Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

"John Boughton’s book is a really welcome publication. For a long time he’s been producing a blog called ‘Municipal Dreams’. It is a fantastic resource. He beetles around the country and researches dozens and dozens of local authority housing schemes. It’s that very detailed knowledge on the ground that feeds into his book. The book is an overview of the story of council housing over the last hundred and twenty years. But as the story progresses, the focus gets closer and closer. We get to the second world war, half way through the story, in about 50 pages, but then the next 250 pages are on the period since then, and particularly the last 30 years. What is so good about it is that he sets these quite recent developments into this continuous historical narrative. It’s very difficult for people operating in the world we live in today to have a historical perspective on what’s happening—you’re dependent on newspapers and those kind of accounts that don’t contextualise the subject at all. Boughton’s book brings the historical perspective right up to the present day. “He beetles around the country and researches dozens and dozens of local authority housing schemes.” The extraordinary things that were going on under New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for example, which actually built far less council housing than Margaret Thatcher had, are here brought out clearly. It’s therefore very enlightening to people who are trying to get just trying to get their heads around what’s going on in the housing situation that we have today. At times the debate around social housing was highly partisan, but equally at other times there was consensus. The Tories in the 50s built far more housing than Labour had done. It’s really to do with changing political perspectives. A decade ago to be arguing for council housing would have been regarded as a very left-wing position to take. Today, because of the undoubted failure of housing policy over the past decades to meet the housing shortage, it’s fairly widely agreed that if you’re going to tackle the housing shortage local authorities are the only institutions that have got the muscle to do so. Boughton writes with passion. He’s a great advocate of council housing, but he’s by no means uncritical. He can see where some things have been successful and other things not so successful. Also, he’s not he’s not saying everything that architects did was great, nor that everything architects did was terrible. He’s a social historian who takes a sensible and sober view of the whole thing."