Estates

"Council estates are public housing in which the person is a tenant rather than an owner of the house or flat. The state provides this housing for people who can’t afford to rent or buy themselves. It started in the 1890s and gradually expanded between the wars. But council housing really took off in the 30 years or so after the war. By the end of the seventies around 30% of all housing was council housing. Yes, she grew up on a huge estate that was built in the sixties. It wasn’t a high rise but a low rise estate, but many of the estates built at the time were high rise. Her book is part council housing history and part memoir. In particular, she brilliantly explores the way in which the experience of living on a council estate became ghettoised. The people living there were often physically apart from the town or city as well as mentally. There is a wonderful detail about how when she was about 16 or 17 she went to a public library and saw The Guardian newspaper in the reading room. She had always assumed that The Guardian was a special kind of paper that only professors could subscribe to. Going to a public library and discovering that anyone could look at it was an amazing revelation. Her descriptions have terrific historical value as a piece of testimony. And I am sympathetic to her argument that architects’ grand ideas of modern design were often not good places for people to actually live in. She is also indignant that when people were given the “right to buy” their properties under Thatcher, the proceeds weren’t put back into the upkeep of the estates. One thing I think she underestimates, though, is the extent to which most people wanted to have their own bit of property and individualism, and that privacy was so important. Council housing was a brave and honourable social experiment, but beyond a certain point it was doomed as a form of mass housing. I would argue that is because it didn’t go with the grain of human nature. In the end, people want their own place to have as an expression of their individual character. This ties into my argument about the whole of the pre-Thatcher period – a lot of evidence shows that society was quite ready for Thatcherism when it came along. Whether one thinks it was a good or bad thing, many people already wanted the “me first, society second” policies that Thatcher promoted."