the new ones has been severely compromised comparing like-for-like) are cropping up in waterfront areas and former industrial districts across this highly financialised country, largely populated by young, middle-class professionals. This is borne partially out of necessity but also logic of the market, which in this country certainly leaves no stone unturned when it comes to opportunities to extract profit. That, however, is an entry for another day.

Spatial Planning in England: Act I

The modern planning system in England is rooted in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act This established two important elements:

(i). a legal framework for development, where land ownership alone was not the sole condition required for development and planning permission needed to be sought and certain criteria met; and

(ii) institutional re-structuring to grant county and borough councils ownership of planning processes, based on local development plans aligned to a national strategic planning framework.

From its progressive roots, the English planning system since the late 1970s has undergone a significant paradigm shift. The state has taken an increasingly diminished role, making way for the market to lead, creating a tendency to sideline social and environmental outcomes.

A fundamental criticism of the English planning system is that it is cumbersome and opaque based around local development plans which are slow to prepare and even slower to implement. Lack of coherence and slow speed of implementation of Local Development Plans makes for a spatial planning system ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.

Legal standing

The spatial planning system in England today is guided top-down by the National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF), but local development plans, which are part of the Local Development Schemes which are a legal requirement for local authorities to produce following the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, remain the cornerstone of implementation, albeit with plans for phase them out.

Local plans tend to be long, complex documents. For example, the Newcastle Local Plan consists of:
 1. 360-page Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan (CSUCP) for Gateshead and Newcastle 2010-2030.
2.147-page Development and Allocations Plan 2015-2030 (DAP).
3. 172-page appendices.


The overall result is a diluted and complex document from which it is difficult to obtain a tangible sense of what the spatial vision for the area seeks to achieve beyond economic prosperity.

Successive planning reforms (e.g. 1990, 1991, 2004, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020) indicate that there is cross-party consensus that the spatial planning system, the NPPF and, by design, Local Development Plans is flawed. However, so far, planning reforms have been at best, incremental, and at worst, entrench existing issues.

The deeply fragmented, incoherent system means that English planners are tasked with achieving too many policy objectives with little resource in a flawed institutional system that is the highly centralised political system of England.  

The housing crisis rages on

The affordable housing crisis at the centre of the critique of the English planning system. The housing issue is structural and partially related to land ownership models in England, and partially due to the structure of the housing market which is over-dominated by large private developers with little interest beyond economic gain in the places in which they secure development rights.  

The failure to address the housing crisis is symptomatic of the incoherent, fragmented nature of English spatial planning. Planning and housing sectors would be well placed to work closely together to tackle the deep inequalities in English society and their impacts, as well as developing deliverable strategies to tackling climate change.

Until the affordable housing crisis is tackled through a radical redistribution of property-based wealth, the spatial planning system is unable to deliver meaningful impact in terms of integrating with other sector to address inequalities in cities.

Skeffington Report (1969)


The 1969 People and Planning (Skeffington Report) continues to provide the benchmark for engaging the British public in earlier on in the process of developing local development plans. In response to the highly centralised planning system framed by the 1947 TPCA, the 1968 amendment mandated that planning authorities must share local development plans with the public, provide an opportunity for affected residents respond. In line with the discretionary, common-law system which shapes public life in Britain, the new recommendations provided no legal grounds or details in how they could be implemented. It was therefore the responsibility of local authorities to interpret the public participation amendment how they saw fit, leading to uneven results.

While the Skeffington Report did make mention of increasing engagement with the planning system by people from underrepresented groups, it did not mention exactly who, or how (Community Planning Toolkit, 2016). This continues to be vital for the modern planning system to overcome, given that the majority of public engagement is with people over 55 and 56% of people in England have never engaged with the planning system at all.

While available data lacks granularity of ethnicity of those engaged in the planning system in England, an ethnographic data shows that even in a London borough where 54% of the population are not white, planning consultation meetings were almost entirely white, the planners and developers themselves were white, and all of the people in the rendering of proposed developments were white. When this is placed in the context of 37% of black people in England having no access to a garden, balcony, or outdoor space (ONS, 2020), it makes the failure of the planning to engage those who are most likely to rely on public parks and green spaces for their leisure time even more startling.

While local politicians have the right to vote on new planning developments, as in the current system, the planning system in England will remain highly politicised. Planning committees are responsible for passing local planning decisions, but they are constituted of elected councillors who often have limited knowledge of planning systems.

Impact of austerity on planning

Spatial planning preparations and development delivery and implementation at local level have been constrained by local authorities a decade of austerity measures, which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated for planning departments by 2015 was around a cumulative average of 45%. With such limited resources for a time-consuming and resource intensive activity as community engagement, it is of little surprise then that Local Development Plan formulation is estimated by the RTPI to have a 1% public rate of engagement, and the participation in the individual planning process is estimated to be at 3%. These figures, coupled with inability of councillors to genuinely represent a cross-section of interests in their local constituencies, highlight a serious problem of democracy and participation in the England planning system.

Discretionary planning systems

Discretionary planning means that central government sets guidance, policies, and visions for how planning will be implemented by regional and local tiers of government, but local authorities have a large degree of discretion on how these translate into reality through formulation of local development plans.

Discretionary systems are characterised by overlapping planning and policy systems often involving different processes or aims, and it is the role of planning departments to interpret these aims to inform negotiations over final planning decisions. This contrasts with the codification of statutory systems.

