This chapter reviews the various urban policy programmes which have attempted to renew and regenerate London's deprived estates. The chapter begins with a brief overview of ‘old’ urban renewal in its post-war slum clearance form, and its ‘new urban renewal’ form as estate regeneration. It then traces the development of estate-based programmes from the 1980s to the 2010s, and in so doing employs a binary early-contemporary periodisation. The early period (1980s to 1990s) included relatively generous public subsidies. Contemporary regeneration dates from the late 1990s to 2010s and is the primary focus of this book. It was during this period that the private sector was expected to undertake the heavy lifting in terms of regeneration funding. The analysis concentrates on the New Labour years since this is when most of the research schemes in this book began. Following this chronological account, the next section examines the hegemonic ‘official discourse’ on estate regeneration and excavates the underlying rationale for such regeneration in London. Aspects of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ are then briefly examined in London, and the concept of the ‘entrepreneurial borough’ is introduced. The penultimate section compares early and contemporary estate regeneration schemes, including with reference to differential mixed-tenure outcomes, while the final section examines what regeneration-as-demolition costs residents both in financial and human terms.

From old to new urban renewal

Post-war urban policy in Western capitalist societies consisted of renewal programmes which involved tearing down inner-city ‘slum housing’ which in many cases was replaced with public/social housing estates, typically of modernist architectural design (Hirsch, 1983; Urban, 2012). While such urban renewal often resulted in improved housing, it also erased established working-class neighbourhoods, as seen in Herbert Gans’ (1962) classic study of the West End of Boston. Urban renewal and resultant displacement destroyed working-class support networks and generated grieving for lost homes and communities (Fried, 1966; Marris, 1986). Fullilove (2016) has employed the concept of ‘root shock’ to highlight the racialised, destructive impacts of urban renewal on black communities in US cities.

The development of large-scale post-war public/social housing estates was based on a utopian modernist vision (Campkin, 2013).