https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n16/james-meek/what-kind-of-people-do-they-think-we-are Anyone would call Luwam Misgina’s place overcrowded, but according to the rules, it isn’t. She lives in a tiny one-bedroom flat in Camberwell, South London, with her three daughters, aged five, eight and eleven. They have one small living room, a cramped kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom where they all sleep. Misgina has a mattress on the floor, wedged up against bunk beds. The two younger girls sleep on the bottom bunk and the older, already beginning to fret about personal privacy, on the top one. With the help of government support for childcare, Misgina works ten hours a week as a cleaner; they otherwise rely on benefits. As the children get older she’ll be able to work more hours, but there’s little chance she’ll ever be able to afford to rent even a two-bedroom flat nearby on the open market and still have money left to feed and clothe herself and the girls.
Along with 23,000 other people in the London Borough of Southwark, Misgina and her family are on the waiting list for a particular kind of home whose cost is contributed to by both the national and the local community: a subsidised home, ideally a council house, with rent that, in this area, now averages about a quarter of market levels. Every week, Misgina bids for houses on the Southwark Council app. She needs three bedrooms, but often just one such home comes up in the whole of Southwark; some weeks it’s none at all. The closest she’s come in seven years is fifteenth place in the queue. Despite their cramped conditions, her family is only in the third most needy category. Children under ten are considered half a person by the overcrowding rules. When Misgina’s second daughter turns ten, the bureaucratic lens will see 3.5 people in the flat, instead of three, and the system might treat them with a little more urgency, but the housing pool will still be dry.
I sat in Misgina’s living room, a poster of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The flat is full of devotional imagery. One reason she wants to stay in the neighbourhood is that her church is here. It was a stifling day during one of the heatwaves that have smothered the city this summer. We could hear the children, just home from school, splashing and giggling in a cold bath. ‘I think about the health of the children all the time,’ she told me.
She and her children have legal status: they are British citizens, statutorily homeless. Southwark Council is bound by law to put a roof over Misgina’s head. More than four thousand households in the borough are in the same position. Across London, the number of families in temporary accommodation is 73,000, more than twice the number in 2011 – an estimated 210,000 people in all, nearly half of them children. In 1981, just after Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Act brought in the Right to Buy scheme, which signalled the start of the British state’s long, undeclared campaign against council housing, Southwark Council had 62,000 homes for a population of 210,000. Now around 315,000 people live in Southwark and the number of council houses has shrunk to 38,000. Over the past 45 years more than 21,000 council houses in the borough have been sold at bargain prices. Privatisation wasn’t the only agent of loss. Over the same period the council knocked down, or allowed developers to knock down, more council houses – almost five thousand – than it built. From the start of Right to Buy until 2004, the period when most council homes, including the nicest ones, were sold off, councils were prevented by central government from using more than a fraction of the proceeds of council house sales – usually no more than a quarter – to build new ones. Restrictions of various forms continued up until 2024.
What gives Misgina’s situation extra bite is that for all the years she’s been waiting for a council house, technically homeless, she’s been living in a council house – one that the council was obliged to sell to its tenants two decades ago. The government is paying her rent to the owners of a one-time council house. The state itself has become the tenant of capital.
While councils across Britain face similar housing emergencies, there’s something extreme about what’s happening in Southwark. Despite the reduction in council housing, Southwark, which changed hands in May’s local elections from Labour to a Green-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, is the country’s fourth largest municipal landlord, after Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Historically a poor and neglected part of South London, its proximity to the City and the West End has made it popular with middle-class strivers priced out of Hackney. It’s also the bastion of a multi-ethnic working class and an entry point for migrants looking for sanctuary, opportunity, or both.
Since 1997, housing associations have built nearly 5600 new homes in Southwark and converted another 1900. According to the government’s figures, the number of homes of all kinds in the borough has increased in the last 25 years from 107,000 to 147,000. On paper, this looks like housing supply running ahead of housing need. But some new homes are owned as investments, and don’t necessarily have residents; others are somebody’s second or third home. Much of the new housing is one and two-bedroom flats, and many of the borough’s bigger homes belong to elderly empty nesters or the well-off. Housing in the borough has never been less affordable.
I went to one of the meetings held by the campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth in a community hall near Elephant and Castle. A hubbub of voices, mainly those of women and children, filled the space, speaking many languages. The attendees gathered in groups at folding tables to share their stories of homelessness and temporary accommodation, and to learn how to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles between them and a secure, affordable place to live. ‘I guess recently there have been two hundred people at the support meetings,’ Elizabeth Wyatt, one of HASL’s founders, said when I met her again a few days later. ‘We had to close the group a year ago because of the sheer number of people coming ... We have a list of legal aid housing lawyers, but when I give it to them, I feel totally empty, because we know all the legal aid housing lawyers in London are at maximum capacity.’