An effective spatial planning system should be able to merge the benefits of a discretionary system, where flexibility allows the planning system to respond to changes in circumstances and place-specific conditions, with the consistency and predictability of the planning outcomes of a regulatory planning system. The Planning for the Future Reforms published in 2020 recognise that the English discretionary planning system in its current guise is flawed, and opened the prospect of implementing a zoning system of sorts in the English planning system.

Section 106

Progressive aims of the TCPA 1947 manifested in nationalised development rights for land use. Consecutive reforms since 1979 have increasingly returned to the pre-1947 system of land ownership concentrated in the hands of a minority of private individuals. The concept of “planning gains,” an ostensibly mitigating factor, was introduced by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 under Section 106, where local authorities could exercise the right to benefit from selling land to developers by capturing the difference between land value and its uplift as a developable site. The logic was that this gain could then be used to fund public infrastructure (libraries, parks, social housing). However, while this initially appears to be a progressive amendment, it does not always achieve socially progressive outcomes. In a recent example, the Nine Elms developers in London used the S106 clause to fund a new tube station under the guise of constructing a new station as a public good. Whether a new tube station is needed in an area of London that mostly consists of luxury apartments during an ongoing and chronic housing affordability crisis remains highly dubious.

PDs

Permitted Development rights (PDs) are a feature of the English planning system where planning proposals meeting specific criteria do not require planning permission. The logic is to ease the pressure on the housing market by making it easier to “flip” buildings to residential usage with minimal bureaucracy. However, this unfettered approach to planning continues to place pressure on local authorities who are required to spend limited time and resource in verifying whether developments met the criteria for PDs, and producing certification to prove their status. It has not reduced the burden on planning departments. This is one example of unsustainable solutions to avoid what is really required to address the housing crisis: rent controls and adequate state intervention, i.e. a significant spend to increase the mass supply of affordable housing as those seen in the 1950s-70s.

Summary

The English spatial planning system is deeply flawed. While it does reflect a flawed and difficult wider political context, there are some measures that can be taken to improve the situation. While the Planning for the Future White Paper set out by the Government in 2020 recognises these flaws, there has been no mention of preventing misuse of S106 agreements and the remedies it does put forward, particularly pertaining to improving public participation and tackling spatial inequality provoked by English land use laws, are inadequate.

Housing reforms: First as tragedy, then as farce

Note: I wrote this on 9th June, but I only post it now due to time pressure etc etc. So, our idiotic PM has finally resigned (albeit with twisted arms, allegedly). I don’t think there’s much to celebrate as what will follow is hardly going to be the saviour this burning pyre of a country needs, but anyway.

A small warning: Here come a few extremely dry entries on planning, housing, policy reforms and the looming shitstorm post-Brexit, Covid, and Russian war. They are massive topics upon which I can only scratch the surface so I will canter through them at great speed. They are also boring as hell but I need to document them somehow for future reference. Part of this project is to document a state taking a nosedive into perpetual crisis and if we ever have to do a post-mortem, it’s good to document things as they happen in real time.

I’ll write about some fun projects soon. I promise.

The Ubiquitous New Build.

I can barely bring myself to type his name these days. Every time I see his face in the media I feel my stomach churning. It goes beyond the visceral hatred of the man I felt a year ago, no longer can he evoke such strong negative emotions. Now I just feel sad. What a pathetic, odious, sad little man. An absolute non-entity. He’s too lazy and narcissistic to be anything really, just a hollow vessel channelling whatever he believes will save his skin and surrounding himself with equally weak, spineless acolytes, stupid yes-(wo)men who cannot stitch together a thought of their own. His party has been transformed from the old British Conservatives in the Burkian tradition or even from the ideologically-charged Hayekian Thatcherite party of the turbo neoliberals we are all suffering (or reaping if you happen to be one of the lucky few) the consequences into nothing more than a bunch of self-serving crooks. Probably at least half of them would be in jail if they didn’t have the Met Police eating from the palms of their hands.

Having alienated most of his own party, it seems our broken and crippled country is united in one thing only: hatred of our Prime Minister. Big business hates him. Small business hates him. Royalists hate him. Constitutionalists hate him. The Gaelic parties most definitely hate him. Most of the media, except the far-right Daily Mail and Daily Express, hate him – and even they have days when they turn against him. The centre-right, centre-left, centre, and left finally have one thing in common: they hate him too. He’s open game: celebrities and pundits can talk about how much they hate him live on BBC. Footballers, musicians, sports commentators, the big mainstream cultural heavyweights are openly contemptuous of him.

Labour seem to have taken largely a backseat and are letting the rest of the country do the Opposition work for them. Starmer is largely MIA on the pile-on against Johnson: instead of hammering in the final nails to the coffin, aside from his famously “forensic” (as the liberal press never tire of reminding us) PMQs, Starmer seems to be sitting back and focusing the ongoing witch-hunt against Leftists and obsessively reminding the world of the pariah status of Corbyn, while cranking up the pro-war rhetoric as we seemingly inch closer and closer to a full-scale global conflict.

I suppose, it’s a good thing that we still live in enough of a democratic society that crowds can boo the Prime Minister as he arrives to attend an event of national and historical significance of the (capital E) Establishment without getting thrown into jail or disappeared, but even so.

And this brings me to the actions of a sad and desperate man: Johnson’s announcement last week on Housing Reform for the UK.

