James Meek: ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’

James Meek on social housing

Anyone would call Luwam Misgina’s place overcrowded, but according to the rules, it isn’t. She lives in a tiny one-bedroom flat in Camberwell, South London, with her three daughters, aged five, eight and eleven. They have one small living room, a cramped kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom where they all sleep. Misgina has a mattress on the floor, wedged up against bunk beds. The two younger girls sleep on the bottom bunk and the older, already beginning to fret about personal privacy, on the top one. With the help of government support for childcare, Misgina works ten hours a week as a cleaner; they otherwise rely on benefits. As the children get older she’ll be able to work more hours, but there’s little chance she’ll ever be able to afford to rent even a two-bedroom flat nearby on the open market and still have money left to feed and clothe herself and the girls.

Along with 23,000 other people in the London Borough of Southwark, Misgina and her family are on the waiting list for a particular kind of home whose cost is contributed to by both the national and the local community: a subsidised home, ideally a council house, with rent that, in this area, now averages about a quarter of market levels. Every week, Misgina bids for houses on the Southwark Council app. She needs three bedrooms, but often just one such home comes up in the whole of Southwark; some weeks it’s none at all. The closest she’s come in seven years is fifteenth place in the queue. Despite their cramped conditions, her family is only in the third most needy category. Children under ten are considered half a person by the overcrowding rules. When Misgina’s second daughter turns ten, the bureaucratic lens will see 3.5 people in the flat, instead of three, and the system might treat them with a little more urgency, but the housing pool will still be dry.

I sat in Misgina’s living room, a poster of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The flat is full of devotional imagery. One reason she wants to stay in the neighbourhood is that her church is here. It was a stifling day during one of the heatwaves that have smothered the city this summer. We could hear the children, just home from school, splashing and giggling in a cold bath. ‘I think about the health of the children all the time,’ she told me.

She and her children have legal status: they are British citizens, statutorily homeless. Southwark Council is bound by law to put a roof over Misgina’s head. More than four thousand households in the borough are in the same position. Across London, the number of families in temporary accommodation is 73,000, more than twice the number in 2011 – an estimated 210,000 people in all, nearly half of them children. In 1981, just after Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Act brought in the Right to Buy scheme, which signalled the start of the British state’s long, undeclared campaign against council housing, Southwark Council had 62,000 homes for a population of 210,000. Now around 315,000 people live in Southwark and the number of council houses has shrunk to 38,000. Over the past 45 years more than 21,000 council houses in the borough have been sold at bargain prices. Privatisation wasn’t the only agent of loss. Over the same period the council knocked down, or allowed developers to knock down, more council houses – almost five thousand – than it built. From the start of Right to Buy until 2004, the period when most council homes, including the nicest ones, were sold off, councils were prevented by central government from using more than a fraction of the proceeds of council house sales – usually no more than a quarter – to build new ones. Restrictions of various forms continued up until 2024.

What gives Misgina’s situation extra bite is that for all the years she’s been waiting for a council house, technically homeless, she’s been living in a council house – one that the council was obliged to sell to its tenants two decades ago. The government is paying her rent to the owners of a one-time council house. The state itself has become the tenant of capital.

While councils across Britain face similar housing emergencies, there’s something extreme about what’s happening in Southwark. Despite the reduction in council housing, Southwark, which changed hands in May’s local elections from Labour to a Green-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, is the country’s fourth largest municipal landlord, after Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Historically a poor and neglected part of South London, its proximity to the City and the West End has made it popular with middle-class strivers priced out of Hackney. It’s also the bastion of a multi-ethnic working class and an entry point for migrants looking for sanctuary, opportunity, or both.

Since 1997, housing associations have built nearly 5600 new homes in Southwark and converted another 1900. According to the government’s figures, the number of homes of all kinds in the borough has increased in the last 25 years from 107,000 to 147,000. On paper, this looks like housing supply running ahead of housing need. But some new homes are owned as investments, and don’t necessarily have residents; others are somebody’s second or third home. Much of the new housing is one and two-bedroom flats, and many of the borough’s bigger homes belong to elderly empty nesters or the well-off. Housing in the borough has never been less affordable.

I went to one of the meetings held by the campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth in a community hall near Elephant and Castle. A hubbub of voices, mainly those of women and children, filled the space, speaking many languages. The attendees gathered in groups at folding tables to share their stories of homelessness and temporary accommodation, and to learn how to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles between them and a secure, affordable place to live. ‘I guess recently there have been two hundred people at the support meetings,’ Elizabeth Wyatt, one of HASL’s founders, said when I met her again a few days later. ‘We had to close the group a year ago because of the sheer number of people coming … We have a list of legal aid housing lawyers, but when I give it to them, I feel totally empty, because we know all the legal aid housing lawyers in London are at maximum capacity.’

On the map, Southwark forms an inverted triangle, with the base stretching along the south bank of the Thames from Tate Modern past London Bridge and Tower Bridge, Borough Market and the Shard, to the former docklands of Rotherhithe, Surrey Quays and Canada Water. It narrows to a point in the leafy expanses of Dulwich. In the middle, between the expensive riverside flats and restaurants of Bermondsey and Dulwich’s private schools and detached houses, lie contested zones of low wages and high incomes, prosperity and precarity, gentrification and decay: Peckham, Camberwell, Elephant and Castle, the Old Kent Road.

From the river, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, it’s a twenty-minute walk to the site of one of Southwark’s most notorious recent housing conflicts. Just east of the huge road junction at Elephant and Castle lies what is now known as Elephant Park, a mainly private estate of tall blocks of flats, shops and restaurants built by the Australian firm Lendlease. To make way for it, the Heygate Estate, built in the 1970s, was obliterated, destroying more than twelve hundred council homes. Not far away, to the south-east, is the Aylesbury Estate, an even larger council project built in the same era. In its prime, between 7800 and 10,000 people lived here, in 2758 flats and houses. Tony Blair came to the Aylesbury in 1997, shortly after he won power. In his speech, he addressed ‘what we all know exists: an underclass, if you like, of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose. Just as there are no no-go areas for today’s Labour Party, so I want there to be no no-hope areas in the new Britain that we want to create.’ In 2014, after several unsuccessful attempts to find the money to renovate Aylesbury’s seventy acres of concrete panels, walkways and green space, Southwark Council did a deal with the Notting Hill Housing Trust (now Notting Hill Genesis) to knock it down and rebuild it with a mixture of private and social housing. Earlier this year, with the project nowhere near complete, the council and NHG parted ways, leaving the remaining residents in limbo. The 35 Per Cent Campaign, which chronicles the erosion of Southwark’s public housing, reckons that £434 million in public funds has already been spent remaking the Aylesbury – more than twice the projected renovation cost.

From the Aylesbury Estate, you can cross Burgess Park and head up the long, shady, car-free cutting of the former Surrey Canal to Peckham. Here, on Rye Lane, on the site of a run-down shopping centre, the developer Berkeley Homes wants to build a dense cluster of blocks containing 867 homes, almost all for private sale or market rent. When Berkeley bought the site, it told the council that more than a third of the homes it wanted to build – 35 per cent, the minimum level set by the council – would be let at ‘affordable’ rents. Most of these would be let by a housing association at the same relatively low rents as council houses. But when it came to making its formal application, Berkeley changed its mind. It said 35 per cent was too much. The market had changed and 35 per cent wouldn’t make enough money. It could offer 12 per cent. Take it or leave it. The council, and the government planning inspector who ruled on Berkeley’s case, decided to leave it. (Berkeley is now trying to overturn the decision in the courts.)