On the map, Southwark forms an inverted triangle, with the base stretching along the south bank of the Thames from Tate Modern past London Bridge and Tower Bridge, Borough Market and the Shard, to the former docklands of Rotherhithe, Surrey Quays and Canada Water. It narrows to a point in the leafy expanses of Dulwich. In the middle, between the expensive riverside flats and restaurants of Bermondsey and Dulwich’s private schools and detached houses, lie contested zones of low wages and high incomes, prosperity and precarity, gentrification and decay: Peckham, Camberwell, Elephant and Castle, the Old Kent Road.
From the river, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, it’s a twenty-minute walk to the site of one of Southwark’s most notorious recent housing conflicts. Just east of the huge road junction at Elephant and Castle lies what is now known as Elephant Park, a mainly private estate of tall blocks of flats, shops and restaurants built by the Australian firm Lendlease. To make way for it, the Heygate Estate, built in the 1970s, was obliterated, destroying more than twelve hundred council homes. Not far away, to the south-east, is the Aylesbury Estate, an even larger council project built in the same era. In its prime, between 7800 and 10,000 people lived here, in 2758 flats and houses. Tony Blair came to the Aylesbury in 1997, shortly after he won power. In his speech, he addressed ‘what we all know exists: an underclass, if you like, of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose. Just as there are no no-go areas for today’s Labour Party, so I want there to be no no-hope areas in the new Britain that we want to create.’ In 2014, after several unsuccessful attempts to find the money to renovate Aylesbury’s seventy acres of concrete panels, walkways and green space, Southwark Council did a deal with the Notting Hill Housing Trust (now Notting Hill Genesis) to knock it down and rebuild it with a mixture of private and social housing. Earlier this year, with the project nowhere near complete, the council and NHG parted ways, leaving the remaining residents in limbo. The 35 Per Cent Campaign, which chronicles the erosion of Southwark’s public housing, reckons that £434 million in public funds has already been spent remaking the Aylesbury – more than twice the projected renovation cost.
From the Aylesbury Estate, you can cross Burgess Park and head up the long, shady, car-free cutting of the former Surrey Canal to Peckham. Here, on Rye Lane, on the site of a run-down shopping centre, the developer Berkeley Homes wants to build a dense cluster of blocks containing 867 homes, almost all for private sale or market rent. When Berkeley bought the site, it told the council that more than a third of the homes it wanted to build – 35 per cent, the minimum level set by the council – would be let at ‘affordable’ rents. Most of these would be let by a housing association at the same relatively low rents as council houses. But when it came to making its formal application, Berkeley changed its mind. It said 35 per cent was too much. The market had changed and 35 per cent wouldn’t make enough money. It could offer 12 per cent. Take it or leave it. The council, and the government planning inspector who ruled on Berkeley’s case, decided to leave it. (Berkeley is now trying to overturn the decision in the courts.)
On the face of it, the council, the many local people who object to the scheme and the inspector are standing up to a developer trying to shirk its obligations. (Although Berkeley wouldn’t answer my questions, it may be significant that the company slashed its affordable housing offer just after Labour came to power in 2024 promising to sweep away planning obstacles to new homes.) But what is happening in Peckham is more complex. Aylesham Community Action (ACA), the local campaign group leading the opposition to Berkeley, made the low amount of affordable housing on offer central to its case, but always paired it with a second argument: that the densely packed towers of the new development would loom over the creative, low-rise, ‘brutiful’ concrete jumble of central Peckham, killing its charm and stealing its light. The two arguments were always in tension with each other. If the scheme was rejected on the basis of one argument, what would become of the other?
Although the inspector rejected Berkeley’s plan, he dismissed the idea that the company had done anything wrong in cutting back on affordable housing. The substance of his decision was aesthetic, heritage-related and almost wholly architectural, glossing over the campaigners’ less tangible fears of the threat to the Peckham vibe. He gave great weight to the handsome clock tower at the northern end of Rye Lane, the Venetian-inspired remnant of a long-lost department store. Berkeley’s towers, he wrote, ‘would rise cliff-like in the townscape ... monolithic and unrelenting ... The circumstances of the case do not lead me to accept new housing and other associated betterments at all costs.’