Housing reforms: the tragic background
The background to all of this is certainly the vote of no-confidence, which he won so narrowly that it can hardly count as a victory. It has also put the Tory party in a difficult situation: with Johnson at the helm the chances of them losing the general election in 2024, a mere two years from now, is high. Johnson has managed to surround himself with as many sycophants as it takes to keep him in power, with the added bonus that most of those sycophants are on the Government payroll so the stakes are higher for them if they vote against their boss.

The country is plummeting headlong into disaster. Actually, more like a slow-motion train wreck – many of these catastrophes were openly discussed and debated in 2016 ahead of the Brexit referendum. So war in Ukraine affecting food supplies combined with a global pandemic happened exogenously but it does not take a genius to understand that something major was about to happen in the world and build in some resilience. The feeling of reaching breaking point, whether climate related, food supply related, breach of peace, or even pandemics have been discussed in scientific, economic, policymaking, health, tech and other fields for a long time now, and especially since 2008 financial crisis. Now all of these things seem to be coming to a head. Cost-of-living crisis has hit after a 12-year run of austerity where public services are largely derelict, and wages have stagnated while living costs (especially related to housing initially, and now food will be hit too) have soared.

Food costs, energy prices? External factors and not the fault of our government.
Low wages not matching cost of living, artificially inflated housing costs, housing market entirely tipped in favour of owners and landlords? The fault of the government.
Lack of real and progressive taxation to protect the poorest in society and ensure our public services can function properly? Most definitely the fault of the government.
Insufficient investment in renewable energy and interventions to secure cheap and reliable supply and divest from fossil fuels? Again, definitely the fault of the government.
Cheap, affordable public transport so people do not need to own cars and pay for extortionate and harmful petrol? Fault of the government bound by the fossil fuel lobby.
Proper food strategy to protect against price hikes (as in France) and shortages? Very much the fault of the government.

There seems to be a deep-seated fear among the right of a “wage-price spiral” à la the 1970s after the 1973 oil shocks and subsequent economic turmoil. However, this seems largely to be a knee-jerk reaction and not grounded in material economic reality. For a start, the unions were in a strong position to negotiate pay to match and exceed the soaring rates of inflation, which topped 24.24% in 1975 while pay rose by 35% in some sectors. Today, with unions significantly castrated since then, we could see inflation of up to 20% with zero wage increases (or maybe a token 1 or 2% to give us some scraps). This is a scary prospect. Grace Blakeley wrote a fantastic piece about this in the latest edition of Tribune, see here for further theoretical grounding and summary of the current predicament.

So, to sum up thus far:

The UK is ploughing headlong into a deep, long-term crisis. Not only economic as the costs of Brexit stack up, but also a crisis of legitimacy. The aftermath of having such a farcical government can only create monsters or at least a greatly diminished status globally. The breakup of the British Isles as Scottish independence and N. Irish loom large and near-certain break-up of the Commonwealth as New Zealand, Australia, Canada hold referenda after the Queen dies and clear statements to remove the Monarchy as Head of State by Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Belize, and Jamaica and surely others will follow. Barbados has already taken the step and become a fully-fledged republic, announcing in 2020 that it would remove the Queen as head of state (Rihanna for President! Just sayin’). In short, the terms of British imperialism are long overdue a negotiation, both globally and domestically within the British Isles.

Our PM, isolated and disliked by all except his closest acolytes, most of whom he has either bribed or blackmailed (possibly both), is clutching for straws.

So what does he do? Reach for the Thatcher songbook.

Except, the UK economy, political circumstance, unity, and society is on far shakier ground than it was in 1979 when Thatcher pushed through monumental social and economic reform. In no small part is the situation today in fact directly consequential to these sweeping reforms and the country has never really recovered from the shock.

The other major difference is that Thatcher was riding the winds of change at the time; she understood the Zeitgeist, grasped it, and helped to re-cast and re-mould how global capitalism is imagined in the UK. In Gramscian terms, she built hegemony. Things that nowadays appear to be just the way things are are in fact implementation of the neoliberal hegemony, the logic that pervades how we think, act, rationalise, exist.

Post-2008, this doctrine has largely lost legitimacy yet is still the dominant force shaping our lives. This has manifested itself through a legitimacy crisis of the entire political class. Boris Johnson, far less skilled, less intelligent, and lacking the imagination and vision that Thatcher had, is simply clutching at ideas that have already been translated into our everyday lives and have made them better for a select few, at the expense of the many. And the demos realise this.

Boris Johnson’s latest announcement is decades too late to impress anyone except rich professional landlords, too pathetic, too lazy. Worn and thin. Recalling Hegel’s first as tragedy, and then as farce. Or the late and great Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, where he poses that nothing new has happened since the 1990s in pop culture but also I suppose this translates to political thought, too. His core thesis is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I have to say, I tend to agree, and more forcefully by the day. Here is an excellent lecture of him talking about how everything today is a weak and diluted copy.

What exactly is he proposing to do?
In his speech on 9th June, he laid out that he wants to bring back the Right to Buy scheme. As outlined in my review below of John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams, this was without a shadow of doubt one of Thatcher’s most damaging policies with far-reaching effects that we are facing today. It is why I, and so many others who do not have family capital or a huge income, cannot get on the housing ladder.

1. Right to Buy

To recap, Right to Buy was a massive reform to privatise social housing stock and ensured that state-owned housing stock managed by local councils was sold off a rock-bottom prices to tenants. Of course, this created a whole new swathe of landlord class, and saw the private rental market boom and the numbers of private landlords soar. Rents, which had previously been set and controlled by local authorities, were now in the hands of the “market” – i.e no upwards cap, and guess what? They spiralled. No more affordable rent in this country.