On the face of it, the council, the many local people who object to the scheme and the inspector are standing up to a developer trying to shirk its obligations. (Although Berkeley wouldn’t answer my questions, it may be significant that the company slashed its affordable housing offer just after Labour came to power in 2024 promising to sweep away planning obstacles to new homes.) But what is happening in Peckham is more complex. Aylesham Community Action (ACA), the local campaign group leading the opposition to Berkeley, made the low amount of affordable housing on offer central to its case, but always paired it with a second argument: that the densely packed towers of the new development would loom over the creative, low-rise, ‘brutiful’ concrete jumble of central Peckham, killing its charm and stealing its light. The two arguments were always in tension with each other. If the scheme was rejected on the basis of one argument, what would become of the other?

Although the inspector rejected Berkeley’s plan, he dismissed the idea that the company had done anything wrong in cutting back on affordable housing. The substance of his decision was aesthetic, heritage-related and almost wholly architectural, glossing over the campaigners’ less tangible fears of the threat to the Peckham vibe. He gave great weight to the handsome clock tower at the northern end of Rye Lane, the Venetian-inspired remnant of a long-lost department store. Berkeley’s towers, he wrote, ‘would rise cliff-like in the townscape … monolithic and unrelenting … The circumstances of the case do not lead me to accept new housing and other associated betterments at all costs.’

The inspector thus laid ACA, and local residents more generally (the planning application had prompted more than two thousand mainly hostile responses), open to accusations of nimbyism from the lobbyists, think tankers and online hip-shooters who’ve made a creed out of the idea that Britain’s housing and infrastructure problems are the fault of selfish, small-minded enemies of progress, enabled by a network of unaccountable, newt-cradling, bat-coddling, heritage-obsessed quangos. But while those accused of nimbyism for trying to save a charming vista of cornfields and golden-stone cottages are usually given a little respect, Peckham’s resistance to Berkeley’s squadron of towers was seen as comedy material. On X, critics posted pictures of the fugly shopping centre on the Berkeley site, suggesting that this was the heritage Berkeley’s opponents wanted to save. Photos of a nearby 1930s shopping arcade that’s in the middle of being knocked down, to no local outcry, were posted as if to show the depth of dereliction and decay to which Peckham had fallen.

Critics presented the rejection of the Berkeley plan as an act of self-harm by a borough that is desperately short of homes. Members of Britain Remade, a national campaign group led by, among others, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and the former head of policy at the Adam Smith Institute, cited the case as proof that ‘it is too hard to build things’ in the UK. In an op-ed for City AM Jeremy Driver, Britain Remade’s head of campaigns, said the cost of property had forced him to leave Peckham, where he had lived for nine years, for a home further from Central London. ‘This was not a choice between 77 affordable homes and a better scheme with hundreds more,’ he wrote. ‘It was a choice between 77 affordable homes and none.’

Britain Remade’s argument is that if developers are allowed to build the houses they want to build on land they own, for sale or rent on the free market, the net number of homes increases. Misgina wouldn’t be able to buy or rent one of the £750,000 three-bedroom flats Berkeley wants to build. But somebody would. That somebody would move out of their current home, which would then be available for somebody else. Households would sort themselves according to their means along the chain of accommodations, from luxurious to cheap, but crucially, the chain itself would lengthen. Eventually there would be so many new houses that prices and rents would fall, and somewhere at the cheap end of the chain, Misgina and her family would find a home.

The abundance notion, the idea that a diabolical alliance of blinkered regulators and local nimbys is artificially holding back a flood of private housing (a view much supported by private housebuilders), has long been prevalent in British political discourse, if not by that name. It buttresses Manchester’s acceptance of developers throwing up tower after residential tower in the city centre without any affordable housing. When Starmer spoke of building 1.5 million new homes he assumed the electorate would understand that his government had neither the intention nor the means to do any such thing. He thought we all understood that the private sector and the housing associations would build the homes because his government would remove the red tape holding back the builders. Hence the general surprise, and disgust from those who support the abundance argument, when the Berkeley Homes scheme was rejected.

The abundance movement has useful things to say about how hard and expensive it is to build things such as power plants and railways in the UK, and on paper their case for housing is logical. Build more houses and housing costs and homelessness should fall. But there are a number of flaws in the theory, especially if a country relies on commercial firms to build houses. Does history show that commercial interests inevitably favour plenty over scarcity? How likely is a builder to keep going at top speed when a price drop is approaching? When most people talk about ‘housing demand’, they mean that people need a place to live. When commercial housebuilders use the term, they mean a willingness among buyers to pay a price that protects their profit margin, justifies how much they paid for the land and keeps their investors happy. Demand can thus be high (people need to be housed) and low (people can’t afford the prices) at the same time.

When I spoke to David O’Leary, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, a few months after Starmer took office, he was enthusiastic about Labour’s efforts. ‘What the government has done so far is more than we could have expected them to have done. They’ve rewritten the planning system in a hundred days … they’ve gone as far as talking about development on parts of the Green Belt.’ And yet, almost two years later, the numbers are weak. Andy Burnham has replaced Starmer with nearly three years of Labour’s term left to run, but at the present rate the government will miss its target by half a million.

Another problem with abundance theory in this context is that a new house or flat is an object fixed to a particular location, and that location determines its value more than the size or grandeur of the house. There might be some truth in the idea that if a £750,000 flat is built in Peckham, its new occupant creates a vacancy elsewhere, and so on down the chain, until there is a home that Misgina and her children can afford. But if the market is the only builder, that home won’t be in Peckham or Camberwell. It probably won’t be in London; it might not even be in Britain. Indeed, if location isn’t an issue, there is no housing deficit. In England, there are plenty of three-bedroom homes for rent at the same rate as Misgina’s little flat in Camberwell. They just happen to be on the outskirts of former mill towns in Lancashire.

There’s no need to imagine a grand plan or conspiracy to see that a process is underway in Southwark which is, and has been for some time, squeezing out people who have little ready money, forcing them further and further from the centre, redefining the borough as a place where only the wealthy can hope to live. A couple of generations ago, private capital judged Southwark undesirable, irredeemably left-wing, unruly and poor; it’s fair to say that many in Southwark regarded private capital with the same jaundiced eye. Rye Lane still has many perma-shuttered and neglected shop fronts. But now that Southwark has become desirable, the patches of neglect are placeholders for the chains and high-end outlets the landlords expect to move in and pay higher rents when some version of the Berkeley development eventually gets built. To describe this as gentrification, as regeneration, as social cleansing, is valid, but none of these terms quite captures the force of a process that’s not only hard to resist but hard to avoid participating in. Its effects can be traced from the Heygate Estate, through the Aylesbury, to the Berkeley Homes project – the estate that was destroyed, the estate in limbo and the estate yet to be built – and one of its most prominent manifestations has to do with children.

My partner and I moved into a terraced house in Nunhead, on the edge of Peckham, a couple of blocks from the southern end of Rye Lane, just before the pandemic. A few minutes’ walk away, close to the railway arch that features in the opening shots of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, there’s a disused, fairly modern building – nothing remarkable, just two low brick wings flanking a glazed atrium under a metal shell roof, with a little car park at the front. On one wall is a mosaic of a crucifix in flowery downland, surrounded by children, with a rainbow in the background. The lettering on the border reads ‘Trust – Compassion – Peace – Forgiveness – Love – Wonder – Honesty – Unique – Hope – Thankfulness’. The site is surrounded by steel mesh bearing placards from a security company. This is St Mary Magdalene Church of England Primary School, which closed last year for lack of children. Across the borough seven other primary schools have closed in the past five years. At my son’s school, a second campus built to accommodate what were expected to be four classes in each year is about to close, with the school shrinking back to two classes per year on a single site.

