Pepys Estate Deptford – 1979, 2004 & 2009
August 15th, 2011
“High living in a council owned tower block is stigmatised, living in a privately rented or owned tower block is the ultimate in urban chic” – The Gentrification Reader
I lived at 93 Aragon Tower on the Pepys Estate Deptford between October 1978 and September 1980, in a scissor maisonette. It was the highlight of my life so far at that point because I had spent the previous few years living in a succession of seedy bedsits, shared houses and other people’s flats. One bright and sunny weekday morning I parked my employer’s pink and purple Austin J4 on the bridge that runs over the (former) Surrey Canal in Oxestalls Road and went into the housing office at the foot of Eddystone Tower for the keys to a hard to let flat in Aragon Tower.
10/1978-9/1980
Andrew Rawnsley on property
June 5th, 2011
The last couple of years have seen a plethora of articles about the lack of new house building and Andrew Rawnsley tackles the subject in some depth in today’s Observer.
The social housing sold off by Mrs Thatcher was never replaced. House building in the last year of Gordon Brown fell to a postwar low. We are currently building around 100,000 homes a year when new household formation is running at about 250,000.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/05/andrew-rawnsley-house-prices-construction
This all ties in with my other articles on right to buy and the sink estates but there is no sign of any political party even beginning to tackle this important issue anytime soon and worse now is the pressure on the outer boroughs of London as the housing benefit cuts begin to be felt forcing people in both council and private rented housing from the centre.
Karen Buck spoke eloquently on Thursday evening at the Barking and Dagenham CLP with a talk about the likely effects of the HB cuts, and will do so again on the 11th June at the London Labour Housing Group policy day. There’s still time to book.
Bernard Crofton on housing, from the Guardian
March 17th, 2011
bernardcrofton -> Bellerephon
Of course not, but you can often blame architect for problem estates. Here’s a little anecdote.
As the most junior lettings officer, I was given the task of filling the empty block in the Stevenage town centre. It had one benefit to the locals: instead of being let to people moving out of London I was allowed to let them to local couples who “fell pregnant” with no other prospect of their own home. I was told to promise them they would be high-priority transfers when the child was three. Then Heath won the 1970 election, budgets were cut, and many of them were still there a decade later, but with more kids. Older couples suited to the estate moved out because of the noise.
The Chief Architect planned a tower block in each neighbourhood:”like a church spire in a traditional village”. My response that people don’t have to live in a church spire fell on cloth ears.
And an anecdote on architects in general. I attended a course on residential densities at the Architectural Association. One of our test exercises was a disused dock backing onto a 1930s LCC estate. Apart from mine and a planner’s from Islington, every design submitted included a big wall between the older council estate and the new homes.
https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/28933440
Is the big society big enough for homeless people?
bernardcrofton’s comment 4 July 2011 12:03PM
It was deliberate policy of the Thatcher government to remove full security of tenure and allow rents to rise in the private sector,and to force council and housing association rents to rise in the public.
The result was that Housing Benefit “took the hit”. (I would say see my evidence to the commons social security committee 1996 but I can’t find the link for the moment). This was seen as an inevitable cost of forcing up rents. The neo-cons believed that eventually there would be a resurgence of the private landlord.
The same belief underpins the current coalition plans for “near-market rents”. The problem is that this time all the family sized dwellings are going to be above the benefits cap etc..
And the “flood of immigrants” around the millennium was a temporary phenomenon caused by the accession of the eastern block to the EU with full rights to live and work anywhere within the EU. I make no comment on the rights and wrongs, or losses and gains to the UK, involved in that treaty. I simply observe that the Accession Act 1996 put into UK law the Maastricht Treaty which gave those countries equal rights with other EU citizens to enter the UK. 1996 was the seventeenth year of a Conservative Government.
Recommended (13)
Another view on post war housing
December 4th, 2010
There’s always someone who sees things from a different point of view and while I may not agree with them I am prepared to take them on head to head so here’s the view from the “other side”.
newsed1
2 December 2010 6:10PM
Well, that’s what happens when the Left fiddles with everything.
As Family and Kinship in The East showed, the Left didn’t like working class housing being private and didn’t like it being handed – via the rent man – down through well-behaved working class families.
Many of the ‘slum’ clearances were nothing of the kind- ask Timothy Spall who used to live in a perfectly decent working class street in Battersea (from where I’m now writing) which was taken over by the local council and demolished never to be re-built.
Housing Benefit cuts – in a nutshell
November 1st, 2010
Allied against Osborne’s housing benefit cuts
Boris Johnson, Simon Hughes and Karen Buck – allies against housing benefit cuts. Photo of Hughes by Keith Edkins
The public have a way of bringing common sense and experience to complex issues and I have great faith in the ability of Joe Public to explain things in straightforward terms that anyone can understand. So it is with the housing benefit cuts and the hyperbole that has gone with it in recent days. I was out last night and happened to glance through the Independent letters page, the first of which sums up for me the whole history of the problem in a few paragraphs.