The inspector thus laid ACA, and local residents more generally (the planning application had prompted more than two thousand mainly hostile responses), open to accusations of nimbyism from the lobbyists, think tankers and online hip-shooters who’ve made a creed out of the idea that Britain’s housing and infrastructure problems are the fault of selfish, small-minded enemies of progress, enabled by a network of unaccountable, newt-cradling, bat-coddling, heritage-obsessed quangos. But while those accused of nimbyism for trying to save a charming vista of cornfields and golden-stone cottages are usually given a little respect, Peckham’s resistance to Berkeley’s squadron of towers was seen as comedy material. On X, critics posted pictures of the fugly shopping centre on the Berkeley site, suggesting that this was the heritage Berkeley’s opponents wanted to save. Photos of a nearby 1930s shopping arcade that’s in the middle of being knocked down, to no local outcry, were posted as if to show the depth of dereliction and decay to which Peckham had fallen.
Critics presented the rejection of the Berkeley plan as an act of self-harm by a borough that is desperately short of homes. Members of Britain Remade, a national campaign group led by, among others, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and the former head of policy at the Adam Smith Institute, cited the case as proof that ‘it is too hard to build things’ in the UK. In an op-ed for City AM Jeremy Driver, Britain Remade’s head of campaigns, said the cost of property had forced him to leave Peckham, where he had lived for nine years, for a home further from Central London. ‘This was not a choice between 77 affordable homes and a better scheme with hundreds more,’ he wrote. ‘It was a choice between 77 affordable homes and none.’
Britain Remade’s argument is that if developers are allowed to build the houses they want to build on land they own, for sale or rent on the free market, the net number of homes increases. Misgina wouldn’t be able to buy or rent one of the £750,000 three-bedroom flats Berkeley wants to build. But somebody would. That somebody would move out of their current home, which would then be available for somebody else. Households would sort themselves according to their means along the chain of accommodations, from luxurious to cheap, but crucially, the chain itself would lengthen. Eventually there would be so many new houses that prices and rents would fall, and somewhere at the cheap end of the chain, Misgina and her family would find a home.
The abundance notion, the idea that a diabolical alliance of blinkered regulators and local nimbys is artificially holding back a flood of private housing (a view much supported by private housebuilders), has long been prevalent in British political discourse, if not by that name. It buttresses Manchester’s acceptance of developers throwing up tower after residential tower in the city centre without any affordable housing. When Starmer spoke of building 1.5 million new homes he assumed the electorate would understand that his government had neither the intention nor the means to do any such thing. He thought we all understood that the private sector and the housing associations would build the homes because his government would remove the red tape holding back the builders. Hence the general surprise, and disgust from those who support the abundance argument, when the Berkeley Homes scheme was rejected.
The abundance movement has useful things to say about how hard and expensive it is to build things such as power plants and railways in the UK, and on paper their case for housing is logical. Build more houses and housing costs and homelessness should fall. But there are a number of flaws in the theory, especially if a country relies on commercial firms to build houses. Does history show that commercial interests inevitably favour plenty over scarcity? How likely is a builder to keep going at top speed when a price drop is approaching? When most people talk about ‘housing demand’, they mean that people need a place to live. When commercial housebuilders use the term, they mean a willingness among buyers to pay a price that protects their profit margin, justifies how much they paid for the land and keeps their investors happy. Demand can thus be high (people need to be housed) and low (people can’t afford the prices) at the same time.
When I spoke to David O’Leary, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, a few months after Starmer took office, he was enthusiastic about Labour’s efforts. ‘What the government has done so far is more than we could have expected them to have done. They’ve rewritten the planning system in a hundred days ... they’ve gone as far as talking about development on parts of the Green Belt.’ And yet, almost two years later, the numbers are weak. Andy Burnham has replaced Starmer with nearly three years of Labour’s term left to run, but at the present rate the government will miss its target by half a million.
Another problem with abundance theory in this context is that a new house or flat is an object fixed to a particular location, and that location determines its value more than the size or grandeur of the house. There might be some truth in the idea that if a £750,000 flat is built in Peckham, its new occupant creates a vacancy elsewhere, and so on down the chain, until there is a home that Misgina and her children can afford. But if the market is the only builder, that home won’t be in Peckham or Camberwell. It probably won’t be in London; it might not even be in Britain. Indeed, if location isn’t an issue, there is no housing deficit. In England, there are plenty of three-bedroom homes for rent at the same rate as Misgina’s little flat in Camberwell. They just happen to be on the outskirts of former mill towns in Lancashire.
There’s no need to imagine a grand plan or conspiracy to see that a process is underway in Southwark which is, and has been for some time, squeezing out people who have little ready money, forcing them further and further from the centre, redefining the borough as a place where only the wealthy can hope to live. A couple of generations ago, private capital judged Southwark undesirable, irredeemably left-wing, unruly and poor; it’s fair to say that many in Southwark regarded private capital with the same jaundiced eye. Rye Lane still has many perma-shuttered and neglected shop fronts. But now that Southwark has become desirable, the patches of neglect are placeholders for the chains and high-end outlets the landlords expect to move in and pay higher rents when some version of the Berkeley development eventually gets built. To describe this as gentrification, as regeneration, as social cleansing, is valid, but none of these terms quite captures the force of a process that’s not only hard to resist but hard to avoid participating in. Its effects can be traced from the Heygate Estate, through the Aylesbury, to the Berkeley Homes project – the estate that was destroyed, the estate in limbo and the estate yet to be built – and one of its most prominent manifestations has to do with children.