British people are having fewer children but the drop in Southwark and other inner London boroughs is especially pronounced. Across England and Wales, between the censuses of 2011 and 2021, the number of under-fives fell by 8 per cent. In Southwark, it was 21 per cent. A Greater London Authority report in 2024 said some inner London boroughs had lost up to 45 per cent of under-elevens in a decade. The fall is attributed in large part to an exodus of young low-income families who can’t afford a place to live. ‘Inner London still has a high proportion of social housing compared to, for example, the centre of Paris,’ the authors of the report write:

But insufficient provision of new social housing, occurring in the context of an overall lack of new housing supply, has led to a shortage of affordable housing in inner London compared to a decade ago … The consequent movement of lower-skilled, lower-income workers into outer London and beyond is changing the distribution of poverty (its ‘suburbanisation’) and of schoolchildren.

For every Luwam Misgina, hanging on in the hope of a bigger house she can afford, there are others who have given up and moved away.

In the history of working-class housing in Southwark, children repeatedly appear as a wild, unbiddable, tragic multitude, exposing the flaws in idealistic, underfunded projects for accommodating the poor. The tenements erected in the 1870s on the site where the Heygate was built, the Palatinate Estate, were part of the ‘model dwellings’ movement, a queasy mix of altruism, charity and capitalism that aimed to build large blocks of flats for the families of artisans judged sufficiently ‘respectable’. Not long after the tenements were built, children began falling to their deaths. In 1883, four-and-a-half-year-old Maud Nodel fell sixty feet down a stairwell. The inquest found such deaths had happened before; despite complaints, the builders and landlords, cousins called Frederick Sutton and John Dudley, hadn’t bothered to child-proof the banisters. Worse were the Palatinates’ flat roofs, designed to be used by women to dry their washing and surrounded by a low wall and railings, broken in places, easy to scale by bold children aiming to show their mettle by balancing on the narrow parapet on the far side. When in 1903 an inquest was held into the death by falling from the roof of six-year-old Joseph Ward, the coroner learned it was the ninth such death in six years. Repeated appeals to Sutton and Dudley had achieved nothing. The coroner asked the firm’s local rent collector: ‘Has nothing been done?’ ‘Not in my time,’ the collector answered. The coroner threatened dire consequences if it happened again. Eight months later, the company escaped penalty after an attempt to prosecute it for the death of another boy failed. It was praised by the judge for its generosity in offering the boy’s mother £5. The unnamed boy, ‘six or seven years of age’, had tried to jump the eighteen-inch gap between two tenements, and didn’t make it.

In Housing for the Poor?, his 1975 account of the history of Southwark council housing, the future head of Shelter, Neil McIntosh, wrote of children as an infestation. One estate, he wrote, showed ‘clear signs of excessive numbers of children such as paint sprayed on most of the walls even round the front doors to individual flats’. A few years later he told the Evening News: ‘There are far too many children on the [Aylesbury] estate. A couple of years ago 40 per cent of the people were under eighteen and that puts a pressure on the social fabric that it cannot take.’ Even before the estate was finished, in 1971, residents reported teenage vandals breaking windows and smashing new bathrooms in homes that weren’t yet ready for their first tenants.

In 2000, a ten-year-old boy, Damilola Taylor, was stabbed with a broken bottle near Peckham Library by two other boys, aged twelve and thirteen. His killers, members of the Young Peckham Boys gang, were eventually convicted of manslaughter. Taylor lived on the North Peckham Estate, part of a vast mosaic of five council estates that lay between Peckham Road and Burgess Park. His killers didn’t live there, and the regeneration of all five estates had already begun, but this didn’t prevent the press from indulging in the familiar evocation of feral children running wild in the underlit canyons of low-cost housing. How to get rid of these troublesome children? Perhaps it was only a matter of raising the rents.

There’s a relationship between the way the enemies of privately rented slums and of mass social housing have talked about these two forms of tenure over the last 150 years: in each case, the buildings themselves have been characterised as the problem, as though the tenants’ difficulties would go away if their environment was destroyed and replaced, rather than the problem being that the tenants were poor and the buildings not looked after.

Damilola Taylor’s murder fed into the media and folk narrative that the council blocks of the 1960s and 1970s, with their raised concrete walkways and monolithic towers – ‘monolithic’ is always the epithet here – generated crime and vandalism. Antisocial behaviour resulted from antisocial architecture. The American architect Oscar Newman argued that successful architecture offered its users ‘defensible space’, while the British geographer Alice Coleman surveyed 4099 blocks of flats and decided the problems of social housing had less to do with underfunding, unemployment or poverty than bad design: people just weren’t meant to live in flats.

Although the Southwark Labour Party defended the idea of council housing in the 1980s, it didn’t always remember that its tenants would rather not have their homes presented to the world as a chronic affliction they were obliged to bear. ‘On the Heygate Estate at the Elephant and Castle the tower blocks are slabs, eleven storeys high and extraordinarily ugly,’ Ann Ward, the Labour deputy leader of Southwark Council, told the Daily Express in 1981. ‘But there is far less vandalism than you might expect, partly because of the long, straight, open lines.’

Jerry Flynn runs the 35 Per Cent Campaign. He was a teenager on the Heygate Estate in the 1970s, when it was new. Not long ago he sent me a video by the Conservative housing spokesman, James Cleverly. Cleverly, in beige trousers and a blue blazer, a handkerchief tucked in the top pocket, addresses the camera as he strolls down one of the smart new alleys of Elephant Park, past sleek blocks of biscuit-coloured brick. ‘This is Heygate Street, which runs through the heart of what used to be the Heygate Estate in Southwark, just around the corner from Elephant and Castle,’ he says. ‘And for anyone my age who grew up in South-East London, the Heygate Estate was a byword for urban failure.’ Here he extends his pinkie, but before he can begin counting off the Heygate’s sins on his fingers, we’re shown some stills of the estate on the eve of demolition, looking its worst. ‘Ugly. Crumbling. Crime-ridden. It was everything that went wrong with postwar planning. But look now!’ The camera pans across the brick apartments, augmented with a tentative fringe of ivy. ‘It’s been torn down and rebuilt, with buildings that are better quality, probably higher density, and create a much more pleasant urban environment.’

People watching the clip could be forgiven for thinking that the former tenants of the Heygate had been temporarily moved out and returned to lovely new flats, rather than summarily evicted from the area, while most of the new flats were privately let or sold on the open market for hundreds of thousands of pounds to people who had no connection to the community. When the Heygate fell, so did the idea that society as a whole might share part of its collective wealth to allow people who aren’t well off to go on living in the heart of London.

Ifirst met Jerry Flynn at a demo against plans to redevelop the Old Kent Road – not against new homes and businesses on this tired section of the old pilgrim way, the main thoroughfare from London to Canterbury, but against the way it’s being done. The protesters had set up a stage against the Michael Faraday memorial (the scientist was born nearby), a house-sized, dimpled stainless steel box in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout. Flynn was one of the first to address the crowd. A lean, undemonstrative man in his seventies, he has a determined, plain way of speaking. He described Berkeley Homes’ Peckham plans and its even bigger project on the Old Kent Road, where a development of 1400 flats and houses has gone from 40 per cent affordable to 12 per cent. In another part of Southwark, Canada Water, British Land promised 35 per cent, now cut to 9 per cent. ‘Developers who promised 35 per cent affordable housing are now saying, “Sorry, we can’t do it. It’s not viable anymore,”’ Flynn told the crowd. ‘What this really means is it’s just not making enough profit anymore.’

