What we need to learn

This impassioned plea comes from a community worker named Les White, based at ‘E13’, one of the 20 estates this book is based on. Worried and angry, White was writing in 1946, only ten years after the first residents moved in. Nonetheless, this ‘problem estate’ of the 1940s survived. It continued to provide homes for hundreds of families for another 70 years after his urgent comments, albeit losing some homes to demolition, and in 2019 it was still home to about 1,000 households. Over its lifetime of over more than 80 years to date, it has generated costs and benefits, some quantifiable, others less so, for tenants, for the local authority which owns and runs it, for its neighbours, and for the nation overall. Is this estate still a ‘monumental example of how new communities should not be planned’? Was it ever? Were lessons from the impassioned analysis of the 1940s learnt or applied? What can we learn from any investigation we carry out today?

The perception and assessment of social housing is a product of history, politics, diverse viewpoints and diverse realities. Social housing was once seen as evidence of the England's growing prosperity and progress, as slums were cleared and housing conditions were improved. However, as Alison Ravetz noted, no firm criteria of success or failure were ever established for social housing, so it could enjoy ‘small scale successes’ while ‘moving forward with a mounting sense of failure’ (Ravetz 2003:4). Council housing's role and value has been in doubt for most of its lifetime, even as it grew to eclipse private renting in 1967, and to house one in three UK households by 1981 (Holmans 2005).