This chapter focuses on residents’ displacement experiences, both before and after physical relocation. It begins by providing an overview of dispossession with reference to social cleansing. It then analyses displacement among social tenants, the tenure with the greatest rehousing rights, including the right to return, and examines the displacement anxiety theme. The next two sections examine the physical displacement experiences of secure council tenants – those who have returned to new properties in the redeveloped neighbourhood, and those who relocated away from the estate. The displacement experiences of owner-occupiers are then discussed, followed by the temporary tenants. The penultimate section scrutinises what the right to return really means, while the final section discusses agency, control and power in rehousing.

Dispossession

The Introduction summarised the notion that estate regeneration involving demolition forms part of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession. Urban working-class populations are dispossessed of publicly held resources, including land and housing, to make way for new predatory rounds of capital accumulation. In the case of estates, this occurs via the springing of the state-induced rent gap (Watt, 2013). This section presents residents’ views on dispossession.

‘It's not for us’ – social cleansing

Many residents displayed a profound distrust of the official rationale for demolition as expressed by their routine invocation of ‘it's not for us’ – meaning us (ordinary working-class people) will not be the prime beneficiaries of regeneration, not least since we will be physically displaced away from the area (Watt, 2013). Ali is a Bangladeshi leaseholder at Northumberland Park estate and recalled how she became disillusioned with the official regeneration aims:

Working-class residents like Ali thought demolition would primarily benefit them and not us. ‘Them’ consists of the social nexus involved in state-led gentrification including local authorities, housing associations, private developers, and the latter's affluent homeowning customers.