In effect, this was a direct transfer of wealth from those who were on the housing ladder, from those who are not. This is a combination of generation (so, being born at the right time and getting lucky), and social class (those who already have family capital would be able to get on the housing ladder anyway). Cynically, this created an entire new class of Tory voters and staunch advocates of Thatcherism, among those who never would have dreamed of voting Tory (the party of landowners and aristocrats) previously. It moved a vast strata of the population from working-class to property-owning petty bourgeoisie. The downside of this was locking the class system more tightly and reducing opportunities for social mobility by tipping the previously somewhat level playing field.

2. Using Universal Credit to save for a deposit

OK. OK, OK, OK. Let’s tackle this one then. So, fair enough, it is a bit weird that housing benefit can only be used to pay rent and the cheque pretty much goes direct to the landlord.

However. It is well documented that Universal Credit is punitive and stingy, especially following the austerity reforms in 2017. It barely covers enough for absolute bare minimum of essentials. How in the good lord’s name will there be any left over for saving? If I can barely save because of the general costs of existing, student debt, cost of rent, running a car (old and battered one by the way, and I barely drive it nowadays), paying for my own professional development so I can stay relevant and employable in a fast-changing and stressful job market and I have a salary well above average in a city that is fairly low in terms of cost of living by UK standards, how on God’s green earth should someone on stingy scrappy Universal Benefits have anything left to put away? Are you going to put UC allowance up by 500% then Boris? No? Didn’t think so.

This is obviously pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Clearly, back to the old Thatcher playbook of personal responsibility. Not able to save money? That’s because you’re living an excessive lifestyle (if bread, milk, a roof over the head, a warm house, a car to be able to get to work to pay for the aforementioned things is excessive, then……yes? But otherwise, no, definitely no).

Certainly not a structural problem and a basic equation of shit wages and massive housing prices and (now) soaring living costs. Surely not.

And before we even discuss securing a mortgage, let’s talk about how big deposits need to be. Average property price now in the UK is, according to the PM’s speech, £278,000 (which is £24,000 higher than this time last year). To raise a 10% deposit, which is the absolute minimum for first-time buyers now and more and more frequently 15% deposit is required, you need to save around £28,000. Add to this solicitor fees, surveying costs and so on, to give a cautious estimate let’s say around £10-15K for that. In total then, a first time buyer in the UK is going to need savings of £40K to own their first home. Average (median) salary in the UK for all workers is currently £25,971. Let’s be generous and say £31,285 as the median for full-time workers only. Before tax obviously. So, in order to save a deposit, you basically need to put a way you ENTIRE salary for two full years straight. That means not buying food, paying for shelter, or living at all basically. Impossible. THIS is the real problem we have. It is not just down to supply and demand availabilities, but how houses are distributed and the link between this and housing prices.

3. Increase supply


Increase of flatpack buying, despite the fact that spiralling costs of materials and labour are causing offsite supplier to go bust at an alarming rate. While Covid created a backlog, the real culprit is surely Brexit with import tariffs on timber from Finland, Germany, Austria and Sweden causing an upward pressure on prices that was not there a couple of years ago.

As more suppliers file bankruptcy, the already stretched supply chain is pulled even further as demand by far outstrips supply. Costs, soaring due to inflation and material issues, are set to spiral.

Why is it a terrible idea?
1. We aren’t going to be building more –
Boris Johnson wants housing authorities to replace houses they sell off. Not gonna happen. (Unlike Thatcher, who banned housing authorities from replacing them).
Cash flow issues – sell them at a discount, and with spiralling material and labour costs, aren’t going to be able to afford to replace them. Exacerbate housing crisis and even more housing shortages.

Also, with a recession looming, everyone knows the first thing to happen is construction companies down tools. I’m expecting a herd of white elephants galore between now and 2030.

2. Clear lack of consultation with enablers and actors
Apparently, mortgage lenders have not been consulted about using UC to contribute towards deposits.
Lenders not on board with using Universal Credit and nor are Housing Associations.
How hard is it to get a mortgage?! Need a permanent contract, taking relationship status into account etc etc.

3. Obsession with home ownership.
In Britain, under successive governments, there are only two options. Option one is tying a millstone around your neck and taking out a massive mortgage on a (likely) poor quality house (as most houses are in this country, new and old).
Option two is being extorted by landlords to live a (mostly) badly maintained and energy inefficient home with insecure tenancy agreements, constant reminders that the home is not yours, next to zero legal rights and paying a massive chunk of your monthly salary for the pleasure.  

Society has changed drastically since 1980s. For me, as for most in my generation. Work is increasingly insecure regardless of sector and we are expected to be increasingly flexible and mobile. Also, some of us want to be flexible and mobile. I likely won’t live in a nuclear family formation – housing policy of the UK is designed for. I still wake up every morning, as for the past xx many years, dreaming about leaving the UK for somewhere with a better climate, less deranged government (if such a place exists) and less stifling and claustrophobic class system. Less inward-looking and less booze-addicted (which I firmly believe is partially a product of the class system and masks the fact that everyone here is miserable to some degree). I don’t want the housing situation to define and force my hand when it comes to romantic relationships either. I do not want to feel or want anyone else to feel bound together by a shitty building.

