South London council housing under threat
TOM CORDELL on Lambeth and Southwark council’s ongoing mission to demolish their post-war council housing
First published Winter 2019
It’s sometimes said of architecture that neglect can be the best form of conservation. The story of London’s local authority housing over the last 40 years shows that the same rule applies equally to the protection of the communities that are settled in it as the buildings themselves.
Today, London’s surviving council estates are a reminder of Britain’s mid-century efforts to upgrade the housing standards of its citizens, yet are increasingly under threat. It’s well known that this programme of local authority housebuilding was effectively terminated with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, but what is less often observed is that beyond legislating to force the slow erosion of local authority housing stock with right to buy, The Tory policy towards the inner city and in particular its housing was one of neglect rather than dramatic intervention. For Mrs Thatcher, dread of the inner city - presented as a hotbed of socialists, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities (or to quote her memorable primetime ITV dogwhistle “swamped by people with a different culture”) - was far too useful in tickling the bigotries of her suburban electorate to devote any energies to fixing its problems. Instead the policy was to leave the buildings (and the communities inhabiting them) to slowly rot.
It was at one such decaying inner city London estate - Southwark’s Aylesbury - that Tony Blair made his first speech as Prime Minister on the day after the election in 1997, vowing that he didn’t “want there to be any forgotten people” in the future Britain. Yet the residents of the estate and many others in London might have preferred to stay forgotten once they found out what his government had planned for them.
A new generation of London’s Labour council leaders - including those in Southwark - broke with decades of party policy that saw council housing as the sacred basis for municipal socialism and instead argued that it was just another asset that could be sold off. Hackney, Brent, Southwark, Lambeth all embarked on major schemes to sell off large numbers of council houses to developers, accepting a far smaller number of social rent homes to replace the lost stock. If they couldn’t fix the desperate poverty of many of their residents, then at least diluting their population with affluent incomers would help improve the deprivation statistics.
Richard Rogers Urban Task Force report, with it’s appealing language of good design - was used as cover for programs to displace the poor with a middle class incomers from the suburbs drawn in from the suburbs with the vision that London would be remade on the lines of the densely populated European cities that they’d encountered on weekend breaks. Now the cumulative benefit of near on a century of publicly funded improvements to the inner city- not just housing but transport, community facilities, and perhaps most significantly the Clean Air Act - would be monetised to provide profit for developers and the financial institutions that had increasingly come to dominate Britain’s economy.
Aylesbury and its neighbouring Haygate estate were unlikely to be described as aesthetically pleasing, but there was a undoubted beauty to their function: providing settled homes for thousands of Londoners. Officially all tenants on estates being redeveloped were meant to be rehoused locally, but to ensure financial viability - in other words to maximise the number of homes created for private sale and minimise the number of LA tenants requiring new build housing - tenant numbers were artificially deflated before regeneration started by encouraging tenants to move out - often after years without adequate repairs. For leaseholders, inadequate compensation forced many to leave the area, and many were run out of London altogether.
Two decades on, the Haygate had had all of its 1212 council and 189 leasehold homes demolished, to be replaced by 2689 new homes of which only 89 are for social rent. The Aylesbury estate is still part occupied but in the slow process of demolition, as home by home is emptied of residents and shuttered up, it’s access walkways now patrolled by private security guards in an operation more reminiscent of a military takeover of a hostile city than an act of civic improvement.
Defenders of the programme insist that the intentions were good within the funding available, yet this argument doesn’t really add up, first of all because a few authorities successfully resisted following the same policy- a key example being Labour Islington - where the council avoided demolition in it’s programmes to upgrade it’s housing stock. The economic arguments in favour of demolition also proved weak, Southwark actually losing money at the Haygate when the costs of clearing residents is deducted from the sale price paid by Australian developer Lendlease. One of Southwark’s key justifications for demolition was that the Haygate and Aylesbury estates - built using the Laing-Jesperson 12M large panel system - were beyond economic repair. Yet again Islington’s alternative policies proved the weakness of this argument, as it refurbished it’s Six Acres Estate in Finsbury Park to modern standards despite it being originally built by the same contractors using the identical 12M system.