My partner and I moved into a terraced house in Nunhead, on the edge of Peckham, a couple of blocks from the southern end of Rye Lane, just before the pandemic. A few minutes’ walk away, close to the railway arch that features in the opening shots of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, there’s a disused, fairly modern building – nothing remarkable, just two low brick wings flanking a glazed atrium under a metal shell roof, with a little car park at the front. On one wall is a mosaic of a crucifix in flowery downland, surrounded by children, with a rainbow in the background. The lettering on the border reads ‘Trust – Compassion – Peace – Forgiveness – Love – Wonder – Honesty – Unique – Hope – Thankfulness’. The site is surrounded by steel mesh bearing placards from a security company. This is St Mary Magdalene Church of England Primary School, which closed last year for lack of children. Across the borough seven other primary schools have closed in the past five years. At my son’s school, a second campus built to accommodate what were expected to be four classes in each year is about to close, with the school shrinking back to two classes per year on a single site.
British people are having fewer children but the drop in Southwark and other inner London boroughs is especially pronounced. Across England and Wales, between the censuses of 2011 and 2021, the number of under-fives fell by 8 per cent. In Southwark, it was 21 per cent. A Greater London Authority report in 2024 said some inner London boroughs had lost up to 45 per cent of under-elevens in a decade. The fall is attributed in large part to an exodus of young low-income families who can’t afford a place to live. ‘Inner London still has a high proportion of social housing compared to, for example, the centre of Paris,’ the authors of the report write:
But insufficient provision of new social housing, occurring in the context of an overall lack of new housing supply, has led to a shortage of affordable housing in inner London compared to a decade ago ... The consequent movement of lower-skilled, lower-income workers into outer London and beyond is changing the distribution of poverty (its ‘suburbanisation’) and of schoolchildren.
For every Luwam Misgina, hanging on in the hope of a bigger house she can afford, there are others who have given up and moved away.
In the history of working-class housing in Southwark, children repeatedly appear as a wild, unbiddable, tragic multitude, exposing the flaws in idealistic, underfunded projects for accommodating the poor. The tenements erected in the 1870s on the site where the Heygate was built, the Palatinate Estate, were part of the ‘model dwellings’ movement, a queasy mix of altruism, charity and capitalism that aimed to build large blocks of flats for the families of artisans judged sufficiently ‘respectable’. Not long after the tenements were built, children began falling to their deaths. In 1883, four-and-a-half-year-old Maud Nodel fell sixty feet down a stairwell. The inquest found such deaths had happened before; despite complaints, the builders and landlords, cousins called Frederick Sutton and John Dudley, hadn’t bothered to child-proof the banisters. Worse were the Palatinates’ flat roofs, designed to be used by women to dry their washing and surrounded by a low wall and railings, broken in places, easy to scale by bold children aiming to show their mettle by balancing on the narrow parapet on the far side. When in 1903 an inquest was held into the death by falling from the roof of six-year-old Joseph Ward, the coroner learned it was the ninth such death in six years. Repeated appeals to Sutton and Dudley had achieved nothing. The coroner asked the firm’s local rent collector: ‘Has nothing been done?’ ‘Not in my time,’ the collector answered. The coroner threatened dire consequences if it happened again. Eight months later, the company escaped penalty after an attempt to prosecute it for the death of another boy failed. It was praised by the judge for its generosity in offering the boy’s mother £5. The unnamed boy, ‘six or seven years of age’, had tried to jump the eighteen-inch gap between two tenements, and didn’t make it.
In Housing for the Poor?, his 1975 account of the history of Southwark council housing, the future head of Shelter, Neil McIntosh, wrote of children as an infestation. One estate, he wrote, showed ‘clear signs of excessive numbers of children such as paint sprayed on most of the walls even round the front doors to individual flats’. A few years later he told the Evening News: ‘There are far too many children on the [Aylesbury] estate. A couple of years ago 40 per cent of the people were under eighteen and that puts a pressure on the social fabric that it cannot take.’ Even before the estate was finished, in 1971, residents reported teenage vandals breaking windows and smashing new bathrooms in homes that weren’t yet ready for their first tenants.
