Council Estate Research Articles

Bread-and-butter politics: Democratic disenchantment and everyday politics on an English council estate

Despite evidence of widespread disenchantment with formal politics among England's impoverished sectors, people on the margins continue to engage with elected representatives on their own terms. On English council estates (housing projects), residents mediate their experiences of an alien and distant political system by drawing local politicians into localized networks of support and care. While this allows residents to voice demands for “bread and butter,” personalized alliances with politicians rarely translate into collective action. The limits of one political party's bread-and-butter strategy highlight the precariousness of working-class movements at a time when the political Left has largely been dismantled. They also demonstrate the need to account for the lived realities of social class in aspirational narratives for “alternative” democratic futures. [democratic crisis, neoliberalism, voting, working-class movements, council estates, alternative democracies, United Kingdom]

‘Regeneration’ and ‘consultation’ at a Lambeth council estate

This article is an account of the experiences of two London leaseholders facing the loss of their homes as the result of the local council's regeneration programme. The article describes how by organising and working with other residents, they were able to bring a successful Judicial Review to force Lambeth Council to re-run their consultation which the Court had deemed unlawful. It also points to lessons learned and prospects for the future.

Complete control

Regeneration has for several years been the favoured term of developers and local authorities for house building programmes in London. Regeneration promises new homes in rejuvenated neighbourhoods. This article tells of how such promises were instead used to lever the residents of one south London council estate, the Heygate, from their homes, leaving the benefits of regeneration for the more affluent to enjoy. It is also a case study of how private developers profit from regeneration, without building homes that most people could actually afford to either rent or buy, and how they evade a local authority's planning requirements for affordable housing by means of secret financial reports, so-called ‘viability assessments’. Finally it briefly recounts how some local communities are starting to challenge this so-far unchallenged power that puts developer profit above the need for truly affordable housing.

Resisting gentrification on its final frontiers: Learning from the Heygate Estate in London (1974–2013)

The state-led gentrification and social cleansing of low income tenants from inner London has been ongoing since the late 1990s and continues today. Publicly owned and managed council estates have become the key target of what has been aptly labelled the 'new' urban renewal. Council estates are one of the final gentrification frontiers in London, housing low income tenants in the face of the total gentrification of the city. In this paper we focus on the resistance to gentrification that emerged in and around one of these estates: the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, inner London. The research and some of the activities discussed formed part of a Scholar- Activist project. We discuss three forms of resistance: local civil society network organising to support open master planning through active engagement with planning; self-organised activities to keep the estate open and accessible during the displacement of its residents; and the legal challenges to the Compulsory Purchase Order of the last remaining properties in the form of a CPO Public Inquiry. While unsuccessful in saving the estate from demolition, each form of resistance and their interrelation succeeded in exposing the degree to which the regeneration of Elephant and Castle and its centrepiece demolition of the estate, was/is not in the ‘public interest’ and in discrediting the local authority's ‘regeneration spin’.

One Tool Amongst Many: Considering the Political Potential of Neighbourhood Planning for the Greater Carpenters Neighbourhood, London

Currently within English planning literature there are polarizing debates about whether neighbourhood planning represents a politically useful tool for communities to utilize to challenge and shape top-down government development plans for their neighbourhood. One side of the debate optimistically presents neighbourhood planning as a radical and exciting opportunity for communities who wish to shape development plans for their locality. On the other side of the debate neighbourhood planning is denounced as a post-political governance technology which does not enable communities to meaningfully challenge and shape government development plans for their neighbourhood. This paper will engage with these competing perspectives whilst exploring how the Greater Carpenters Neighbourhood Forum (GCNF) are using neighbourhood planning to try and protect housing on the Carpenters Estate, a council estate in Stratford, east London. This paper begins by providing a brief introduction to community participation in planning in England. Subsequently, this paper discusses benefits and challenges communities face engaging with formal planning mechanisms before specifically exploring perspectives on the challenges of using neighbourhood planning to realize their development aspirations for their neighbourhood. Drawing from interviews, planning document analysis, and ethnographic research carried out over the last year this paper then reflects on how neighbourhood planning is being deployed by the GCNF within a wider repertoire of community activities aimed at ensuring the protection and refurbishment of housing on the Carpenters Estate. Throughout this paper there will be reflection on whether participation in state planning processes represents a politically effective way for communities to shape development plans and outcomes for their neighbourhood. It will be argued that the political potential of neighbourhood planning for communities may be unlocked when it is pursued strategically in concert with a range of other actions aimed at challenging and shaping state development plans for a community’s neighbourhood.

