on September 5, 2026, 11:31 am, in reply to "‘What kind of people do they think we are?’ James Meek on social housing"
The Peckham Partnership had raised suspicions that Southwark was trying to bring more middle-class people into the borough at the expense of poorer families. Stephen Chance was a director at the architecture firm Pollard Thomas and Edwards, which worked on the project. ‘The intention is to have a mixed-tenure neighbourhood and make it possible for people to want to buy private property in an area that was not popular,’ he said at the time. ‘We are not trying to build a new estate, we are trying to build a bit of ordinary London.’ As the historian John Boughton, who quotes Chance on his blog, Municipal Dreams, points out, ‘popular’ and ‘ordinary’ bear much decoding.
In March 1999, an article appeared in Estates Gazette, a magazine for developers, with the headline ‘Shelter for the middle class: Labour councils in London are selling off social housing and displacing poor people in a bid to transform blighted areas.’ The article names Southwark and Newham as the boroughs in the lead, with Hackney, Lewisham and Lambeth also ‘involved’. Bob Young, the head of housing policy in Newham in East London, was the most forthright of the officials quoted. Talking about 4200 new homes planned in his borough, he said: ‘What we have is a concentration of benefit-dependent people in the area. Social housing attracts people that are challenged economically who can’t support local shops and services. We don’t want to see any more social rented housing ... We’ve got a New Labour government. All we have done is put our local surfboard on a wave that is coming out of Downing Street.’
Fred Manson, the head of regeneration for Southwark, was less inflammatory, but his comments were seized on by anti-development campaigners. Manson argued that the borough needed to reverse the trend that had left 60 per cent of Southwark’s housing stock as social housing. ‘Because social housing generates people on low incomes coming in and that generates poor school performances, middle-class people stay away. We need to try and do this for stability.’ Whatever hope Southwark might have had of winning people over to the Estates Initiative was probably doomed by Manson’s comments. A leading voice in the tenants’ groups at the time, Gary Glover, said that Manson was confirming what he’d always suspected: that the council had a hidden agenda.
The following year a council survey found that tenants would vote overwhelmingly against a transfer of the entire stock, some 50,000 homes, to a housing association. The council was back where it started: short of cash to fix up its properties, short of places for people to live, under pressure from developers. The next target was Elephant and Castle itself, designated for regeneration, and the huge estates next door, the Heygate and the Aylesbury.
When Heygate tenants first learned their estate was to be demolished, Flynn told me, many were enthusiastic. Early talks showed the complexity of locals’ relationship to the estate: it wasn’t the buildings they were wedded to but the idea of secure, good quality affordable housing in that particular neighbourhood, provided by their elected representatives, the council. Tenants were wary of demolition not because of architectural sentimentality but because they knew the buildings embodied their legal and moral right to be there. Initially, the council and developers seemed to respect this. Tenants were promised the choice between a new home on the site of the estate – the ‘footprint’ – or one of the new homes the council was going to have built on sixteen small sites in and around the area, funded by additional homes for private sale. ‘It was great, fantastic,’ Flynn said. ‘So we start from a position where everybody is full of enthusiasm, open to these ideas, and it looks as if there’s a way of doing it. Over four years, relationships fall apart.’
In 2003, the tenants were told they’d lost their right of return: there was no guarantee they’d be able to get new homes on the Heygate footprint. Nonetheless, at the beginning of 2007, they were still getting upbeat brochures from the council, urging them to come along to an exhibition of the new houses they’d been promised. ‘This is your chance to see all the designs in one location,’ the brochure gushed. ‘You can even start to think about the layout and decoration of your new home, for example if you would prefer an open plan or separate kitchen/diner. Don’t miss it!’ A small number of council flats had already been built as a pilot for the sixteen sites, looking spiffy in a bright red-to-yellow façade, hard up against one of the Heygate mega-blocks.