In 2000, a ten-year-old boy, Damilola Taylor, was stabbed with a broken bottle near Peckham Library by two other boys, aged twelve and thirteen. His killers, members of the Young Peckham Boys gang, were eventually convicted of manslaughter. Taylor lived on the North Peckham Estate, part of a vast mosaic of five council estates that lay between Peckham Road and Burgess Park. His killers didn’t live there, and the regeneration of all five estates had already begun, but this didn’t prevent the press from indulging in the familiar evocation of feral children running wild in the underlit canyons of low-cost housing. How to get rid of these troublesome children? Perhaps it was only a matter of raising the rents.
There’s a relationship between the way the enemies of privately rented slums and of mass social housing have talked about these two forms of tenure over the last 150 years: in each case, the buildings themselves have been characterised as the problem, as though the tenants’ difficulties would go away if their environment was destroyed and replaced, rather than the problem being that the tenants were poor and the buildings not looked after.
Damilola Taylor’s murder fed into the media and folk narrative that the council blocks of the 1960s and 1970s, with their raised concrete walkways and monolithic towers – ‘monolithic’ is always the epithet here – generated crime and vandalism. Antisocial behaviour resulted from antisocial architecture. The American architect Oscar Newman argued that successful architecture offered its users ‘defensible space’, while the British geographer Alice Coleman surveyed 4099 blocks of flats and decided the problems of social housing had less to do with underfunding, unemployment or poverty than bad design: people just weren’t meant to live in flats.
Although the Southwark Labour Party defended the idea of council housing in the 1980s, it didn’t always remember that its tenants would rather not have their homes presented to the world as a chronic affliction they were obliged to bear. ‘On the Heygate Estate at the Elephant and Castle the tower blocks are slabs, eleven storeys high and extraordinarily ugly,’ Ann Ward, the Labour deputy leader of Southwark Council, told the Daily Express in 1981. ‘But there is far less vandalism than you might expect, partly because of the long, straight, open lines.’
Jerry Flynn runs the 35 Per Cent Campaign. He was a teenager on the Heygate Estate in the 1970s, when it was new. Not long ago he sent me a video by the Conservative housing spokesman, James Cleverly. Cleverly, in beige trousers and a blue blazer, a handkerchief tucked in the top pocket, addresses the camera as he strolls down one of the smart new alleys of Elephant Park, past sleek blocks of biscuit-coloured brick. ‘This is Heygate Street, which runs through the heart of what used to be the Heygate Estate in Southwark, just around the corner from Elephant and Castle,’ he says. ‘And for anyone my age who grew up in South-East London, the Heygate Estate was a byword for urban failure.’ Here he extends his pinkie, but before he can begin counting off the Heygate’s sins on his fingers, we’re shown some stills of the estate on the eve of demolition, looking its worst. ‘Ugly. Crumbling. Crime-ridden. It was everything that went wrong with postwar planning. But look now!’ The camera pans across the brick apartments, augmented with a tentative fringe of ivy. ‘It’s been torn down and rebuilt, with buildings that are better quality, probably higher density, and create a much more pleasant urban environment.’
People watching the clip could be forgiven for thinking that the former tenants of the Heygate had been temporarily moved out and returned to lovely new flats, rather than summarily evicted from the area, while most of the new flats were privately let or sold on the open market for hundreds of thousands of pounds to people who had no connection to the community. When the Heygate fell, so did the idea that society as a whole might share part of its collective wealth to allow people who aren’t well off to go on living in the heart of London.
Ifirst met Jerry Flynn at a demo against plans to redevelop the Old Kent Road – not against new homes and businesses on this tired section of the old pilgrim way, the main thoroughfare from London to Canterbury, but against the way it’s being done. The protesters had set up a stage against the Michael Faraday memorial (the scientist was born nearby), a house-sized, dimpled stainless steel box in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout. Flynn was one of the first to address the crowd. A lean, undemonstrative man in his seventies, he has a determined, plain way of speaking. He described Berkeley Homes’ Peckham plans and its even bigger project on the Old Kent Road, where a development of 1400 flats and houses has gone from 40 per cent affordable to 12 per cent. In another part of Southwark, Canada Water, British Land promised 35 per cent, now cut to 9 per cent. ‘Developers who promised 35 per cent affordable housing are now saying, “Sorry, we can’t do it. It’s not viable anymore,”’ Flynn told the crowd. ‘What this really means is it’s just not making enough profit anymore.’
The protesters took up their banners and headed off towards the Old Kent Road. It was a buzz to have the traffic stopped so we could walk along the grungy old flyover; the rough concrete panels echoed the walls of the system-built Heygate. But to get there the march had to pass Elephant Park and its brightly coloured new towers. ‘What do we want? Council houses! When do we want them? Now!’ ran a ragged chorus. ‘Homes for people, not profit!’ The towers of Elephant Park looked down, smart, untroubled, untouchable.
