Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945–1995

Abstract

Southwark is a borough across the river from the City of London. Until late in the twentieth century, its Labour leaders used housing policy to prevent gentrification from flowing across its northern boundary. Nonetheless, at the turn of the century, Labour lost political control. Ethnicity became the dominant force in Southwark local politics; the wards that first turned against Labour were those dominated by the White working-class. This was by no means inevitable; rather, it was an unintended, and cruelly ironic, consequence of 50 years of social intervention designed to build social solidarity. Collective political action creates high levels of uncertainty about who will benefit; communities depend on trust to resolve this dilemma. But the narrow community that is capable of creating strong social capital will often be unwilling to share the benefits it creates. The restricted nature of the original housing programme (which favoured relatively 'respectable' families) was concealed by an ideology that rendered others invisible. When this consensus broke down, as slum-clearance families started to be allocated most of the new housing, prosperous working-class families started to move out of the borough. The new basis for access was the idea of 'rights'. But formal rights were hard to specify; claims based on long-residence (for example) could seem just to established families, but racist to newcomers. This lack of consensus provoked extensive attempts to circumvent the system. In addition, needs-based housing allocation of new rentals acted as a lens, focusing the worst-off families in areas with high rates of tenant turnover. Thus, different parts of the borough came to have sharply divergent interests. Competition for housing from immigrants with a different ethnic group acted as a highly salient marker of these conflicting interests, but did not cause them. Had different housing policies been adopted earlier, it is unlikely that the conflicts would have led to the emergence of ethnic politics in the 1990s.