In the summer of 1951, a national exhibition was held at venues throughout the UK. The Festival of Britain,1 as it was known, was designed to cultivate a sense of national recovery in the aftermath of the Second World War. Integral to this was the showcasing of key British contributions to science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts. One of the exhibits was a newly built housing estate in Poplar, east London. The estate was named after the former MP for Bow and Bromley (and former leader of the Labour Party), George Lansbury, who was popular locally because of his campaigns for social justice.2 Its design was described by the American sociologist Lewis Mumford as âbased not solely on abstract aesthetic principles, or on the economics of commercial construction, or on the techniques of mass production, but on the social constitution of the community itself, with its diversity of human interests and human needsâ (quoted in Blanton 2016: 21). Others concurred, seeing the estate as successfully avoiding the design flaws of public housing constructed elsewhere in the interwar period, collectively dubbed âtenement townâ (Hanley 2007).3 The Lansbury was lauded as the finest example yet of what Minister for Health, Aneurin Bevan, had called âthe living tapestry of a mixed communityâ (quoted in Goodchild 2008: 85), with solidly built dwellings of different sizes existing alongside vibrant street markets and transport nodes. There were no special requirements for living on the estate, but it came to be dominated by the areaâs local working-class population; 90 per cent of the estateâs principal wage earners had manual jobs, while 28 per cent had found employment on the East Endâs docks or in ancillary trades (Ravetz 2001).
In this context the term âmixedâ was addressed more to the function of the estate than the demographic characteristics of its residents; the Lansbury âs design took careful account of residentsâ access to schools, retail outlets, transport hubs and places of worship. However, in contemporary London many estates are more mixed in terms of social class, ethnicity, nationality and age than they are in terms of function. It is important to note that the diversification of such estates along demographic lines has had little to do with the political logic espoused by Bevan, which sought to reorder the national landscape according to the egalitarian principles that typified the Labour government of the day.
Times change but housing remains a political issue. Thirty years after the Festival of Britain, in pursuit of what Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (following Conservative party icons like Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan ) termed a â property-owning democracyâ, new government legislation gave council tenants the statutory right to purchase their homes from local authorities. This had far-reaching consequences for the social complexion of Britainâs housing estates. Critics have laid the blame for Britainâs current shortage of affordable housing at the door of â Right to Buyâ, seeing in the policy all that is wrong with the neoliberal ideology promoted by Thatcherism (Foster 2015). Indeed, it is interesting that in qualifying the remark so often taken to encapsulate her creed of individual responsibility, Thatcher (speaking in 1987) reached for the same phrase that Bevan had used back in the 1950s:
There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. (Quoted in Seawright 2010: 36)
While it would be unfair to identify the âRight to Buy â scheme exclusively with the Conservative government under whose auspices it was passedâcross-party support for the scheme is underplayed by many commentators (Hanley 2007)âits elevation to a national level was a bold move. In line with Margaret Thatcherâs Hayekian endorsement of individual responsibility and entrepreneurship (which entailed a corresponding scaling down of state services), the act allowed council tenants to buy their property at market value minus a discount based on the length of tenancy (Jones and Murie 2006; Moore 2013). This would change the face of numerous inner-city estates, and in many ways its implications are still being realised.
Ideas and People
By purchasing their property and selling during âboomsâ in the housing market, enterprising residents of estates situated in prime locations stood to make tens of thousands and, if they were particularly lucky and held their nerve, hundreds of thousands of pounds.4 Concomitantly, in many parts of London ex-local authority housing stock became the only affordable option for the aspirant middle classes, a fact reflected in the number of young professionals who have made their home on inner-city estates over the last twenty years.
Recent legislation on council housing has paved the way for a further round of privatisation. The 2016 Housing and Planning Act, the Conservative governmentâs attempt to boost levels of homeownership and house building, proposed that so-called high-value vacant council properties be sold off as part of an extension of Right to Buy. In parts of London this could result in nearly 50 per cent of one-time public housing stock being held in private hands (Murphy 2016).
The 1980 Housing Act has therefore been instrumental in broadening the social base of numerous housing estates. In 1979, more than 40 per cent of Britons lived in council-owned property. Today this figure stands at under 8 per cent (Harris 2016).5 With just under 10,000 dwellings having been sold off by the local council in the central London borough of Northtown via the Right to Buy scheme since 1980, the borough is consistent with other inner-London local authorities.6 Importantly, most of these sales have been concentrated in a handful of estates seen as desirable because of their size (broadly speaking, estates comprising fewer than 200 units), configuration and location. Lashall Green (LG), the focus of this book, is one of the latter.
LG is located in one of the most diverse areas in the UK in terms of ethnicity. The push-and-pull dynamics of internal and external migration and, relatedly, the vagaries of geopolitics, have played a role in making LG so ethnically diverse. On the completion of building work in the mid-1960s, LG became home to first-generation Irish, Portuguese and Greek Cypriot migrants and their children, as well as members of the local white working class. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a number of migrants from the ânew Commonwealthââmore specifically, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the West Indies and West Africaâalso settled on the estate. Working locally and originally remitting a sizeable proportion of their savings, they would in many instances be joined by relatives over the next twenty or so years who also sought accommodation nearby (and if possible on the same estate). The 1990s saw new, asylum-seeking arrivals from Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania (among other places), while the years following Polandâs accession to the European Union in 2004 saw a handful of Poles be granted accommodation on LG.
Because it is relatively small, low rise and brick built, LG âs 148 housing units have proved popular with tenants seeking to purchase their flats.7 As a result, nearly 40 per cent of its dwellings are privately owned, and this figure is set to rise to over 50 per cent with the passing of the aforementioned Housing and Planning Act of 2016 (Murphy 2016). The majority of newly minted homeowners have since moved on, buying from the council in the late 1980s and early 1990s and subsequently selling for a substantial profit. This was then used to purchase houses some 25â30 miles outside London in counties such as Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent.8 Today the private dwellings on LG are owned mainly by middle-class professionals unable to afford anything âbetterâ and buy-to-let landlords, with some of the latter boasting a âportfolioâ of properties. A handful of ex-tenants became landlords sometime after purchasing their property via the Right to Buy scheme.
The profile of some of the estateâs private renters reflected other governmental ambitions. The number of university students living on LG has increased dramatically since the early 2000s. I...