I went back to Elephant Park a few days later to meet Flynn in a café filled with earnest young people on laptops. He’s a librarian by profession, a working-class intellectual. His 35 Per Cent blog is part archive, part narrative, part polemic, part journalism, an essential resource for anyone trying to understand the story of housing in Southwark this century. He moved out of the Heygate Estate to the council flat where he now lives in 1981, but his parents and his uncle Felim, Irish immigrants, stayed in their home until their deaths, leaving one of his brothers as the last remaining Flynn on the estate. Their two-storey maisonettes had three bedrooms and a garden. Listening back to my recording of his affectionate, downbeat account of the family home, it occurred to me how narrow the idea of council estate life is for those who haven’t experienced it: the stylish architectural design, the promo shots of new buildings, the journalist’s melodrama of social entropy, the actual TV drama – many gritty segments were shot on the Heygate and the Aylesbury, with the fees going to Southwark Council – and how rare it is to see inside.
Flynn told me his mother had been dismayed to find herself diminished in the eyes of society just because she lived on a council estate. ‘My mother became progressively more upset, I guess, at the way council tenants were portrayed. When we moved onto a council tenancy, there was no stigma about being a council tenant. None whatsoever. People wanted to become council tenants. By the time we moved off, it was quite the opposite, and it did distress my mum. What kind of people do they think we are? You know, she’d read these stupid articles in the Mail and that. She was pretty outraged by it. She knew it bore no relation whatsoever to the kind of life she or her neighbours lived.’
We talked about the motivations for estate regeneration. ‘They were made up of three elements, if you like: distaste for the way the place looks, distaste for the people who live on it and distaste for the whole idea of council housing. With effort, with imagination and with investment, what could have been done? I don’t know whether it could have been fully refurbished, but maybe it could have.’
In the early Victorian era, the propertied classes came to feel guilt, horror and fear towards the industrial cities that were the source of their new prosperity. Guilt at the human misery; horror at the squalor of the factory towns; fear of the mob. A greater fear, and the catalyst for change, was of infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera. The impulse to house working families in more sanitary conditions, indeed the eventual development of an interventionist, supervisory state, drew on philanthropic and evangelical sentiments, but derived its urgency from a primal fear of fatal infection. Philanthropic housebuilding organisations appeared, supplementing the market’s overcrowded dwellings with blocks of flats for working families. It was a form of architecture the English struggled to comprehend. ‘One hardly knows ... what to think of them,’ one observer wrote on seeing the first examples, four-storey blocks in Birkenhead, completed in 1847. ‘They are not rows of cottages containing two or three rooms each, fronted and backed by gardens. They are not scattered cottages, speckling a valley or the side of a hill, like so many of our pretty, old English villages. On approaching them ... they appear more like houses for the upper classes of society; and we feel puzzled how to associate them with the requirements and limited wants of a working population.’
The Birkenhead flats are gone, but a near contemporary block from 1850 remains, a stone’s throw from the LRB offices in Bloomsbury. Now owned by the Peabody housing association, it bears the inscription ‘Model Houses for Families’. They were known as model dwellings because their philanthropic patrons wanted to provide a pattern of space and comfort at low rents that other enlightened developers could copy. But there was a limit to their philanthropy: to finance the work, they had to get investors, and for that, they had to offer a return, usually between 4 and 5 per cent, a lower rate than you could get by putting your money into something less virtuous.
In the 1870s, when the six-storey Palatinate Estate went up near Elephant and Castle, they were called model dwellings by journalists, but there’s little evidence of idealism on the part of the builders, or philanthropy on the part of their lenders. Sutton and Dudley shrugged off the deaths of children, and in the same period, broken windowsills led to the death of at least one woman and the permanent disablement of another. The model dwellings were on their way to becoming slums. In 1901 the Bermondsey and Southwark Tenants’ Protection Leagues campaigned against Sutton and Dudley’s rent policies. The Labour radical Francis Soutter addressed raucous tenants’ meetings, complaining that behind the ‘fresh paint that adorned the outer walls’ of the Palatinate Estate lay ‘dark staircases and dismal well holes, back yards entered through prison-like gates, ashes and house refuse of the most offensive character being allowed to lay about everywhere’. And yet these same buildings stood for another seventy years, barely refurbished, gaining layers of soot. During their last days they served as a location for the 1967 film Poor Cow, made by Ken Loach, whose TV play about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, inspired the creation of Shelter. Joy, played by Carol White, is filmed taking her baby up onto the roof. Soon afterwards, the slum was demolished to make way for the Heygate. In the Loach film, the Palatinate tenements, filmed from the back, look grimy, the interiors archaic. They also look like the old Thames warehouses that have since been converted into expensive apartments. But few wore gentrifying goggles in those days.