Housing benefit – the row goes on
October 31st, 2010
Sometimes a single comment shines out so clearly that it cuts through all the wordy articles that have been written on the subject since last week. This is one such, not that saying it makes the situation any better but it does make it easier to understand the implications of the ConDem policy.
31 October 2010 7:14AM
So when there is a well known shortage of social housing throughout the land they decide on a policy of pushing people out of currently available housing into areas where there is a shortage of social housing already. Thus making the problem many times worse resulting in increased financial, health and social costs whilst people are housed in temporary accomodation and bed and breakfasts which is the worse thing you can do to a family which is trying to get back on its feet again which will cause the state more in all sorts of ways.Some help this lot are neither to themselves or anyone else.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/31/london-housing-crisis-benefit-cuts
Mixed tenure estates
September 24th, 2010
My thinking on this has been coloured by the analysis of Nicky Gavron. For example if I skim my blog I can find the following quotation . . .
‘Mixed and balanced communities are rightly one of the shibboleths of the London Plan. But under Mr Johnson’s this means ‘a mix of tenure should be sought, particularly in neighbourhoods where social renting predominates’. Where, one might ask, are displaced residents to go? Crucially, there is no reciprocal policy for social rented housing to be introduced into areas where private housing predominates.
On the one hand the right wing London boroughs want to clear their council estates and build private flats for sale to overseas investors and on the other hand they don’t want new “social” tenants moving in anywhere, the polarisation of London will continue.
Now turning for a moment to the interview Dave Hill conducted with Karen Buck MP we can find the following transcript:-
DH: In terms of security of tenure isn’t there an ongoing debate in the world of housing assocations social housing in the broader sense about whether you need to change the rules I mean it’s because you have situations where people they get themselves into a nice social rented home of one type or another they stay there for ever sometimes they start to earn a lot more money than they earned when they moved into it. It’s that kind of conversation that’s going on. Is there no kind of argument for changing the rules as they stand at the moment?
Right to buy II
June 14th, 2010
From time to time while researching housing matters I come across such erudite and informed articles that I treasure them and what follows is one such which encapsulates the both the recent history of and present crisis in housing. It covers so much of what I think is presently wrong with the housing situation in this country.
oldonmk2
13 Jun 2010, 12:06PM
Subsidized housing is not simply council housing, or housing assn properties. Many houses built in the private sector from 1945- 79 benefitted from tax relief on mortgage interest payments!
In what is now Milton Keynes an employed person with a £6000 mortgage in 1973 had the same tax relief as a person with six children of school age. And the bigger the mortgage, the greater the tax relief.
The problem is that around 50% of the population had wages which would not allow them to buy a house back then, and that figure has probably risen to 70-75% today. Then the building of council houses – flats made it possible for people to have a reasonable life. The alternative was private sector housing in bedsits which typically took more than 35% of the average wage in rent for one dilipidated room without running water, and any security of tenure.
There was also those houses lost by bombing, and thousands of men returning from the forces, or as my parents did, having to move from a requisitioned house we had been parked in because my father was required for war work in a factory design office out in the sticks. These displaced persons did not have the cash to buy property, [forces pay for the rank & file rarely exceeded £3 per week! They were the majority! Not much to risk your life for.
Council housing before “right to buy” was largely self financing, the asset lasting near a century or more, would ultimately pay for itself. Right to buy wrecked this system. Which up to the time of Thatcher was largely accepted by both parties. Indeed some of the most pleasant council estates were erected by Tory councils in semi rural areas. Thatcher set out to destroy local govt, by “reform” of the rating system, and planning control. She largely succeeded. Now we have the consequences of Her and her acolytes Major, Blair and Brown.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/13/cuts-threaten-affordable-new-homes
Lastly if you’re wondering where Right to buy I is it’s linked here
UPDATE: This from the Green Benches
https://eoin-clarke.blogspot.com/2011/10/tories-sold-320bn-of-council-homes.html
Right to buy
February 15th, 2010
Stephen Greenhalgh and “decent neighbourhoods”
Anybody got anything intelligent to say about the continuing to stack the poorest and the most recently arrived on top of each other, in defined areas, for the rest of time?
Clearly you are right that this is not a good idea. However you have to look at the history to see why this now appears to be the case.
When RTB was introduced by Margaret Thatcher it was always going to be the most desirable properties in the best locations that went first to those who could afford the discounted prices. This inevitably altered the housing stock balance across the country adversely and tilted towards the estates which even if they had not been in trouble before now began to decline because tenants able to afford RTB on those estates moved out and let the flats to DSS tenants.