The protesters took up their banners and headed off towards the Old Kent Road. It was a buzz to have the traffic stopped so we could walk along the grungy old flyover; the rough concrete panels echoed the walls of the system-built Heygate. But to get there the march had to pass Elephant Park and its brightly coloured new towers. ‘What do we want? Council houses! When do we want them? Now!’ ran a ragged chorus. ‘Homes for people, not profit!’ The towers of Elephant Park looked down, smart, untroubled, untouchable.

I went back to Elephant Park a few days later to meet Flynn in a café filled with earnest young people on laptops. He’s a librarian by profession, a working-class intellectual. His 35 Per Cent blog is part archive, part narrative, part polemic, part journalism, an essential resource for anyone trying to understand the story of housing in Southwark this century. He moved out of the Heygate Estate to the council flat where he now lives in 1981, but his parents and his uncle Felim, Irish immigrants, stayed in their home until their deaths, leaving one of his brothers as the last remaining Flynn on the estate. Their two-storey maisonettes had three bedrooms and a garden. Listening back to my recording of his affectionate, downbeat account of the family home, it occurred to me how narrow the idea of council estate life is for those who haven’t experienced it: the stylish architectural design, the promo shots of new buildings, the journalist’s melodrama of social entropy, the actual TV drama – many gritty segments were shot on the Heygate and the Aylesbury, with the fees going to Southwark Council – and how rare it is to see inside.

Flynn told me his mother had been dismayed to find herself diminished in the eyes of society just because she lived on a council estate. ‘My mother became progressively more upset, I guess, at the way council tenants were portrayed. When we moved onto a council tenancy, there was no stigma about being a council tenant. None whatsoever. People wanted to become council tenants. By the time we moved off, it was quite the opposite, and it did distress my mum. What kind of people do they think we are? You know, she’d read these stupid articles in the Mail and that. She was pretty outraged by it. She knew it bore no relation whatsoever to the kind of life she or her neighbours lived.’

We talked about the motivations for estate regeneration. ‘They were made up of three elements, if you like: distaste for the way the place looks, distaste for the people who live on it and distaste for the whole idea of council housing. With effort, with imagination and with investment, what could have been done? I don’t know whether it could have been fully refurbished, but maybe it could have.’

In the early Victorian era, the propertied classes came to feel guilt, horror and fear towards the industrial cities that were the source of their new prosperity. Guilt at the human misery; horror at the squalor of the factory towns; fear of the mob. A greater fear, and the catalyst for change, was of infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera. The impulse to house working families in more sanitary conditions, indeed the eventual development of an interventionist, supervisory state, drew on philanthropic and evangelical sentiments, but derived its urgency from a primal fear of fatal infection. Philanthropic housebuilding organisations appeared, supplementing the market’s overcrowded dwellings with blocks of flats for working families. It was a form of architecture the English struggled to comprehend. ‘One hardly knows … what to think of them,’ one observer wrote on seeing the first examples, four-storey blocks in Birkenhead, completed in 1847. ‘They are not rows of cottages containing two or three rooms each, fronted and backed by gardens. They are not scattered cottages, speckling a valley or the side of a hill, like so many of our pretty, old English villages. On approaching them … they appear more like houses for the upper classes of society; and we feel puzzled how to associate them with the requirements and limited wants of a working population.’

The Birkenhead flats are gone, but a near contemporary block from 1850 remains, a stone’s throw from the LRB offices in Bloomsbury. Now owned by the Peabody housing association, it bears the inscription ‘Model Houses for Families’. They were known as model dwellings because their philanthropic patrons wanted to provide a pattern of space and comfort at low rents that other enlightened developers could copy. But there was a limit to their philanthropy: to finance the work, they had to get investors, and for that, they had to offer a return, usually between 4 and 5 per cent, a lower rate than you could get by putting your money into something less virtuous.

In the 1870s, when the six-storey Palatinate Estate went up near Elephant and Castle, they were called model dwellings by journalists, but there’s little evidence of idealism on the part of the builders, or philanthropy on the part of their lenders. Sutton and Dudley shrugged off the deaths of children, and in the same period, broken windowsills led to the death of at least one woman and the permanent disablement of another. The model dwellings were on their way to becoming slums. In 1901 the Bermondsey and Southwark Tenants’ Protection Leagues campaigned against Sutton and Dudley’s rent policies. The Labour radical Francis Soutter addressed raucous tenants’ meetings, complaining that behind the ‘fresh paint that adorned the outer walls’ of the Palatinate Estate lay ‘dark staircases and dismal well holes, back yards entered through prison-like gates, ashes and house refuse of the most offensive character being allowed to lay about everywhere’. And yet these same buildings stood for another seventy years, barely refurbished, gaining layers of soot. During their last days they served as a location for the 1967 film Poor Cow, made by Ken Loach, whose TV play about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, inspired the creation of Shelter. Joy, played by Carol White, is filmed taking her baby up onto the roof. Soon afterwards, the slum was demolished to make way for the Heygate. In the Loach film, the Palatinate tenements, filmed from the back, look grimy, the interiors archaic. They also look like the old Thames warehouses that have since been converted into expensive apartments. But few wore gentrifying goggles in those days.

By September 1968, when Southwark Council drew up the planning brief for the Heygate Estate, London had been building council houses at a clip for decades. Wartime bombing had left 116,000 houses destroyed or unrepairable. Many slums had been demolished or were scheduled for demolition, leaving people to be rehoused. But despite block after block of new social housing, it seemed to the confident, self-consciously modernising state of the 1960s that there was much more to do. London was running to keep still. Homelessness was high. Immigrants, particularly immigrants of colour, struggled to find homes. Overcrowding was rampant. Trust in private landlords was low. A parliamentary report on housing in London described a landlord chalking lines on the floor of a room to divide it into separate lettings. The same report found that in Greater London in 1961 there were more than half a million households ‘without even shared use of a bathroom’.

The Heygate was built by Southwark Council, rather than by the better-resourced Greater London Council.* The estate was ambitious in scale, but not in budget: the aim was simply to house a large number of people quickly and cheaply. The Palatinate and the rest of the old neighbourhood were levelled and work began using the 12M Jespersen system, a pre-cast concrete panel. One detail in the planning brief betrays a paternalistic, almost parental anxiety: ‘Laundries are good places for encouraging social contacts; they should be situated close to other social areas, shops etc.’ But it’s a rare moment. You can see why architects found these briefs frustrating. There’s no vision or idealism on the council’s part. The Heygate brief deals with numbers, percentages, persons, units. Under the heading ‘Design of Dwellings’ there are 44 words, saying, in essence: ‘Here are the government’s space standards. You can make the flats bigger if you like, but it mustn’t cost too much.’ The borough architect who led the team that realised the brief, Tim Tinker, told Rowan Moore that he bitterly regretted the council’s decision to save money by abandoning the planned balconies. ‘Planners laid it down and we did it,’ he said. ‘All they wanted was housing. The political parties were outbidding each other to build the most … We never set out to build a utopia. That’s a nonsense; we were trying to do the best we could. The fundamentals, in my book, were correct. People would give their right arm for these living conditions. It was a place near to the centre where you can park your car, it was quiet – it was unbelievable.’ The Heygate had just over 1200 flats. I compared the size of one of its two-bed flats to one of the new two-bed flats at Elephant Park, on the market, at the time of writing, for £720,000. The council flat was bigger.

Flynn and his family lived a few blocks away from the Palatinate. ‘We thought, well, at least we don’t live there.’ But the flat his family rented privately in a terraced house opposite a bomb site wasn’t ideal either. The flats didn’t have front doors: other tenants went past his family’s living room to get to their flats by the common stair. There was no kitchen, only a cooker on the landing. There was a toilet, but no bathroom. ‘We washed in the sink. And occasionally, when we were young, my mum got out one of those galvanised tubs in the back room. But my father and mum, they used the local public baths.’ Flynn’s parents slept in one bedroom, Uncle Felim and the three boys in three beds in the other. ‘I guess when you’re young, everything’s normal. We didn’t think of ourselves as being deprived.’