Do I want to sacrifice my one life on this earth for several years and do nothing but work and save, in order to pay a massive amount of money for a crappy house that will cost a fortune to maintain and heat, will likely be outside the city centre so I’m forced to drive around to maintain any form of social life, and I will be saddled with for the rest of my life? No thanks.

What we need is rent reform, protection, and control. Landlords need to be held to account and renters need protection. Funny that the PM’s speech measures home ownership as success. He states that home ownership for 25-34 year olds in Britain fell since 2008 whereas it has risen in almost all other European countries. Although, he smugly points out, Britain is still ahead of France and Germany in terms of home ownership. BUT IT’S NOT A LEAGUE TABLE! France and Germany have laws in place to protect their rents. In Germany at least, as in the Nordic countries and possibly also France, it’s normal to rent long-term, for life even. Homeownership is NOT the be-all-and-end-all. The UK needs to get over this fixation and introduce other options that match the needs of a modern society.

4. The reforms do not actually address any salient issues
It seems to me that this announcement is just a dogwhistle to what’s left of the Tory supporters among the electorate and the most ardent of Thatcherites. Or, a distraction from a government sinking in its own shit, mired in scandal after scandal after scandal.


Should we worry?
My hunch is no, we should not. Or, we should continue to worry about the lack of intervention in a failing economic system, but the laissez-faire attitude is the real cause for concern, not these nothing-policies. The reforms will have exactly zero impact on a system that failed a long time ago.

Municipal Dreams (Review, part 2)

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.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (review, part 1)

Given the centrality of housing as the centrepiece of British socio-political reality, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing is far more than a simple audit and historical account of the trajectory of social housing spanning over a century. Viewed through the lens of social housing, John Boughton provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of housing as a response to the changing social and political conditions of Britain. The big questions of the day are often reflected in the government’s responses to the challenge of housing its people. The Municipal Dreams journey departs from the early Victorian-era disease-ridden slums where life, for most, was, to quote Hobbes’ Leviathan “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” through to the golden age of socialist thought rising from the ashes of two brutal world wars, to the late 20th century project of “rolling back the state,” privatisation of state assets, financial deregulation and push to the free market and its somewhat tragic consequences, the embodiment of which are reflected in the charred remains of Grenfell Tower.

This fascinating project to trace the noble origins and development of social housing in Britain stemmed from four years of blogging, which is in fact still very much alive and well at Municipal Dreams. Much of the material in the book derives from ethnographic sources, which affords Boughton a level of intimacy not seen (to my limited knowledge) in any other literature spanning such a broad range of council estates. It also allows Boughton to encompass an insider’s perspective and avoids the lack of objectivity that befalls many accounts of working-class culture using a more distant, participatory observation approach.

The book is organised chronologically, with three discernible phases:

1. Philanthropy, morality and Victorian values: Britain’s first council estate, the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch which was completed in 1900, was constructed as a direct response from the appalling conditions of the slum quarter in London’s East End. Multiple accounts, from novels such as Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago referenced in the first chapter of Municipal Dreams, Charles’ Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to historical accounts and ethnographies including Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, also referred to in Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, and Friedrich Engels’ The Great Towns offered stark descriptions of the criminality, abject poverty, death, and disease in these miserable human rookeries. This misery was the downside of the first ever Industrial Revolution. The work of empiricists such as Engels, and later Thomas Carlyle, informed embryonic ideas for developing the welfare state. These ideas were brought forward by philanthropic individuals and loosely bound “corporations” which would later crystallise and formalise into local councils embedded within the institutional architecture of the British state.

2. The impact of war: The first world war gave rise, both directly and indirectly, to the world’s first mass council housing building programme. In 1919, Lloyd George promised “homes for heroes” and following the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, over the next two decades, 1.1 million council homes were built (pg 31). This gained support from both left and right wing of the political spectrum, albeit on differing grounds. The right, especially, feared the revolutions and Bolshevism sweeping across mainland Europe and believed that providing council housing would sweeten and disarm would-be revolutionaries. Following the war, it was tacitly agreed that a fit, healthy, and strong population was desirable and providing good-quality housing seemed one logical way to do this. The interwar period and the Great Depression saw large-scale slum clearances, where for the first time the poorer working class were brought into council housing.

From 1945, under Clement Attlee there was a concerted effort to rebuild and rebirth the nation following a catastrophic first half of the twentieth century. The welfare state was born, and housing was a large part of this. At this time, socialist thought defined post-war Britain. The NHS was created, access to education expanded, and the dominant ideology gave rise to the idea that council housing was for a prosperous, economically active, and aspirational working class (pg 256).

3. Demonisation and privatisation: From 1979 onwards, Britain was remodelled once again. The post-1945 consensus was replaced with free market ideals of shrinking the state and selling off state-owned assets. This included council housing. While national companies were being sold off at an alarming rate, council housing stock was transferred from state ownership to private hands or to third-party public-private entities and housing associations for ideological reasons. This included the expanded Right to Buy introduced in 1980. Meanwhile, rhetoric and discourse peddled by government, the national press and free-market think tanks such as Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute ensured that council estates and their inhabitants were stigmatised. Social housing is today the preferred term for those working in the housing sector, due not in small part to the negative connotations attached to the term “council housing” and “council estate.” Municipal dreams is not party political work, but it certainly seeks to bring to the fore the social origins of council housing and the critical role the Labour movement played in ensuring access to decent and affordable housing. These principles have been very much eroded in recent decades, but not all hope is lost. We may reach a turning point once again. Or then, things might become ever more entrenched.