FENLAND VIGNETTES

1 2 6 Y F E N L A N D V I G N E T T E S B R I A N S W A N N I: Mail at Xmas The war a dozen years over, my father who fought the Nazis bravely (though the Germans were ‘‘our brothers’’) has been warning me again that the commies are coming for everything including his second-hand Morris Minor that barely fits into his garage and once in seldom leaves. They’re welcome, I think as I pedal the red GPO bike with my heavy leather GPO satchel through this greasy orange street light morning fog spreads over semi-detached houses, whose house numbers are indecipherable until you go right up and stick your nose on them at the new housing estate called King’s Hedges Road, where there are no kings, except the three I bring, and any hedges are buried with ancient Angles in rotten fen sedge and gray mud underrime-encrustedpostage-stamplawns,herewhereIwanderroundandround on my heavy bike, lost, banging into things, bearing tidings of comfort and joy. 1 2 7 R II: Digging Come Spring Heavy gray marl sticks to my spade, water seeping into the deep gash I gouge through rotten sedge and reeds, sucking at my feet, the old fen rising in a line we pile near where they’d built another council estate and found an Angle burial ground. In this stink of ancient air I stand up straight to breathe. ‘‘Kill it, kiddo! Kill it!’’ laughs Shay, one of the Irish navvy twins, shoulders too wide to fit into the trench, posing with one foot on the pipes we’re laying while rolling giant clay phalli, balls to match, which he demonstrates for housewives who watch from behind curtains, colored scarves round their heads, pretending to look past us across their small dug-up lawns into the distance and its bit of sun. ...

“The state has replaced the man”

This article offers an ethnographic analysis of everyday sociality and the welfare state on a council estate in England. Taking the case of means-tested benefits, it investigates how women's encounters with the welfare state come into conflict with their attempts to build and to maintain family homes. It argues that while the current benefit system offers women a minimum safety net, it also comes with a set of expectations about appropriate behavior that is contrary to the fluid and collaborative nature of women's daily lives. Although the article demonstrates that women contest the punitive effects of the policies by subverting the rules of the benefit system, ultimately it suggests that dependence on the benefit system is a deeply coercive experience. Overall, the article not only provides a critical commentary on current policy developments in Britain, but it also contributes more generally to anthropological challenges of normative models of citizenship.

The Cambridge companion to hip-hop

Introduction: the interdisciplinary world of hip-hop studies Justin A. Williams Part I. Elements: 1. MC origins: rap and spoken word poetry Alice Price-Styles 2. Hip-hop dance Imani K. Johnson 3. Hip-hop visual arts Ivor Miller 4. DJs and turntabilism Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen 5. The fifth element: knowledge Travis Gosa 6. Hip-hop and religion: from the mosque to the church Christina Zanfagna 7. Hip-hop theater and performance Nicole Hodges Persley Part II. Methods and Concepts: 8. Lyrics and flow in rap music Oliver Kautny 9. The musical analysis of hip-hop Kyle Adams 10. The glass: hip-hop production Chris Tabron 11. Hip-hop and racial identification: an (auto)ethnographic perspective Anthony Kwame Harrison 12. Thirty years of rapsploitation: hip-hop culture in American cinema Geoff Harkness 13. Barbz and kings: explorations of gender and sexuality in hip-hop Regina Bradley 14. Hip-hop and politics Chris Deis 15. Intertextuality, sampling, and copyright Justin A. Williams Part III. Case Studies: 16. Nerdcore hip-hop Amanda Sewell 17. Framing gender, race, and hip-hop in Boyz in the Hood, Do the Right Thing and Slam Adam Haupt 18. Japanese hip-hop: alternative stories Noriko Manabe 19. Council estate of mind: the British rap tradition and London's hip-hop scene Richard Bramwell 20. Cuban hip-hop Sujatha Fernandes 21. Senegalese hip-hop Ali Coleen Neff 22. Off the grid: instrumental hip-hop and experimentalism after the golden age Mike D'Errico 23. Stylized Turkish German as the resistance vernacular of German hip-hop Brenna Byrd 24. 'Bringin' '88 back': historicizing rap music's greatest year Loren Kajikawa 25. 'Where ya at?': Hip-hop's political locations in the Obama era Michael Jeffries.