Only a few months later, the bullishly pro-regeneration Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition that ran Southwark from 2002 to 2010 picked Lendlease to develop the Heygate. The council announced that everyone on the estate should start preparing to leave, long before the houses they were supposed to move to were ready. They’d be given priority on the waiting list to find a house somewhere else in the borough. Eventually, if they wanted, they’d be able to get one of the new houses. The justification for this peremptory banishment was the vague claim – from the landlord whose job it had been to sustain the buildings – that the fabric of the estate had become ‘unsustainable’. ‘Clearing the Heygate Estate is essential to the success of the Elephant and Castle redevelopment. Demolition of the Heygate will provide symbolic and tangible evidence to the people of Southwark that the council is driving ahead with the regeneration of the borough,’ a council report declared. It continued, with circular logic, to promise to protect residents from the consequences of its own actions: ‘Half-empty blocks become a breeding ground for crime and antisocial behaviour. The council has a responsibility to mitigate this risk. For these reasons, we have proposed an action plan to empty the Heygate in the quickest possible time.’
Flynn’s mother died in 2006. When the notice to quit arrived he helped his brother, the last member of his family on the estate, to find a property elsewhere through a version of the bidding system Misgina is using. Because his brother had top priority, they found a place, a basement in a terraced house without gas or electricity (these were eventually connected). Those who’d bought flats through Right to Buy, trusting in Thatcher’s flagship policy, were not offered anything like the money they would have needed to buy similarly sized properties in the area. Some of them fought a bitter, and futile, rearguard action through the courts before being forced to sell.
One day during the pandemic, I was looking at bike routes using Google Street View when I noticed a strange phenomenon. A virtual journey down a street of low-rise modern blocks of flats suddenly shifted and blurred into grey, textured concrete panels. It was as if the end of the street were a portal into the 1970s. For a while, the pre-demolition and post-demolition streetscapes of the Heygate were juxtaposed. The different year-views, which go back to 2008, form an animation of change. Looking at the 2008 images of Heygate Street, I found the panelled side wall of one of the estate maisonettes with the open access stair against it, supported by a round pillar, behind an acacia tree in an expanse of greenery. The building looks clean, sound, quirky. It’s still there in 2010, but by 2012, with the estate empty, signs of dereliction are apparent. Graffiti has appeared, a low brick wall separating the building from the street has gone and the grounds are no longer being tended. By 2014, most of the trees behind the building have been cut down – not yet the acacia – and fencing has gone up with the Lendlease logo. A few months later, the building has been demolished, replaced by construction equipment and Portakabins. Next spring, the acacia still stands, but without leaves. A hoarding in front of the dead tree says: ‘Welcome to Elephant Park’. Another year, and the bare ground is ready for construction; all that’s left of the acacia is a stump. In October 2016, cranes appear, all traces of the acacia gone. In May 2018, a building is rising; by September 2020, it’s finished, a skinny ziggurat in two-tone brick; by 2024, tall apartment blocks have risen up on either side of it, and a newly planted tree is growing from a cutout in the pavement.
There are a lot of figures in housing stories, and a confusing number of different forms of tenure – secure council tenancy, housing association social rent, housing association affordable rent. Of all of them, council tenancies are the most prized. First, because they’re the cheapest by a huge margin. The average monthly rent for a two-bed council home in Southwark is £559, versus £2306 for the equivalent on the open market. Second, council tenancies can be passed on, once, to another member of the original tenant’s household.
By the time I spoke to Flynn this year, the 1200 council houses on the Heygate Estate were long gone, the residents dispersed. In their place, Lendlease has built nearly 2700 homes, overwhelmingly for various kinds of private ownership, but with a small number of affordable homes. According to Flynn, of all the tenants expelled (many left earlier), only 42 eventually moved into Elephant Park and the sixteen smaller sites, which were built much later.