I will elaborate further on these musings a bit later.

Alpha City: How London Was Captured By the Super-Rich (review)

Rowland Atkinson, Verso Books, 2021

Atkinson takes us on a fascinating tour around London and illustrates how the city is carved up into different strata of the superrich according to the significance and development history of each domain. In the West End one can find the patrician heartlands which have historically been and are still a haven for old money (which includes the 1066 land grabbers, and the aristocrats fat from a millennium of assets yet have never worked a day in their life). To the north, which includes bits of Camden and Islington boroughs, settled newer old money, mostly those who became rich off the back of slavery, colonial activities, war and the industrial revolution. In and around the more recently developed riverbank, Hyde Park and Mayfair, Chelsea, Kensington, and farther afield bear the hallmarks of new money (bankers and hedge fund managers, gamblers, launderers, criminal networks). In the liminal spaces across the city there are substantial zones where new and old meet.

The rich exurbs consisting of stockbroker belts and rural gated communities in Surrey), such as St George’s Hill are popular among Russian oligarchs. Only last week St George’s Hill was in the spotlight following Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine which led to protests and calls to expel the secretive owners of billionaire mansions harbouring Russian dirty money. St George’s Hill was ironically where the socialist agrarian Diggers first broke ground in 1649 but that history is long lost. Atkinson highlights its 20th century history as the home of celebrities including rockstars, F1 champions and supermodels (John Lennon lived there in the early 1960s, as well as Ringo Starr, and also Elton John, Tom Jones, Jenson Button, Kate Moss and countless more). Until recently it was considered one of the most desirable gated communities in Europe.

While once the celebrities and buzzy rich community would wander around the gated community in relative freedom and enjoy a sense of elite community spirit, this way of elite public life has largely been replaced by secretive oligarchs seeking privacy and invisibility. Most of the activity is limited to the staffers of the oligarchs running errands and chores for their largely absent employers, who may be in London only one or two days per year.

The pattern of superrich zones inhabiting formerly active communities which have been hollowed out and replaced with largely deserted and heavily surveilled dead zones is a recurring theme of the book. This is just one way in which the super rich instilling a sterile, resentful and distrustful atmosphere into a city once known for its vibrancy and dynamism.

Parasites and their hosts

Alpha City elegantly captures the parasitic nature of the super-rich and how their essences sucks all of the nutrients out of cities. Atkinson explains how London is a particularly unique case owing to a combination of factors including history, location, topography, leading to particular patterns of socio-political and economic development. London is certainly unique in Europe and globally there are perhaps with only a handful of cities on a similar level (New York, perhaps Shanghai, Moscow). The heavy financialisation has created a city which is fully geared towards serving the needs of the super rich, at the expense of everyone else.

The financialisation of the city was certainly accelerated after the 2008 crisis and the end of the post-war consensus, but the wheels had already been set in motion prior to that. Finance has been the fundamental element of the city’s development programme since the Thatcherite period throughout the 1980s and expanded under Blair’s New Labour from 1997 until the 2008 financial crisis. The biggest different today is that the neoliberals have lost all legitimacy and no longer need to pretend they believe in social benefit for the many.

The rhetoric around trickle-down wealth creation, already a thinly veiled lie, ceased to bear any weight after the 2008 crisis and the redistribution of global financial capital after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will see and end to the neoliberal order and will usher in a very dangerous era. The main output of the neoliberal project has been incredible, intense levels of inequality which are now extraordinarily visible in London, the Alpha City of mind-boggling contrasts.

Everyone loses, nobody wins

Alpha City captures very well the anxious, fearful lives the super-rich lead. They are obsessed with control over every single aspect of living their lives and require squadrons of staff to ensure no detail, no matter how small, is overlooked. Their aim seems to be to ensure their surroundings are constant at all times and no matter where they are. Same temperature in their air-conditioned rooms. Same décor, same food, same types of people on hand to serve their every need. The much-acclaimed HBO TV series Succession encapsulates very well the paranoia, anxiety, fear, and downright unhappiness that characterise the lives led by the superrich.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in London most people are struggling. The displacement of the poor through various means of gentrification: sometimes forcibly, other times stealthily, and too often tragically (such as the appalling aftermath of the Grenfell disaster whereby many of the surviving families are, almost 5 years later, still displaced) breaks and re-moulds less affluent areas and destroys communities to fuel the rampant property market and speculation on land.

The undercurrent running through London is that of violence: the violence of a dysfunctional economy led by property developers, the stress and struggle of the majority of inhabitants, and the hatred and fear of the superrich towards everyone else creates an aggregated effect of unhappiness across the spectrum.

Future vision

Having just finished reading Alpha City a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine and while the west are, justly, piling an increasing number of sanctions on Russia feels eerie in its timeliness. What we learn in Alpha City is that London, and the British Government, have played no small part in the Russian oligarchy. For almost all of Putin’s reign the City of London has been actively propping up a Russian mafioso state, ushered in by the policies of successive governments (Blair, Cameron/Clegg, Cameron, now Johnson). Theresa May to a lesser extent, instead she made a brief pivot towards Indian capital.

Oligarchs, not only Russian but from around the world, and their dirty money are embedded within the UK economy and disentangling from that is going to take a clear vision and a ton of political will. To date I have seen no evidence of either of these things. Johnson’s sabre-rattling so far has proved to be largely tokenistic, particularly when shining a torch on the measures he has taken so far in comparison with other western governments. But: this deserves an entry in its own rite.