By September 1968, when Southwark Council drew up the planning brief for the Heygate Estate, London had been building council houses at a clip for decades. Wartime bombing had left 116,000 houses destroyed or unrepairable. Many slums had been demolished or were scheduled for demolition, leaving people to be rehoused. But despite block after block of new social housing, it seemed to the confident, self-consciously modernising state of the 1960s that there was much more to do. London was running to keep still. Homelessness was high. Immigrants, particularly immigrants of colour, struggled to find homes. Overcrowding was rampant. Trust in private landlords was low. A parliamentary report on housing in London described a landlord chalking lines on the floor of a room to divide it into separate lettings. The same report found that in Greater London in 1961 there were more than half a million households ‘without even shared use of a bathroom’.
The Heygate was built by Southwark Council, rather than by the better-resourced Greater London Council.* The estate was ambitious in scale, but not in budget: the aim was simply to house a large number of people quickly and cheaply. The Palatinate and the rest of the old neighbourhood were levelled and work began using the 12M Jespersen system, a pre-cast concrete panel. One detail in the planning brief betrays a paternalistic, almost parental anxiety: ‘Laundries are good places for encouraging social contacts; they should be situated close to other social areas, shops etc.’ But it’s a rare moment. You can see why architects found these briefs frustrating. There’s no vision or idealism on the council’s part. The Heygate brief deals with numbers, percentages, persons, units. Under the heading ‘Design of Dwellings’ there are 44 words, saying, in essence: ‘Here are the government’s space standards. You can make the flats bigger if you like, but it mustn’t cost too much.’ The borough architect who led the team that realised the brief, Tim Tinker, told Rowan Moore that he bitterly regretted the council’s decision to save money by abandoning the planned balconies. ‘Planners laid it down and we did it,’ he said. ‘All they wanted was housing. The political parties were outbidding each other to build the most ... We never set out to build a utopia. That’s a nonsense; we were trying to do the best we could. The fundamentals, in my book, were correct. People would give their right arm for these living conditions. It was a place near to the centre where you can park your car, it was quiet – it was unbelievable.’ The Heygate had just over 1200 flats. I compared the size of one of its two-bed flats to one of the new two-bed flats at Elephant Park, on the market, at the time of writing, for £720,000. The council flat was bigger.
Flynn and his family lived a few blocks away from the Palatinate. ‘We thought, well, at least we don’t live there.’ But the flat his family rented privately in a terraced house opposite a bomb site wasn’t ideal either. The flats didn’t have front doors: other tenants went past his family’s living room to get to their flats by the common stair. There was no kitchen, only a cooker on the landing. There was a toilet, but no bathroom. ‘We washed in the sink. And occasionally, when we were young, my mum got out one of those galvanised tubs in the back room. But my father and mum, they used the local public baths.’ Flynn’s parents slept in one bedroom, Uncle Felim and the three boys in three beds in the other. ‘I guess when you’re young, everything’s normal. We didn’t think of ourselves as being deprived.’
The family hesitated when they got the offer of a flat in the Heygate: ‘In those days, the council house was a step up. The rent was higher.’ When they moved in, ‘the first impressions were, you know, wow, this is much better than we had ... I’m not sure there was any idealism. There was an idea that’ – he laughed at having to state the obvious – ‘that there should be decent housing for people! And it was something that people should feel entitled to, and the council should provide that, and that is how it should be.’
And yet the Heygate, and the Aylesbury, built at about the same time, had deep problems. The central heating and hot water system in the tower blocks kept breaking down. There was vandalism and littering. There were long waits for repairs. There was crime. The elevated walkways, and the endless up and down of ramps and stairs, got on people’s nerves. Coleman may have been blinkered in her ideas, but her notion of ‘confused space’, areas of a communal property that nobody takes responsibility for, is a recognisable one. ‘There used to be the usual antisocial behaviour, as it’s called now, people playing loud music or having rows or that kind of thing,’ Flynn said. ‘But you regarded that as just life, really, not anything that necessarily makes you think, well, we’ve got to get out of here.’
Underlying the dilapidation of the Heygate and the Aylesbury were a series of miscalculations by Southwark Council. In 1977, it prepared to call time on its house-building programme. There were doubts over the pace at which the borough had moved. One councillor later described the mood as a ‘sort of religious fervour ... The only effective and coherent policy ... was to knock down the whole of the borough and build a sparkling new borough.’ There was concern that, as one council document put it, ‘to be restricted from access to council housing in Southwark is for most people tantamount to being restricted from all housing in Southwark.’ The change in Southwark’s population in the decades before the middle-class influx wasn’t simply a case of immigrants arriving, but of people leaving, and not just because they couldn’t get the right council house, or because they didn’t like immigrants – although that played a part for some – but because they wanted to buy a big house with a garden, and in those days city councils were as likely to be knocking down that kind of property as building it.