The family hesitated when they got the offer of a flat in the Heygate: ‘In those days, the council house was a step up. The rent was higher.’ When they moved in, ‘the first impressions were, you know, wow, this is much better than we had … I’m not sure there was any idealism. There was an idea that’ – he laughed at having to state the obvious – ‘that there should be decent housing for people! And it was something that people should feel entitled to, and the council should provide that, and that is how it should be.’

And yet the Heygate, and the Aylesbury, built at about the same time, had deep problems. The central heating and hot water system in the tower blocks kept breaking down. There was vandalism and littering. There were long waits for repairs. There was crime. The elevated walkways, and the endless up and down of ramps and stairs, got on people’s nerves. Coleman may have been blinkered in her ideas, but her notion of ‘confused space’, areas of a communal property that nobody takes responsibility for, is a recognisable one. ‘There used to be the usual antisocial behaviour, as it’s called now, people playing loud music or having rows or that kind of thing,’ Flynn said. ‘But you regarded that as just life, really, not anything that necessarily makes you think, well, we’ve got to get out of here.’

Underlying the dilapidation of the Heygate and the Aylesbury were a series of miscalculations by Southwark Council. In 1977, it prepared to call time on its house-building programme. There were doubts over the pace at which the borough had moved. One councillor later described the mood as a ‘sort of religious fervour … The only effective and coherent policy … was to knock down the whole of the borough and build a sparkling new borough.’ There was concern that, as one council document put it, ‘to be restricted from access to council housing in Southwark is for most people tantamount to being restricted from all housing in Southwark.’ The change in Southwark’s population in the decades before the middle-class influx wasn’t simply a case of immigrants arriving, but of people leaving, and not just because they couldn’t get the right council house, or because they didn’t like immigrants – although that played a part for some – but because they wanted to buy a big house with a garden, and in those days city councils were as likely to be knocking down that kind of property as building it.

Southwark had built so many council houses that it forecast a surplus by 1981 – more homes than people needed. This seemed a reasonable bet, since the population of the borough had fallen every decade since 1901, when almost 600,000 people lived there. By the 1971 census, it had dropped to 262,000, and was still falling. The council thought it could focus on repair and renovation; it wasn’t as if the money needed to keep the operation running was going to stop dead.

Then two things happened. The population started going up, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. It’s notorious that the Conservatives enacted the Right to Buy rules in a way that was highly damaging to the foundations of communally financed housing. What’s less well known is quite how many ways the Conservatives found after 1979 to crush the nascent prospect of housing as a universal national service. And Southwark, with its preponderance of council homes, was particularly vulnerable.

As it built new estates, the council budgeted for their maintenance. But the radical step of creating dense new town-sized communities at low cost, using unfamiliar materials and design principles, left the council with hefty liabilities. Money ought to have been spent righting the inevitable mistakes in their design and, after a certain number of decades, renovating the estates. Neither expenditure was planned for.

Another area of vulnerability was debt. To finance the construction of council houses, the government enabled cheap loans, but although they were cheap, they weren’t free: when the Heygate and Aylesbury were planned, the council could have expected to pay around 5 per cent interest. But the great inflation of the 1970s, which would melt away the debt of some councils that had begun to wind up their housebuilding, hit those who went on building hard. In 1975, Southwark warned that it was having to pay twice as much in debt repayments for each council home as it collected in rent. Housing debt overall had increased fourfold in ten years. ‘The key thing that made the difference is how much housing you built in the 1970s,’ Matthew Warburton of ARCH, a grouping of councils which still own estates, told me. ‘Because that was the expensive stuff.’

To maintain its housing stock and pay down its debt the council drew on rents, rates and government support. When Thatcher came to power, each came under attack. It’s hard to describe the assault as anything but punitive, although it stretched out over decades, long after she stepped down. The best houses were picked off through Right to Buy. Councils were prevented from using most of the proceeds to build new houses, and the premature forced liquidation of precious communal assets went, in large part, towards paying off long term debt. Municipalities began to bleed affordable property with no way to replace it. Grants to build new council houses or transform existing estates were diverted to housing associations. The government stopped councils using the rates, elected local government’s only means of raising money directly, to cross-subsidise council housing. At the same time, maintenance funds were slashed. In 1979, Southwark had a budget of £60 million to maintain its 36,000 homes. By 1987, it had inherited homes from the abolished GLC, bringing the number up to 62,000, but the maintenance budget had been cut to £28.5 million. Taking inflation into account, the council was trying to keep its vast estate from crumbling with less than a third of the old budget.

Councils that had wound down their house building early, benefited from inflation and gone into surplus weren’t rewarded: they were punished by the Treasury, which effectively plundered their rents. A late 2000s effort by John Healey, then Gordon Brown’s housing minister, to offer councils a new housing deal – reconfiguring debt and letting councils finance their housing stock via rents – was crushed by George Osborne’s austerity regime in the 2010s. Meanwhile government resources that could have been used to subsidise more affordable housing went instead towards subsidising private housebuilders through the Help to Buy scheme. The right-wing media, and a large proportion of the public, didn’t blame central government. They blamed the councils. They blamed the architects. They blamed the tenants. On the day she left Downing Street for the last time, Thatcher moved into a newly built house in Southwark, in a gated estate in Dulwich.

Until the Thatcher years, and for some time after she came to power, Southwark Council had been hostile to gentrification. Tony Ritchie, the borough’s Labour leader from 1984 to 1986, scorned the American actor Sam Wanamaker when he sought to build a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre close to where it originally stood, near Southwark Bridge. To the delight of Labour’s enemies, he said, according to the Sunday Times, that Shakespeare was ‘tosh’, a bold statement from a borough that features Hamlet on its coat of arms. Southwark resisted office building on the Thames, near the City; when the government gave a regeneration agency, the London Docklands Development Corporation, planning control over much of Bermondsey, and private money flooded in, Southwark at first stood aloof from that too. But in the mid-1980s, things began to change. Ritchie, embroiled in local party scandals, stepped down. The Labour leaders who followed thought it futile to fight Thatcher and her successors. They hired management consultants. Southwark went, in the eyes of government and developers, from incompetent rebel to regeneration golden child. Wanamaker got his Globe; Southwark got Tate Modern. Money, well-heeled youth and ambitious restaurateurs rushed into the north of the borough.

At this point, in the 1990s, questions that had been whispered in the newly complaisant town hall began to sound more distinctly. How did river views for financiers translate into better conditions for council tenants in decaying blocks? And was it possible that those tenants’ needs were stopping this high-spending excitement spreading south through the borough? In 1994, Southwark pooled government money with its own and joined a consortium of housing associations and private developers to demolish and rebuild five council estates in north Peckham. The Peckham Partnership knocked down thousands of council homes and replaced them with a less dense mix of council, housing association and private homes. The programme, which saw many council tenants rehoused in place, went fairly smoothly and the council was encouraged to try something more ambitious to solve its maintenance crisis. The cannibalistic solution it came up with was the Southwark Estates Initiative: the council would demolish some estates, sell the land to private developers and use the money to meet its repair bill. One of the estates in the frame for demolition was the Heygate.

The Peckham Partnership had raised suspicions that Southwark was trying to bring more middle-class people into the borough at the expense of poorer families. Stephen Chance was a director at the architecture firm Pollard Thomas and Edwards, which worked on the project. ‘The intention is to have a mixed-tenure neighbourhood and make it possible for people to want to buy private property in an area that was not popular,’ he said at the time. ‘We are not trying to build a new estate, we are trying to build a bit of ordinary London.’ As the historian John Boughton, who quotes Chance on his blog, Municipal Dreams, points out, ‘popular’ and ‘ordinary’ bear much decoding.