Those who survived did retain the right to return until the last of the new sites was belatedly finished. The council, the housing associations and the developers are now well on the way to creating a new town centre at Elephant and Castle, and have built thousands of private homes; they’ve also built almost as many affordable homes as were lost on the Heygate site. ‘My response would be: look, this has been going on now over thirty years and you’ve only just succeeded in replacing what we had when we started out, and you haven’t replaced them, because these are social rented homes,’ Flynn said. ‘And there is a big difference between council housing and social rented housing.’
Against the heavily caveated promise of a future profit share with Lendlease, it was the council that demolished its own flats in the mid-2010s, selling the site to the developers at a loss. The local politician who has probably attracted the most odium for the death of the Heygate Estate is Peter John, who became the Labour council leader after the party won Southwark back in 2010. He signed the final deal with Lendlease and led the council’s fight to buy out the homeowners. He remains a strong supporter of regeneration, although he told the Guardian in 2015 that ‘if the opportunity ever arose again to clear out a whole estate, you wouldn’t do it. It’s not the right way to regenerate. It’s terrible.’
The council leader when the estate was prematurely cleared of tenants was John’s predecessor, Nick Stanton of the Liberal Democrats. In 2010, with demolition of the Heygate poised to begin, he spoke at a networking event for planners, developers and architects. He delivered a swaggering historical account of the case for regeneration. ‘The more that Southwark Council said we’re poor, we’re miserable, you wouldn’t want to live here, the more people agreed and didn’t. The more we said it was Thatcher’s fault and she should give us money, she didn’t. And generally speaking, we were beginning to get sucked into a spiral of decline. And in the early 1990s ... we stopped being a South London borough with our back to the river, and we started to think of ourselves as a Central London borough, respectable. We came up in the world ... We faced and embraced the river, and actually, we wanted a slice of that Central London action.’
I met Stanton at a Colombian café on the Old Kent Road. The cost of refurbishing the Heygate, he said, would have been so large that Southwark would have been able to do nothing else while it was being done. ‘This was the arcane high priesthood of housing finance,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t get subsidy ... to build stock that was replacing stock that was going to be demolished, so it’s very difficult to actually fund these new builds.’ He fell back on the circular argument that the buildings were deteriorating because they’d cut back on repairs, they’d cut back on repairs because the buildings were due to be demolished, and the deterioration made demolition more urgent.
‘There are council meetings Jerry Flynn never talks about, where people from the Heygate would come along holding rusty pipework which had fallen off, or there’d be people stuck on the thirteenth floor when the lift wasn’t working. In the end, we said: “We can’t wait for all this new housing to come forward first, as promised. We’re going to have to get on and, horrid word, decant you now, because we cannot allow you to go on living in these conditions.”’ Labour should have looked after it better, he told me. ‘Everyone had the chance to stay in Southwark, if that’s what they wanted to do. There was no mass cleansing.’
Earlier this year I cycled to the Aylesbury Estate, where tall new affordable blocks with views of Burgess Park are being built. Most of the estate is still as it was, unregenerated, badly cared for, in the same style as the Heygate, a mixture of smaller blocks and gigantic oblong stacks containing hundreds of flats. I met two women, Brenda and Marie, who live at opposite ends of a row of two-storey houses, built in brick with a concrete frame, with gardens and deep balconies. Marie had lived there since 1979, Brenda since 1969. Their flats have been earmarked for demolition, but they’ve no idea when it’s going to happen. After the collapse of the council’s deal with Notting Hill Genesis, they’ve been told it could be another fourteen years. For now they’re classed as comfortably housed, with no chance of having a bid accepted for another council property. Marie moved to London from Yorkshire when she was fifteen. She’s 71 now and lives with her son, a postman. She used to work at BHS in Oxford Street. ‘I’ve always lived in South London and the estates don’t bother me,’ she said. The new affordable homes, she told me, were small, with thin walls, no storage and no gardens even for ground-floor flats. ‘I don’t mind rich people being in Southwark at all,’ she said. ‘I’m not snobbish in that way. What does bother me is council tenants pushed into new build properties, or pushed out.’