Southwark had built so many council houses that it forecast a surplus by 1981 – more homes than people needed. This seemed a reasonable bet, since the population of the borough had fallen every decade since 1901, when almost 600,000 people lived there. By the 1971 census, it had dropped to 262,000, and was still falling. The council thought it could focus on repair and renovation; it wasn’t as if the money needed to keep the operation running was going to stop dead.
Then two things happened. The population started going up, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. It’s notorious that the Conservatives enacted the Right to Buy rules in a way that was highly damaging to the foundations of communally financed housing. What’s less well known is quite how many ways the Conservatives found after 1979 to crush the nascent prospect of housing as a universal national service. And Southwark, with its preponderance of council homes, was particularly vulnerable.
As it built new estates, the council budgeted for their maintenance. But the radical step of creating dense new town-sized communities at low cost, using unfamiliar materials and design principles, left the council with hefty liabilities. Money ought to have been spent righting the inevitable mistakes in their design and, after a certain number of decades, renovating the estates. Neither expenditure was planned for.
Another area of vulnerability was debt. To finance the construction of council houses, the government enabled cheap loans, but although they were cheap, they weren’t free: when the Heygate and Aylesbury were planned, the council could have expected to pay around 5 per cent interest. But the great inflation of the 1970s, which would melt away the debt of some councils that had begun to wind up their housebuilding, hit those who went on building hard. In 1975, Southwark warned that it was having to pay twice as much in debt repayments for each council home as it collected in rent. Housing debt overall had increased fourfold in ten years. ‘The key thing that made the difference is how much housing you built in the 1970s,’ Matthew Warburton of ARCH, a grouping of councils which still own estates, told me. ‘Because that was the expensive stuff.’
To maintain its housing stock and pay down its debt the council drew on rents, rates and government support. When Thatcher came to power, each came under attack. It’s hard to describe the assault as anything but punitive, although it stretched out over decades, long after she stepped down. The best houses were picked off through Right to Buy. Councils were prevented from using most of the proceeds to build new houses, and the premature forced liquidation of precious communal assets went, in large part, towards paying off long term debt. Municipalities began to bleed affordable property with no way to replace it. Grants to build new council houses or transform existing estates were diverted to housing associations. The government stopped councils using the rates, elected local government’s only means of raising money directly, to cross-subsidise council housing. At the same time, maintenance funds were slashed. In 1979, Southwark had a budget of £60 million to maintain its 36,000 homes. By 1987, it had inherited homes from the abolished GLC, bringing the number up to 62,000, but the maintenance budget had been cut to £28.5 million. Taking inflation into account, the council was trying to keep its vast estate from crumbling with less than a third of the old budget.
Councils that had wound down their house building early, benefited from inflation and gone into surplus weren’t rewarded: they were punished by the Treasury, which effectively plundered their rents. A late 2000s effort by John Healey, then Gordon Brown’s housing minister, to offer councils a new housing deal – reconfiguring debt and letting councils finance their housing stock via rents – was crushed by George Osborne’s austerity regime in the 2010s. Meanwhile government resources that could have been used to subsidise more affordable housing went instead towards subsidising private housebuilders through the Help to Buy scheme. The right-wing media, and a large proportion of the public, didn’t blame central government. They blamed the councils. They blamed the architects. They blamed the tenants. On the day she left Downing Street for the last time, Thatcher moved into a newly built house in Southwark, in a gated estate in Dulwich.
Until the Thatcher years, and for some time after she came to power, Southwark Council had been hostile to gentrification. Tony Ritchie, the borough’s Labour leader from 1984 to 1986, scorned the American actor Sam Wanamaker when he sought to build a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre close to where it originally stood, near Southwark Bridge. To the delight of Labour’s enemies, he said, according to the Sunday Times, that Shakespeare was ‘tosh’, a bold statement from a borough that features Hamlet on its coat of arms. Southwark resisted office building on the Thames, near the City; when the government gave a regeneration agency, the London Docklands Development Corporation, planning control over much of Bermondsey, and private money flooded in, Southwark at first stood aloof from that too. But in the mid-1980s, things began to change. Ritchie, embroiled in local party scandals, stepped down. The Labour leaders who followed thought it futile to fight Thatcher and her successors. They hired management consultants. Southwark went, in the eyes of government and developers, from incompetent rebel to regeneration golden child. Wanamaker got his Globe; Southwark got Tate Modern. Money, well-heeled youth and ambitious restaurateurs rushed into the north of the borough. Ctd....
on September 5, 2026, 11:30 am