Alpha City neatly highlights the burgeoning class of “enablers”:  those who themselves are wealthy but not superrich (millionaires rather than billionaires) and whose livelihoods largely depend on the superrich and therefore they have an interest in ensuring the superrich continue to feel welcome in London. Unfortunately, this class includes our lawmakers, political class, and property development sector.

The political class are culpable for allowing money laundering and criminal networks to thrive. Not only have they turned a blind eye to it, but they have positively encouraged it with their policies and exclusive property marketing campaigns targeting the money of oligarchs directly. The super-rich with their appalling social attitudes have been encouraged to settle in London as a safe haven, a welcoming and secure place to expand their networks and clean up their money.

This has come with a high price for those who are not part of the elite class nor their enablers. The skyline in London, a historically horizontal city, has been scarred by developments built for the wealthy, with appalling abuse of Section 106 (e.g. Nine Elms, for which I will provide a separate entry at some point).  The psychosocial impacts of the super rich on the city have been dreadful: who cares about a fantastic skyline when you can’t afford bread or a roof over your head?

Alpha City offers a bleak view for the future, made even bleaker by a pandemic and yet another violent war (let us not forget Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria) subsequent to the publication of the book. Atkinson suggests capping profits on housing developments, and the conclusion points to the fact that social housing must be a component, rather than a feature to eradicate, of a functioning city.

However, with no political will to implement either of these things and cross-party appetite to continue to appease the super wealthy, the prognosis for the Alpha City in the post-pandemic, European war 2022 does not look good at all.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Photo credit: “Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia” (Icarus films, 1995)

IWD 2022: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

I haven’t updated this thing for a while and judging by the visitor stats, nobody reads it anyway. It’s mostly a chronicle for my own sake at the moment. The world is dark and monstrous and, selfishly, I need an outlet.

However, the aim of this journal is not political analysis; there are several thousand million journals and blogs and substacks etc (one of these days I will gather and share a reading list) out there that are far more insightful than I could ever be. I will bend this rule a little bit in the coming days or weeks or months (unavoidable in the present climate), but I will keep the analysis light as the last thing the world needs is one more hot take from a comfortable Brit looking on from the computer screen as the horror unfolds. Nevertheless, I will aim to keep any political chat relevant to the task at hand: trying to make sense of the urban environment around us.

I have a couple of dry book-review-y/recommendation-y type entries stacked up, but since it is International Women’s Day today I will write a little homage to a good international woman:  committed communist, feminist designer, and architect-activist Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.

Recently I watched the film Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia which merits its own entry. In a nutshell, it details a group of architects (known as the “May Brigade” led by the Dutch architect Ernst May) from the West – mainly Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, who went to the Soviet Union to help deliver panellised housing to create planned socialist cities in Magnitogorsk,Siberia during the USSR building programme in 1920s and 1930s. One of these architects was Schütte-Lihotzky.

Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female student at the University of the Applied Arts in her hometown, Vienna, and one of the first female architects in Europe. She studied under Oskar Strnad, who was extremely influential in the mass social housing projects in Vienna (sozialer Wohnbau). Vienna has long been an object of interest for planners, urban designers, and architects in terms of social housing (and this also warrants an entry in its own right).

In 1926, she was commissioned by the City of Frankfurt to support an effort to resolve the city’s acute housing crisis led by the architect and city planner Ernst May. Schütte-Lihotzky worked on the New Frankfurt project, bringing her humanitarian values to housing to create a space that was affordable, comfortable, and stylish.

Her work on the New Frankfurt project gave rise the Frankfurt kitchen in 1926 (insert cap from film clip) based on the principle of a small kitchen to maximise a housewife’s efficiency and reduce the amount of time spent on unpaid domestic labour. The Frankfurt kitchen model is extremely common in the mass-built social housing prevalent across mainland Europe.

Photo: “Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia” (Icarus films, 1995)

Beyond her design activities, she remained a committed communist until her death in 2000. She became a member of the Austrian Community Party (KPÖ) in 1939 where she worked with the Austrian Communist resistance. She was caught by the Gestapo in Istanbul in 1941, and imprisoned by 15 years in Bavaria. She was liberated by US troops at the end of the Second World War, upon which she no longer wished to return to Austria immediately. She worked in Bulgaria for a few years before returning to Vienna, although her communist views prevented her from receiving any major public commissions in Austria.

To finish up, here is an excerpt from Schütte-Lihotzky’s work “Why I became an architect,” published by Juliet Kinchin in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), pp. 86-96:

“What were the theoretical foundations and ideals that lay behind the Frankfurt
Kitchen that led to its being reproduced in the thousands? For me there were
two motives that led to the creation of the Frankfurt Kitchen. The first was
the recognition that in the foreseeable future women would have proper paid
employment, and would not solely be expected to be on hand to wait upon their
husbands. I was convinced that women’s struggle for economic independence
and personal development meant that the rationalization of housework was an
absolute necessity. Foremost in my mind when working on housing projects was
the idea that the design and, above all, the layout could save work. . . . Second,
I felt the Frankfurt Kitchen—a design so connected to the architectural fabric
and to the planning and built-in features of rooms—was only the very first
step toward developing a new way of living and at the same time a new kind
of housing construction.”

Dwellings, units, homes, houses, and investments.

Block of nine houses advertised as an investment opportunity and a dark kitchen. Durham Road, Gateshead, 2020. Photo credit: Marianne Kell.