In March 1999, an article appeared in Estates Gazette, a magazine for developers, with the headline ‘Shelter for the middle class: Labour councils in London are selling off social housing and displacing poor people in a bid to transform blighted areas.’ The article names Southwark and Newham as the boroughs in the lead, with Hackney, Lewisham and Lambeth also ‘involved’. Bob Young, the head of housing policy in Newham in East London, was the most forthright of the officials quoted. Talking about 4200 new homes planned in his borough, he said: ‘What we have is a concentration of benefit-dependent people in the area. Social housing attracts people that are challenged economically who can’t support local shops and services. We don’t want to see any more social rented housing … We’ve got a New Labour government. All we have done is put our local surfboard on a wave that is coming out of Downing Street.’

Fred Manson, the head of regeneration for Southwark, was less inflammatory, but his comments were seized on by anti-development campaigners. Manson argued that the borough needed to reverse the trend that had left 60 per cent of Southwark’s housing stock as social housing. ‘Because social housing generates people on low incomes coming in and that generates poor school performances, middle-class people stay away. We need to try and do this for stability.’ Whatever hope Southwark might have had of winning people over to the Estates Initiative was probably doomed by Manson’s comments. A leading voice in the tenants’ groups at the time, Gary Glover, said that Manson was confirming what he’d always suspected: that the council had a hidden agenda.

The following year a council survey found that tenants would vote overwhelmingly against a transfer of the entire stock, some 50,000 homes, to a housing association. The council was back where it started: short of cash to fix up its properties, short of places for people to live, under pressure from developers. The next target was Elephant and Castle itself, designated for regeneration, and the huge estates next door, the Heygate and the Aylesbury.

When Heygate tenants first learned their estate was to be demolished, Flynn told me, many were enthusiastic. Early talks showed the complexity of locals’ relationship to the estate: it wasn’t the buildings they were wedded to but the idea of secure, good quality affordable housing in that particular neighbourhood, provided by their elected representatives, the council. Tenants were wary of demolition not because of architectural sentimentality but because they knew the buildings embodied their legal and moral right to be there. Initially, the council and developers seemed to respect this. Tenants were promised the choice between a new home on the site of the estate – the ‘footprint’ – or one of the new homes the council was going to have built on sixteen small sites in and around the area, funded by additional homes for private sale. ‘It was great, fantastic,’ Flynn said. ‘So we start from a position where everybody is full of enthusiasm, open to these ideas, and it looks as if there’s a way of doing it. Over four years, relationships fall apart.’

In 2003, the tenants were told they’d lost their right of return: there was no guarantee they’d be able to get new homes on the Heygate footprint. Nonetheless, at the beginning of 2007, they were still getting upbeat brochures from the council, urging them to come along to an exhibition of the new houses they’d been promised. ‘This is your chance to see all the designs in one location,’ the brochure gushed. ‘You can even start to think about the layout and decoration of your new home, for example if you would prefer an open plan or separate kitchen/diner. Don’t miss it!’ A small number of council flats had already been built as a pilot for the sixteen sites, looking spiffy in a bright red-to-yellow façade, hard up against one of the Heygate mega-blocks.

Only a few months later, the bullishly pro-regeneration Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition that ran Southwark from 2002 to 2010 picked Lendlease to develop the Heygate. The council announced that everyone on the estate should start preparing to leave, long before the houses they were supposed to move to were ready. They’d be given priority on the waiting list to find a house somewhere else in the borough. Eventually, if they wanted, they’d be able to get one of the new houses. The justification for this peremptory banishment was the vague claim – from the landlord whose job it had been to sustain the buildings – that the fabric of the estate had become ‘unsustainable’. ‘Clearing the Heygate Estate is essential to the success of the Elephant and Castle redevelopment. Demolition of the Heygate will provide symbolic and tangible evidence to the people of Southwark that the council is driving ahead with the regeneration of the borough,’ a council report declared. It continued, with circular logic, to promise to protect residents from the consequences of its own actions: ‘Half-empty blocks become a breeding ground for crime and antisocial behaviour. The council has a responsibility to mitigate this risk. For these reasons, we have proposed an action plan to empty the Heygate in the quickest possible time.’

Flynn’s mother died in 2006. When the notice to quit arrived he helped his brother, the last member of his family on the estate, to find a property elsewhere through a version of the bidding system Misgina is using. Because his brother had top priority, they found a place, a basement in a terraced house without gas or electricity (these were eventually connected). Those who’d bought flats through Right to Buy, trusting in Thatcher’s flagship policy, were not offered anything like the money they would have needed to buy similarly sized properties in the area. Some of them fought a bitter, and futile, rearguard action through the courts before being forced to sell.

One day during the pandemic, I was looking at bike routes using Google Street View when I noticed a strange phenomenon. A virtual journey down a street of low-rise modern blocks of flats suddenly shifted and blurred into grey, textured concrete panels. It was as if the end of the street were a portal into the 1970s. For a while, the pre-demolition and post-demolition streetscapes of the Heygate were juxtaposed. The different year-views, which go back to 2008, form an animation of change. Looking at the 2008 images of Heygate Street, I found the panelled side wall of one of the estate maisonettes with the open access stair against it, supported by a round pillar, behind an acacia tree in an expanse of greenery. The building looks clean, sound, quirky. It’s still there in 2010, but by 2012, with the estate empty, signs of dereliction are apparent. Graffiti has appeared, a low brick wall separating the building from the street has gone and the grounds are no longer being tended. By 2014, most of the trees behind the building have been cut down – not yet the acacia – and fencing has gone up with the Lendlease logo. A few months later, the building has been demolished, replaced by construction equipment and Portakabins. Next spring, the acacia still stands, but without leaves. A hoarding in front of the dead tree says: ‘Welcome to Elephant Park’. Another year, and the bare ground is ready for construction; all that’s left of the acacia is a stump. In October 2016, cranes appear, all traces of the acacia gone. In May 2018, a building is rising; by September 2020, it’s finished, a skinny ziggurat in two-tone brick; by 2024, tall apartment blocks have risen up on either side of it, and a newly planted tree is growing from a cutout in the pavement.

There are a lot of figures in housing stories, and a confusing number of different forms of tenure – secure council tenancy, housing association social rent, housing association affordable rent. Of all of them, council tenancies are the most prized. First, because they’re the cheapest by a huge margin. The average monthly rent for a two-bed council home in Southwark is £559, versus £2306 for the equivalent on the open market. Second, council tenancies can be passed on, once, to another member of the original tenant’s household.

By the time I spoke to Flynn this year, the 1200 council houses on the Heygate Estate were long gone, the residents dispersed. In their place, Lendlease has built nearly 2700 homes, overwhelmingly for various kinds of private ownership, but with a small number of affordable homes. According to Flynn, of all the tenants expelled (many left earlier), only 42 eventually moved into Elephant Park and the sixteen smaller sites, which were built much later.

Those who survived did retain the right to return until the last of the new sites was belatedly finished. The council, the housing associations and the developers are now well on the way to creating a new town centre at Elephant and Castle, and have built thousands of private homes; they’ve also built almost as many affordable homes as were lost on the Heygate site. ‘My response would be: look, this has been going on now over thirty years and you’ve only just succeeded in replacing what we had when we started out, and you haven’t replaced them, because these are social rented homes,’ Flynn said. ‘And there is a big difference between council housing and social rented housing.’