The estate lacked menace in the sunshine, but there is a complex geography of residence and dereliction: here washing hung out to dry and people coming and going; there barren grey-brown textured panels and broken windows. I rode up a ramp to one of the walkways running along the outside of a big block, the Wendover, which once would have housed more than a thousand people. A court closure order warned it was illegal to be there without an accompanying police officer unless visiting one of a dozen flats that had been bought under Right to Buy. I only found one person at home, who said he didn’t own the flat, and didn’t want to chat. Each of the other flats had been welded shut with a panel of solid steel, its number scarred onto the surface with the tip of a welding rod.
Just a glide along the walkway, in a smaller but otherwise very similar block at right angles to the Wendover, there was habitation, foot traffic, a postman leaving a parcel on somebody’s mat. I got talking to Faith, who lives in a large garden flat with three bedrooms – the kind that never comes up – with her three sons. She was pleased the council put her there three years ago, she told me. ‘The moment I got inside, it doesn’t look like the outside at all,’ she said. ‘It’s bigger, there’s a big garden and the kids have a lot of space to play.’ Still, she’d rather live somewhere else. Her main complaint was what she called ‘disturbances’. ‘Sometimes we hear the police chasing them, and just the other day I had a little domestic violence issue ... a little calmer would be fine.’ Sometimes they have mould in the bathroom, but the council comes along and paints over it.
Faith and her family live in a council flat and Faith pays rent to the council. And yet the council doesn’t recognise them as its tenants. As far as the council is concerned, they’re in the same category as Misgina: British citizens, statutorily homeless. The council could move them somewhere else at any time: the building is still, nominally, scheduled to be knocked down one day. It’s a remarkable failure of the British state. Faith works full-time as an NHS nurse, her sons are at state schools and they’re living in a flat built and maintained by the local arm of the British state. Yet somehow, they’re homeless, and the building eternally due to be knocked down and replaced, without the money or plan to see it through.
I asked Reginald Popoola, the Green councillor who became Southwark’s social housing lead in May, why they’d put Faith in the Aylesbury.† It turns out that housing homeless families in council properties without making them tenants has been standard practice for years. When the Heygate was evacuated, hundreds of homeless families were spirited away to other temporary accommodation. Later, I found out that one of my son’s friends at primary school is statutorily homeless and lives with her parents in the Aylesbury.
‘You are correct that there is a new pseudo-class of council tenants, but they are still statutorily homeless,’ Popoola told me. He was in the tricky position, as a newly elected insurgent, of both attacking and justifying Southwark Council. The stalled redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate had left ‘hundreds of voids’ – empty flats – and the council had been creative enough to fill them with homeless families. ‘There have historically been complaints about the council taking people from Peckham and throwing them into Pembrokeshire ... the council have to a certain extent refurbished these homes and kept people there while they continue to bid for a council house, but unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to have people in those homes for eight, nine, ten, eleven and thirteen and fifteen years.’ He said they weren’t made council tenants ‘primarily because those blocks are chronically unsafe’. But if they were chronically unsafe, I said, people shouldn’t be living there at all. ‘I completely agree,’ Popoola replied, ‘but unfortunately the council’s hands are tied. That’s why the council has been proactive in terms of emergency repairs. But we can’t do that in perpetuity.’
Popoola spoke idealistically of forming a common front across the country to pressure government to do more, to challenge developers, to commit to a revival of direct public funding for council housing. The Aylesbury, he believes, should have been renovated rather than consigned to destruction. At the same time, he inhabits a constrained universe in which the council owes a billion pounds on its housing account, struggles to build any new council houses and is obliged to partner with developers.