Middlefield: The Development of a Provincial Post-World War Two Council Estate in Lincolnshire, 1960–1965

Scholarly, local-historical, studies of provincial, low-rise post-World War Two council estates are rare. This article attempts to remedy this by examining one such example, the Middlefield Lane estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, which was completed in 1965. Using two key primary sources, the minute books of the Gainsborough Urban District Council’s Housing Committee and the Gainsborough Evening News, the article will provide a narrative account of the planning and development of Middlefield, and of the experiences of the estate’s new residents as they settled in there. Post-war council estates have long been criticized as being socially and architecturally problematic. This article aims to present a more nuanced historical perspective on this by demonstrating that these estates were carefully and thoughtfully planned, and have rich and meaningful histories that are worth chronicling.

Ruin Lust and the Council Estate

Arinze Kene's domestic drama, God's Property (Soho Theatre 2013), is set on a council estate in Deptford, South East London in 1982. The play focusses on the aftermath of longstanding racial tensions in the area that led to the 1981 Brixton Riots - a series of violent confrontations between the police and, primarily, members of the local African-Caribbean community. This article positions the council estate as an archetypal contemporary ruin. I provide an analysis of God's Property, which examines the complexities thrown up by the paradoxical estate narratives of nostalgia and ruin and the particular complications that the historical and current context of race and racial difference in South East London adds to these narratives. I offer an autoethnographic reading of the performance, framing my analysis within a lived understanding of South East London. In this way, I propose that the council estate setting of the play coupled with the realist detail in which the domestic space was depicted evoked a complex nostalgic affect that we might consider within a paradigm of ruin aesthetics.

‘X’ – realism, fantasy and heroism in the National Youth Theatre's The Block

In 2010, as part of the National Youth Theatre's social inclusion educational outreach programme ‘Playing Up 2’, young people identified as ‘NEETS’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training) performed a new-writing play called The Block, by first time playwright Tarkan Cetinkaya. This play is set on an unnamed London council estate, and follows the intersecting lives of 10 estate denizens, brought together by the central character, Barry/Baz, and his struggle with an unspecified personality disorder. I argue that social inclusion practices work within a ‘heroic paradigm’. Many of the young people involved in the project lived or had lived on estates, and many faced ongoing social and economic problems that had interfered with their ability to find employment. In the final scene of the play, which up until this point follows the conventions of social realism, a mysterious character named ‘X’ is revealed to be a superhero. He turns back time and changes the course of events in the play, saving a young woman's life and preventing her brother from embarking on a lifetime of punishment, guilt and regret. This paper problematises the character of ‘X’, exploring how the relationship between realism and fantasy, in this performance, worked to suggest that social change hinges upon intervention from an outside ‘hero’. I ask what the implications of this message might be for participants and audience members and explore how the narrative of The Block intersects with the National Youth Theatre's wider social inclusion policy.

Attachments and connections: a ‘white working-class’ English family's relationships with their BrAsian ‘Pakistani’ neighbours

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.

Memories of Childhood in Post-War Grimsby

This paper details the vivid memories of the author’s childhood in the fishing port of Grimsby, shortly after the Second World War. It was a time of shortages, overcrowding, improvisation and cannibalisation of anything that could be re-used. In time it became a period of reconstruction but not without its upheavals and difficulties. It begins in the ‘old town’ of workers’ small terrace houses, typically in a poor state of repair. Then it moves to the ‘new’ council estates. Similarly, the narrative also begins with a ‘Victorian’ technology of steam, coal and horses with very few petrol-engined vehicles and moves to the very beginnings of early consumer society. The principal analytic content of the paper concerns the status of what is clearly a ‘personal history’ – if that is not too great a contradiction – or as the author suggests: mystory. The obvious ‘critical’ response – that it could have been otherwise – is contrasted against the suggestion that this story is a non-negotiable foundation of the author’s identity and that this ‘critical’ response is not appropriate. Some of the interdisciplinary options thrown up by this problem are considered.

The making of the modern British home: the suburban semi and family life between the wars

This book explores the impacts of the modern suburban semi-detached house on British family life during the 1920s and 1930s—focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on working-class households who moved from cramped inner-urban accommodation to new suburban council or owner-occupied housing estates. Migration to suburbia is shown to have initiated a dramatic transformation in lifestyles—from a ‘traditional’ working-class mode of living, based around long-established tightly knit urban communities, to a recognizably ‘modern’ mode, centred around the home, the nuclear family, and building a better future for the next generation. This process had far-reaching impacts on family life, entailing a change in household priorities to meet the higher costs of suburban living, which in turn impacted on many aspects of household behaviour, including family size. This book also constitutes a general history of the development of both owner-occupied and municipal suburban housing estates in interwar Britain, including the evolution of housing policy; the housing development process; housing and estate design, layouts, and architectural features; marketing owner occupation and consumer durables to a mass public; furnishing the new suburban home; making ends meet; suburban gardens; social filtering and conflict on the new estates; and problems of mis-selling and ‘jerry-building’. It thus integrates the social history of the interwar suburbs with their economic, business, marketing, and architectural/planning histories, demonstrating how these elements interacted to produce a new model of working-class lifestyles and ‘respectability’ which marked a fundamental break with pre-1914 urban communities.