Against the heavily caveated promise of a future profit share with Lendlease, it was the council that demolished its own flats in the mid-2010s, selling the site to the developers at a loss. The local politician who has probably attracted the most odium for the death of the Heygate Estate is Peter John, who became the Labour council leader after the party won Southwark back in 2010. He signed the final deal with Lendlease and led the council’s fight to buy out the homeowners. He remains a strong supporter of regeneration, although he told the Guardian in 2015 that ‘if the opportunity ever arose again to clear out a whole estate, you wouldn’t do it. It’s not the right way to regenerate. It’s terrible.’

The council leader when the estate was prematurely cleared of tenants was John’s predecessor, Nick Stanton of the Liberal Democrats. In 2010, with demolition of the Heygate poised to begin, he spoke at a networking event for planners, developers and architects. He delivered a swaggering historical account of the case for regeneration. ‘The more that Southwark Council said we’re poor, we’re miserable, you wouldn’t want to live here, the more people agreed and didn’t. The more we said it was Thatcher’s fault and she should give us money, she didn’t. And generally speaking, we were beginning to get sucked into a spiral of decline. And in the early 1990s … we stopped being a South London borough with our back to the river, and we started to think of ourselves as a Central London borough, respectable. We came up in the world … We faced and embraced the river, and actually, we wanted a slice of that Central London action.’

I met Stanton at a Colombian café on the Old Kent Road. The cost of refurbishing the Heygate, he said, would have been so large that Southwark would have been able to do nothing else while it was being done. ‘This was the arcane high priesthood of housing finance,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t get subsidy … to build stock that was replacing stock that was going to be demolished, so it’s very difficult to actually fund these new builds.’ He fell back on the circular argument that the buildings were deteriorating because they’d cut back on repairs, they’d cut back on repairs because the buildings were due to be demolished, and the deterioration made demolition more urgent.

‘There are council meetings Jerry Flynn never talks about, where people from the Heygate would come along holding rusty pipework which had fallen off, or there’d be people stuck on the thirteenth floor when the lift wasn’t working. In the end, we said: “We can’t wait for all this new housing to come forward first, as promised. We’re going to have to get on and, horrid word, decant you now, because we cannot allow you to go on living in these conditions.”’ Labour should have looked after it better, he told me. ‘Everyone had the chance to stay in Southwark, if that’s what they wanted to do. There was no mass cleansing.’

Earlier this year I cycled to the Aylesbury Estate, where tall new affordable blocks with views of Burgess Park are being built. Most of the estate is still as it was, unregenerated, badly cared for, in the same style as the Heygate, a mixture of smaller blocks and gigantic oblong stacks containing hundreds of flats. I met two women, Brenda and Marie, who live at opposite ends of a row of two-storey houses, built in brick with a concrete frame, with gardens and deep balconies. Marie had lived there since 1979, Brenda since 1969. Their flats have been earmarked for demolition, but they’ve no idea when it’s going to happen. After the collapse of the council’s deal with Notting Hill Genesis, they’ve been told it could be another fourteen years. For now they’re classed as comfortably housed, with no chance of having a bid accepted for another council property. Marie moved to London from Yorkshire when she was fifteen. She’s 71 now and lives with her son, a postman. She used to work at BHS in Oxford Street. ‘I’ve always lived in South London and the estates don’t bother me,’ she said. The new affordable homes, she told me, were small, with thin walls, no storage and no gardens even for ground-floor flats. ‘I don’t mind rich people being in Southwark at all,’ she said. ‘I’m not snobbish in that way. What does bother me is council tenants pushed into new build properties, or pushed out.’

The estate lacked menace in the sunshine, but there is a complex geography of residence and dereliction: here washing hung out to dry and people coming and going; there barren grey-brown textured panels and broken windows. I rode up a ramp to one of the walkways running along the outside of a big block, the Wendover, which once would have housed more than a thousand people. A court closure order warned it was illegal to be there without an accompanying police officer unless visiting one of a dozen flats that had been bought under Right to Buy. I only found one person at home, who said he didn’t own the flat, and didn’t want to chat. Each of the other flats had been welded shut with a panel of solid steel, its number scarred onto the surface with the tip of a welding rod.

Just a glide along the walkway, in a smaller but otherwise very similar block at right angles to the Wendover, there was habitation, foot traffic, a postman leaving a parcel on somebody’s mat. I got talking to Faith, who lives in a large garden flat with three bedrooms – the kind that never comes up – with her three sons. She was pleased the council put her there three years ago, she told me. ‘The moment I got inside, it doesn’t look like the outside at all,’ she said. ‘It’s bigger, there’s a big garden and the kids have a lot of space to play.’ Still, she’d rather live somewhere else. Her main complaint was what she called ‘disturbances’. ‘Sometimes we hear the police chasing them, and just the other day I had a little domestic violence issue … a little calmer would be fine.’ Sometimes they have mould in the bathroom, but the council comes along and paints over it.

Faith and her family live in a council flat and Faith pays rent to the council. And yet the council doesn’t recognise them as its tenants. As far as the council is concerned, they’re in the same category as Misgina: British citizens, statutorily homeless. The council could move them somewhere else at any time: the building is still, nominally, scheduled to be knocked down one day. It’s a remarkable failure of the British state. Faith works full-time as an NHS nurse, her sons are at state schools and they’re living in a flat built and maintained by the local arm of the British state. Yet somehow, they’re homeless, and the building eternally due to be knocked down and replaced, without the money or plan to see it through.

I asked Reginald Popoola, the Green councillor who became Southwark’s social housing lead in May, why they’d put Faith in the Aylesbury.† It turns out that housing homeless families in council properties without making them tenants has been standard practice for years. When the Heygate was evacuated, hundreds of homeless families were spirited away to other temporary accommodation. Later, I found out that one of my son’s friends at primary school is statutorily homeless and lives with her parents in the Aylesbury.

‘You are correct that there is a new pseudo-class of council tenants, but they are still statutorily homeless,’ Popoola told me. He was in the tricky position, as a newly elected insurgent, of both attacking and justifying Southwark Council. The stalled redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate had left ‘hundreds of voids’ – empty flats – and the council had been creative enough to fill them with homeless families. ‘There have historically been complaints about the council taking people from Peckham and throwing them into Pembrokeshire … the council have to a certain extent refurbished these homes and kept people there while they continue to bid for a council house, but unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to have people in those homes for eight, nine, ten, eleven and thirteen and fifteen years.’ He said they weren’t made council tenants ‘primarily because those blocks are chronically unsafe’. But if they were chronically unsafe, I said, people shouldn’t be living there at all. ‘I completely agree,’ Popoola replied, ‘but unfortunately the council’s hands are tied. That’s why the council has been proactive in terms of emergency repairs. But we can’t do that in perpetuity.’

Popoola spoke idealistically of forming a common front across the country to pressure government to do more, to challenge developers, to commit to a revival of direct public funding for council housing. The Aylesbury, he believes, should have been renovated rather than consigned to destruction. At the same time, he inhabits a constrained universe in which the council owes a billion pounds on its housing account, struggles to build any new council houses and is obliged to partner with developers.

The Heygate story, which began with the demolition of badly kept, low-cost private housing from the 1870s and ended in the 2010s with the demolition of badly kept, low-cost public housing from the 1970s, might seem separate from Berkeley’s plans for Peckham. For Jerry Flynn, they belong to the same history of broken promises, and he won’t support them. ‘You said you were going to give us 35 per cent affordable housing, and now we’re only going to get 12 per cent. So we’ve no reason to believe anything that you say,’ was his message to Berkeley. ‘Why should we care? They’re not for us. You know, no more than you care for us, why should we care for you? And why should we care for the people coming and living here? It’s no good building us homes we can’t afford.’