The Heygate story, which began with the demolition of badly kept, low-cost private housing from the 1870s and ended in the 2010s with the demolition of badly kept, low-cost public housing from the 1970s, might seem separate from Berkeley’s plans for Peckham. For Jerry Flynn, they belong to the same history of broken promises, and he won’t support them. ‘You said you were going to give us 35 per cent affordable housing, and now we’re only going to get 12 per cent. So we’ve no reason to believe anything that you say,’ was his message to Berkeley. ‘Why should we care? They’re not for us. You know, no more than you care for us, why should we care for you? And why should we care for the people coming and living here? It’s no good building us homes we can’t afford.’
Nick Stanton was an ally of the property developers, but defends his record in getting affordable housing built in Southwark. He told me about the day the late founder of Berkeley Homes, the self-made tycoon Tony Pidgley, who lived in a railway carriage as a child, came to his office. ‘He was a very brusque guy. He says, basically, “You’re bloody lucky to have Berkeley coming to you.” He slaps down a pad on the table: “This is what we’re going to be getting.”’ When Stanton pushed back, ‘Pidgley says, “You’re very poor,” and I say, “Yup, the seventh most deprived in England.” He says, “So you don’t want any affordable housing, then, so we’ll do 100 per cent private.” He was genuinely perplexed. “You’re already so completely poor. Why on earth do you want more housing for poor people?” And I was like, “You don’t understand, my casework is full of people that need housing. The only thing I can think of to say to them is that the next time a developer comes to do stuff, we’ll make sure they provide it, because that’s the only lever we have.”’
It was a different Berkeley project from the one in Peckham, and a different era. Berkeley, like all property developers in London, is now pushing the idea that local government is asking too much of them, that the already slow pace of London housebuilding could stop altogether if they’re compelled to build too many affordable homes. Sceptics point to the curious institution of the ‘viability study’, the convention by which property developers are allowed to claim that affordable housing which reduces their profit below 20 per cent is ‘unviable’. Developers have come to treat this guideline as if it were a law guaranteeing them a 20 per cent return, using opaque data to which the public has no access.
Imet Ann Lalic and Siobhan McCarthy of ACA, the main group campaigning against the Berkeley project, in a pub on Choumert Road, halfway between Bellenden Road and Rye Lane. Bellenden Road, site of a much earlier council-funded marriage of renovation and gentrification, now has independent boutiques, a free school, a bookshop, a wine shop, an artisanal butcher’s, a deli selling £7 sourdough loaves and a new fishmonger’s selling fresh oysters from a cart outside. As you go east, you pass large Georgian houses, an architect’s studio, a café spilling out onto the street. You come to a row of alms houses – an ancient and resilient form of affordable housing – and at the junction with Rye Lane, pass through an invisible membrane: this end of Choumert Road is home to Merciful God African Food Wholesale and Retail, the Delta Tavern Kitchen Nigerian Spice Café, Hair for Queens (By My Roial Ears), Suuyar, a street barbeque selling spiced grilled meat. Here and on Rye Lane are beauty shops that stay open late into the night, windows full of wigs and grocers selling stacks of yams. It is scruffy, chaotic, energetic, as wealthy modern cities so seldom are. There is a sense that commercial life, while full of stresses, inequalities and dodginess, is carried out horizontally, rather than controlled from above. ‘We are not what they call nimbys, in no way, shape or form,’ Lalic, one of the founders of ACA, told me. ‘I want [the site] to be developed, totally.’ But not as Berkeley proposed. ‘It just showed contempt.’
Lalic is a filmmaker who used to work on Grand Designs. She moved to Peckham after the death of her husband in 2019. She lives on an old, terraced street like Choumert Road. Berkeley’s plans horrified her. ACA raised a huge sum, £58,000 – £5000 more than it needed – to allow it to take part in the Berkeley planning inquiry as a third party, along with the developers and the council.