Authenticity and Representation: Council Estate Plays at the Royal Court

Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse. In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’. Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces. Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy. Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices.

Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz. Authentic Voices, Representing the Council Estate: Politics, Authorship and the Ethics of Representation

Amongst the many socio-political concerns central to contemporary British theatre, there appears an overriding concern – in terms of the production of new plays - with the notion of ‘authenticity’ in the voice of the authors of new writing. This issue is related to politics as it resonates with contemporary concerns about the ability of individual citizens to have their ‘voices’ (Couldry 2010) heard within contemporary structures of neo-liberalism. In the UK, pioneering new writing theatres, most notably the Royal Court, run writing programmes which target economically disadvantaged and minority ethnic communities, and ask members of these groups to use their own experiences as a basis for storytelling. The work produced from these programmes is often marketed by using the ‘authenticity’ of the writer. Authenticity, in this definition, is synonymous with notions of personal experience. Although a focus on authenticity addresses postcolonial concerns regarding the ethics of representation, it also problematically suggests that personal experience is the basis for ‘authentic’ artistic output. This paper examines the portrayal of council estates (British social housing estates) in contemporary play-writing, looking at the issues which might emerge from a commercial focus on the ‘authentic voice’. It asks how representations might work to intervene in the production of council estate spaces. Drawing on the Royal Court’s recent production Off the Endz (2010), the paper seeks to problematize the notion of the ‘authentic voice’ by considering the Royal Court as a public sphere, where the discourse of contemporary culture might be democratised (McCracken 2007).

The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory, by Ben Jones * Working-Class Suburb: Social Change on an English Council Estate, 1930-2010. by Mark Clapson

The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory, by Ben Jones * Working-Class Suburb: Social Change on an English Council Estate, 1930-2010. by Mark Clapson

“Suicide Heights”: Council Estates As Sites Of Entrapment And Resistance In Hello Mum

Council estates have been contestable social spaces of contemporary urban life in metropolitan cities like London and the marginalizing spatial experience they provide for the “working class” has been a problematic topic for many disciplines like architecture, sociology, psychology and literature. Considering the significance of space for the body in literary works, this essay analyses the black British woman writer Bernardine Evaristo’s fifth work, Hello Mum , a short-fiction, which revolves primarily around a fourteen-year-old black teenager Jerome’s tragic experience in a council estate in London. In this essay, scrutinizing Bernardine Evaristo’s novella Hello Mum and inhabiting a council estate as a challenging spatial experience, I suggest the teenager victim Jerome’s narrative reveals a kind of physical and psychological entrapment and resistance to the dominant ideology of the council estates, offers an alternative perception for the black people who are obliged to live in such marginalized places.

“How people read and write and they don't even notice”: everyday lives and literacies on a Midlands council estate

AbstractThis article presents data from a British Academy‐funded study of the everyday literacy practices of three families living on a predominantly white working‐class council housing estate on the edge of a Midlands city. The study explored, as one participant succinctly put it, “how people read and write and they don't even notice”. This alludes to the ways in which everyday practices may not be recognised as part of a dominant model of literacy. The study considered too the ways in which these literacy practices are part of a wider policy context that also fails to notice the impact of austerity politics on everyday lives. An emphasis on quantitative measures of disadvantage and public discourse which vilifies those facing economic challenge can overshadow the resilience and resourcefulness of individuals and families in making meaning from their experiences. Drawing together consideration of everyday lives and the everyday literacies which are part of them, this article explores the impact of the current policy context on access to both economic and cultural resources, showing how literacy, as part of this context, should be recognised as a powerful means not only of constricting lives but also of constructing them.

The age of affluence revisited: Council estates and consumer society in Britain, 1950–1970

Historians and sociologists have long had a fascination with the idea of the postwar British ‘affluent society’. Yet, up until now, most work in this area has been centred upon developments within the private and commercial sectors of the British economy. What this article shows is that rising levels of affluence, and the subsequent emergence of mass consumerism, also had quite profound effects upon the British public sector during the 1950s and 1960s. Using the public housing sector as the case study through which to explore these changes, this article shows how the increased emphasis upon consumer spending and consumer choice in this period not only resulted in heightened levels of consumption within the domestic sphere, but also fundamentally altered the shape and meaning of the council estate home.