But these levels of domicide - the mass destruction of homes - were merely a rehearsal for an intensification of destruction of council housing that followed New Labour losing power nationally in the 2010 election and the rise of the Tory-Liberal coalition. The new government made massive cuts in LA funding, tailored to reflect individual boroughs’ asset base - with the naked political purpose to force boroughs to sell off their land and to diminish their agency in shaping the urban realm. Land was now an asset to be sold off to fund essential services. Underpinning this was the view articulated by many in Tory circles that those on low income should not live in areas of high land value. Theo Blackwell - a Labour councillor in Camden - described the borough’s land holdings as its “North Sea oil”, which could be used to fund education and social programmes in the face of austerity.
Alongside government cuts, there was pressure from the technocrat planners at City Hall to demolish existing council estates and rebuild them at higher density to increase housing delivery numbers. The GLA planners’ blindness to the impact of demolition on existing communities is shocking enough - detailed research shows that living through what’s euphemistically described as regeneration causes increased mental and physical ill health, as well as higher mortality rates in residents. But what is perhaps worse is that this policy - based on chasing a forecast population expansion of London over decades - ignores substantial evidence that what Londoners need right now is an increase in low rent secure housing for those on lower incomes, in other words exactly the tenure type that is reduced by estate demolition. With bitter irony the racially and culturally mixed inner city demonised by Mrs Thatcher, is now being destroyed by public bodies that ostensibly place great importance on diversity.
Exemplifying the way councils have responded to this new world of reduced funding and increased housing targets, In 2015 Lambeth Council launched its plan to become a property developer itself. It plans to transfer its housing stock to a special purpose vehicle Homes for Lambeth (HfL), securing finance on its value to fund a programme to build 1000 new homes. It has identified a series of its estates for demolition to create space for the new homes. But contrary to the council’s rhetoric, the new tenants will not be offered secure tenure or controlled rents - the defining characteristics of council housing. The entire stock will in fact be used as collateral with a commercial investor partner, placing it at risk of repossession if at any point in the future the rent revenues fail to cover the finance costs of the vast scheme.
So far Lambeth has made remarkably little progress with HfL. Residents in the estates blighted by proposed demolition have shown extraordinary resistance fighting to protect their communities and homes. At Cressingham Gardens - a thoughtful low rise housing scheme designed by Charles Atwood in the early 1970s - attempts to protect the estate through listing have sadly failed. Instead the residents have stalled the council with a series of legal challenges, and how now secured the right to manage the housing themselves, and exceptionally have persuaded central government to allow them to attempt a stock transfer from the council. It seems likely that this will succeed protecting their homes.
At Central Hill - another beautifully planned 1970s estate designed Rosemary Stjernstedt - again attempts at listing have been rejected. Instead the communist is being eroded by the council’s policy to fill properties that become empty with people in need of temporary accommodation - often with complex problems and support needs. Residents fear that this could cause a rise in crime and antisocial behaviour, adding to the pressure on existing residents to move away.
Resident campaigners in Lambeth have tended to reject engagement with local Labour Party in disgust at its treatment of them. The Green Party has been the main beneficiary of their support, but it unlikely that votes located around hyperlocal campaigns will change the direction of council policy. But a new pathway of resistance has opened - the rise of the Labour left in the local party in bringing pressure on the councillors to change direction, and threatening them with potential deselection if they do not.
Fundamentally the programme’s continuation - and that of similar schemes around London - is threatened by the wonky economics that underpin it, specifically the lack of demand for full market price housing- or at least the ability for potential residents to afford it, in an economy where wages have flatlined for years. In Camden, there are signs that the North Sea oil is already running out. Sales at its regeneration schemes have been slow, and the council has admitted that it is in the preposterous situation of considering buying back unsold properties from itself to temporarily prop up the regeneration project’s balance sheet.
Yet until reality bites, more communities and buildings across London are under threat, most notably the groundbreaking Alton West estate, this time in Tory Wandsworth. Essentially the solution must come from a change of policy at national government level, yet it is depressing that few of London’s council leaders or the GLA planners feel able to imagine a positive future vision beyond more managerialism if they were offered a new funding settlement - a possible future that will be defined more than anything by the outcome of the general election - unknown as I write, but that will be decided by the time you read this.
