The social cleansing of London council estates: everyday experiences of ‘accumulative dispossession’

Abstract

London’s council estates and their residents are under threat like never before. Council tenants are being forced out of their homes due to estate renewal, welfare reforms, poverty, and the precarity of low-income work. Social cleansing can be understood as a geographical project made up of processes, practices, and policies designed to remove council estate residents from space and place, what we call a ‘new accumulative form of (state-led) gentrification’. We outline these accumulative processes, practices and policies, but more importantly we present grounded, empirical evidence of council tenants and leaseholders’ everyday experiences of dispossession, focusing our lens on three south London boroughs identified as eviction hotspots.