Nick Stanton was an ally of the property developers, but defends his record in getting affordable housing built in Southwark. He told me about the day the late founder of Berkeley Homes, the self-made tycoon Tony Pidgley, who lived in a railway carriage as a child, came to his office. ‘He was a very brusque guy. He says, basically, “You’re bloody lucky to have Berkeley coming to you.” He slaps down a pad on the table: “This is what we’re going to be getting.”’ When Stanton pushed back, ‘Pidgley says, “You’re very poor,” and I say, “Yup, the seventh most deprived in England.” He says, “So you don’t want any affordable housing, then, so we’ll do 100 per cent private.” He was genuinely perplexed. “You’re already so completely poor. Why on earth do you want more housing for poor people?” And I was like, “You don’t understand, my casework is full of people that need housing. The only thing I can think of to say to them is that the next time a developer comes to do stuff, we’ll make sure they provide it, because that’s the only lever we have.”’

It was a different Berkeley project from the one in Peckham, and a different era. Berkeley, like all property developers in London, is now pushing the idea that local government is asking too much of them, that the already slow pace of London housebuilding could stop altogether if they’re compelled to build too many affordable homes. Sceptics point to the curious institution of the ‘viability study’, the convention by which property developers are allowed to claim that affordable housing which reduces their profit below 20 per cent is ‘unviable’. Developers have come to treat this guideline as if it were a law guaranteeing them a 20 per cent return, using opaque data to which the public has no access.

Imet Ann Lalic and Siobhan McCarthy of ACA, the main group campaigning against the Berkeley project, in a pub on Choumert Road, halfway between Bellenden Road and Rye Lane. Bellenden Road, site of a much earlier council-funded marriage of renovation and gentrification, now has independent boutiques, a free school, a bookshop, a wine shop, an artisanal butcher’s, a deli selling £7 sourdough loaves and a new fishmonger’s selling fresh oysters from a cart outside. As you go east, you pass large Georgian houses, an architect’s studio, a café spilling out onto the street. You come to a row of alms houses – an ancient and resilient form of affordable housing – and at the junction with Rye Lane, pass through an invisible membrane: this end of Choumert Road is home to Merciful God African Food Wholesale and Retail, the Delta Tavern Kitchen Nigerian Spice Café, Hair for Queens (By My Roial Ears), Suuyar, a street barbeque selling spiced grilled meat. Here and on Rye Lane are beauty shops that stay open late into the night, windows full of wigs and grocers selling stacks of yams. It is scruffy, chaotic, energetic, as wealthy modern cities so seldom are. There is a sense that commercial life, while full of stresses, inequalities and dodginess, is carried out horizontally, rather than controlled from above. ‘We are not what they call nimbys, in no way, shape or form,’ Lalic, one of the founders of ACA, told me. ‘I want [the site] to be developed, totally.’ But not as Berkeley proposed. ‘It just showed contempt.’

Lalic is a filmmaker who used to work on Grand Designs. She moved to Peckham after the death of her husband in 2019. She lives on an old, terraced street like Choumert Road. Berkeley’s plans horrified her. ACA raised a huge sum, £58,000 – £5000 more than it needed – to allow it to take part in the Berkeley planning inquiry as a third party, along with the developers and the council.

Many of the people I interviewed for this article used ‘gentrification’ and ‘regeneration’ interchangeably, but I felt this missed a useful distinction. Gentrification can be seen as a grassroots process, as students and artists looking for cheap housing move into an area with an existing working-class culture, establishing studios and music venues and bars, which draw in a wealthier clientele, encouraging businesses targeted at this demographic. Regeneration is different: a top-down process orchestrated by large, remote corporations and local authorities, concerned with volume and scale and order, and eager to tap into the same working-class culture that attracted gentrifiers, but in a way that confines and ultimately kills it.

The difficulty for profit-seeking regenerators such as Berkeley is that the gentrifiers got there first, and are trying to defend the Peckham they found every bit as fiercely as the working-class locals they consider, sometimes rightly, their friends and allies. The difficulty for abundance fans is that the constituency most likely to support Berkeley is impossible to rally, because it is made up of people who might live in the homes, but don’t know it yet, because the homes don’t exist.

‘When my parents were young, there weren’t that many non-white people here, so we’ve seen changes,’ said McCarthy, who lives in Nunhead. ‘When I was growing up, I think such a strong nickname for this area was Little Lagos. It’s really sad that it’s more like miniature Lagos now … I see it becoming smaller, smaller, smaller.’

Lalic said Berkeley’s team at the inquiry failed to understand the campaigners’ concern for Peckham’s intangible heritage. They didn’t seem to understand their own market. ‘You’re building things that are gonna fuck up what people want to buy into.’

‘What if it was exactly the same design, but 100 per cent social housing?’ I asked.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Lalic.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ McCarthy said, ‘but I think a lot of people would stomach it, if it was 100 per cent.’

I asked Popoola, a strong opponent of Berkeley’s plans, the same question. ‘The answer,’ he said, ‘will always be yes.’

One afternoon I noticed Saulo Paul, one of Bellenden’s few black business owners, sitting outside his café, 139 Fika. He lives with his family in a flat on a regenerated development in Canada Water. He finds it soulless. I asked him whether it might not develop its own character, its own community, over time, but he couldn’t see it happening in those tall towers of young professionals, the little city of consumer individuals. If they built the Berkeley Homes development, he said, ‘you might get a migration of people that will come to Peckham, but all you’re going to do is just turn Peckham into another suburb, another little city.’

In the early 1980s, the journalist and later London mayoral candidate Christian Wolmar interviewed Charles Sawyer, the Southwark councillor who presided over the era of intense housebuilding in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘I regret the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I think the whole scale of what we did was mad. There was a feeling at the time that any development of less than a thousand dwellings wasn’t worth bothering about. Yet we could have built low-rise housing at only a slightly lower density on the same land.’

I’ve seen an extract from the interview being used to suggest Sawyer was trashing the entire council house programme. In fact, he was only talking about the Aylesbury Estate. He wasn’t recanting on the ideal of a decent home for everyone in Southwark. For all its errors, the council is still building houses, still trying to get it right. The picture varies according to what you take as your base year, and 2014 is the council’s preferred date, but it’s not nothing that since then it claims to have built or started building 3289 homes, against – according to central government figures – 2474 demolished and lost to Right to Buy. With the pro-council house Andy Burnham and John Healey in government, and a 35-year moratorium to be imposed on Right to Buy for new houses, the ideal has life.

Elizabeth Wyatt of HASL scolded me for referring to council housing as ‘subsidised’. I don’t think it’s stigmatising, but it’s true that other subsidised services tend to get called ‘subsidised’ less often: the railways, or the NHS, or schools, as if it’s only a subsidy when it’s communal funding for low-income people. The greater ideal, perhaps, is to make the state-assisted universalisation of housing seem normal.

Wyatt says that if Southwark were to build as many appropriate-sized homes as there are homeless households on its books, it could become the first council to solve its homelessness problem. But might zero homelessness not draw more people in from elsewhere? It would, I suggested, be quite an experiment.

‘I would really encourage them to try that experiment,’ Wyatt replied.

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Footnotes

The Heygate was conceived and built as London County Council transitioned to the Greater London Council, part of the unending conflict between Labour and the Conservatives, and between London and its boroughs, for political control of the city.

Popoola was one of a group of Labour councillors who defected to the Greens after regional Labour officials forced the rerun, on extremely technical procedural grounds, of the local party’s election of the left-winger James McAsh as Southwark’s Labour leader, which would have made him council leader. McAsh also left Labour for the Greens after losing the rerun. Following the council elections, McAsh is now council leader after all, but for the Greens.