Anyone who has lived and/or worked in an environment dominated by British people cannot fail to have noticed the national obsession with property. By this I do not refer to housing, nor architecture and physical form. To the average Brit, property is considered an asset with an emphasis on ownership and increasing value. We are a nation of wannabe estate agents and small-time real estate developers. The specific nature with which property is discussed among friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers using the same casual tone with which one might discuss the weather, or the same earnestness as applied to the post-mortem of a Premier League football match, demonstrates the special place property holds in the national psyche. To Brits, property ownership is a sport. To inhabitants of other countries where the relationship between property, land, and society isn’t so perverted, this attitude is completely alien.


There are indeed active and lively resistance movements in Germany over rent controls, debates in Barcelona and other cities with a tourism-oriented economy on the Airbnb-ification of their neighbourhoods, discussions in Stockholm and other Scandinavian cities over the future of collective rent bargaining and gaining secure tenancies in the face of chronic housing shortages, and we all see widespread social displacement from increasingly unaffordable city living across in the face of a yawning inequality gap and stagnating economies in major cities of both the global north and south. While both the spectrum and root causes of these struggles are broad, they have one thing in common: all depart from the definition of housing as home, as a place to live.

In the Anglo world, housing is viewed from a different angle. Houses here are first and foremost treated as investments. Cue the continual cycle of modifications to increase property value: conservatories, extensions, loft conversions, patios, restorations, and so it goes. Once on the “property ladder” there is the never-ending quest to move up to the next rung. Buy small, extend, increase value, sell, upsize and upscale. Or make a sideways step by using the proceeds to build tiny empires: buy even more properties you can upsize, and upscale while extracting rent, to eventual sell and the cycle continues.

In the UK specifically, housing is so deeply embedded within the class system that I would argue that a house, or dwelling (in technocratic planner-speak), is first and foremost a social status signifier. Tower blocks are historically the domain, literally, of the working classes (side note: although in London this has shifted considerably since the 1980s). The middle-class ideal of the single or two-storey house in the suburbs with a private garden has withstood the test of time. For the upper-middle, gated communities and private estates continue to exist, segregating new and old money from the lower classes. The real old money continues to own land, unhindered since the last time this island was invaded in 1066.

Within each social class, there is even more granularity in the attitudes towards housing. The British middle class has a disconcerting talent for knowing exactly what each postcode means in relation not only to house prices and whether they are likely to increase significantly (an “investment opportunity” the aspiring British landlord will purr), but also the types of people who live there. This extends not only to which ethnic group, but also career, age demographic, levels of education, and even whether more people in the area were privately educated or attended state school. While the US is similarly configured, although more markedly along racial lines, this level of social segregation is unheard of elsewhere in Europe.

This attitude to housing is problematic, to say the least. If housing is considered an investment opportunity in a competitive market, what happens to those people who fail to step into the housing ladder? Here, the situation becomes complicated.

Previously, the gap was filled by council housing which was rented at affordable rates in relation to wages. In 1980, Thatcher introduced the Housing Act which saw a turbo-charged Right to Buy scheme. This saw a mass-scale transfer of ownership of council housing from the state to private hands where 500,000 council homes were sold off between 1980 and 1985. Today the renting classes continue to suffer the consequence of this action, while the rentiers of the world have increased their riches extraordinarily. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, which pushes people into the unregulated private rental sector. High rents prevent workers on stagnant salaries from saving up a deposit required for securing a mortgage. Low deposits for first time buyers is no good either, as the monthly re-payments are often higher still than the already uncontrolled rents on the private market.

In the deregulated market of the 1980s and 1990s, mortgages were easier than ever before to obtain. This, coupled with the possibility of buying heavily discounted Council housing, created the perfect conditions for an expanding inequality gap to exacerbate the difference between those who own property and those who do not. Those who purchased their Council homes in the 1980s at heavily discounted rates were then able to sell them off at enormously inflated values a decade later. The proceeds with which were then able to either upsize significantly or purchase additional houses for the purpose of leverages rents on the private market. The expansion of Rent to Buy in 1996 formalised this structure. Since then, the housing market has become increasingly lopsided and the structural crisis is becoming increasingly entrenched. Without radical state intervention, the situation is unlikely to be rectified anytime soon.

Consequently, British society is very much organised into two groups: those who own property, and those who do not. Increasingly, those who own property own not just a roof over their heads but multiple properties that are rented out on the private market. Often, this alone can provide a household income – there’s no need to work a 9-5 job for an employer. The professional landlord now makes more money than would be possible working in a regular salaried profession, thanks to a combination of decades of wage stagnation, an affordable housing shortage and spiralling property prices.

Without drawing any further conclusions or speculations on what must, could, or should be done to resolve this flaming hot issue, this brings me to the main point of this blog: the understanding that housing, property, and land ownership in the Anglo-American world is at the very core of our political, social, and economic system. Our access to and relationship with property dictates our social values, who we are most likely to vote for, where we are likely to live, what our employment prospects might be. Our entire political system, at its heart, is based around the nature of property ownership: do we protect the interests of rentiers, or renters? Should housing be treated as a right whereby everyone should be granted access to a roof over their head, or as an asset from which to extract profit?

Understanding attitudes to social housing in the UK provides a picture of the political and social conditions and the likely trajectory in the decade to come. And we better strap ourselves in – it’s going to be a hell of a ride.