Many of the people I interviewed for this article used ‘gentrification’ and ‘regeneration’ interchangeably, but I felt this missed a useful distinction. Gentrification can be seen as a grassroots process, as students and artists looking for cheap housing move into an area with an existing working-class culture, establishing studios and music venues and bars, which draw in a wealthier clientele, encouraging businesses targeted at this demographic. Regeneration is different: a top-down process orchestrated by large, remote corporations and local authorities, concerned with volume and scale and order, and eager to tap into the same working-class culture that attracted gentrifiers, but in a way that confines and ultimately kills it.
The difficulty for profit-seeking regenerators such as Berkeley is that the gentrifiers got there first, and are trying to defend the Peckham they found every bit as fiercely as the working-class locals they consider, sometimes rightly, their friends and allies. The difficulty for abundance fans is that the constituency most likely to support Berkeley is impossible to rally, because it is made up of people who might live in the homes, but don’t know it yet, because the homes don’t exist.
‘When my parents were young, there weren’t that many non-white people here, so we’ve seen changes,’ said McCarthy, who lives in Nunhead. ‘When I was growing up, I think such a strong nickname for this area was Little Lagos. It’s really sad that it’s more like miniature Lagos now ... I see it becoming smaller, smaller, smaller.’
Lalic said Berkeley’s team at the inquiry failed to understand the campaigners’ concern for Peckham’s intangible heritage. They didn’t seem to understand their own market. ‘You’re building things that are gonna fuck up what people want to buy into.’
‘What if it was exactly the same design, but 100 per cent social housing?’ I asked.
‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Lalic.
‘It wouldn’t work,’ McCarthy said, ‘but I think a lot of people would stomach it, if it was 100 per cent.’
I asked Popoola, a strong opponent of Berkeley’s plans, the same question. ‘The answer,’ he said, ‘will always be yes.’
One afternoon I noticed Saulo Paul, one of Bellenden’s few black business owners, sitting outside his café, 139 Fika. He lives with his family in a flat on a regenerated development in Canada Water. He finds it soulless. I asked him whether it might not develop its own character, its own community, over time, but he couldn’t see it happening in those tall towers of young professionals, the little city of consumer individuals. If they built the Berkeley Homes development, he said, ‘you might get a migration of people that will come to Peckham, but all you’re going to do is just turn Peckham into another suburb, another little city.’
In the early 1980s, the journalist and later London mayoral candidate Christian Wolmar interviewed Charles Sawyer, the Southwark councillor who presided over the era of intense housebuilding in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘I regret the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I think the whole scale of what we did was mad. There was a feeling at the time that any development of less than a thousand dwellings wasn’t worth bothering about. Yet we could have built low-rise housing at only a slightly lower density on the same land.’
I’ve seen an extract from the interview being used to suggest Sawyer was trashing the entire council house programme. In fact, he was only talking about the Aylesbury Estate. He wasn’t recanting on the ideal of a decent home for everyone in Southwark. For all its errors, the council is still building houses, still trying to get it right. The picture varies according to what you take as your base year, and 2014 is the council’s preferred date, but it’s not nothing that since then it claims to have built or started building 3289 homes, against – according to central government figures – 2474 demolished and lost to Right to Buy. With the pro-council house Andy Burnham and John Healey in government, and a 35-year moratorium to be imposed on Right to Buy for new houses, the ideal has life.
Elizabeth Wyatt of HASL scolded me for referring to council housing as ‘subsidised’. I don’t think it’s stigmatising, but it’s true that other subsidised services tend to get called ‘subsidised’ less often: the railways, or the NHS, or schools, as if it’s only a subsidy when it’s communal funding for low-income people. The greater ideal, perhaps, is to make the state-assisted universalisation of housing seem normal.
Wyatt says that if Southwark were to build as many appropriate-sized homes as there are homeless households on its books, it could become the first council to solve its homelessness problem. But might zero homelessness not draw more people in from elsewhere? It would, I suggested, be quite an experiment.
‘I would really encourage them to try that experiment,’ Wyatt replied.
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