Introduction

The access to services and opportunities a residential neighbourhood offers will affect the relative popularity of an area. It may affect residents’ education, employment, standard of living and quality of life, and could contribute to ‘inverse care’ (Chapter 2) and to neighbourhood effects (Chapter 3). This chapter describes the availability, quality and cost of a range of estate and neighbourhood services, access to jobs, media representations of estates, evidence of any ‘estate effects’, and residents’ views of their estates, with a variety of qualitative and quantitative measures.

Estate shops and facilities

Access to a reasonable selection of shops and facilities is particularly important for those on low incomes, who are less likely to have cars, for older people and families with children, all over-represented in the estates (Chapter 10).

All the estates were in urban locations, although some were at the urban fringe: E1 (1929/300/h/NW), E11 (1938/400/h/Mid) and E12 (1947/1,000/h/NE). Most were built near existing high streets with a good range of shops. In 1938, a journalist reported that local shopkeepers were looking forward to the arrival of E4 (1938/300/fl/L) (‘HD’ 1938). Shops and services near the estate in the 1970s and 1980s recalled by former residents included a fish and chip shop, pie and mash shop, bakers, sweet shop, clothes makers, café, pubs, swimming pool and cinema, as well as places holding jumble sales, and a department store. A former resident posted in 2016, ‘I remember the green grocers [stall] i used to go on Sunday morning to get Vinegar and fresh Mint.’ Shops and shopkeepers loom large in the online recollections of many who grew up in the estates. A former resident of E18 (1966/1,600/deck/L) who became a professional rapper sang about her childhood pleasure in ‘bopping to the shops’ in the 1980s.

Most estates included shop units, generally in small parades with flats above. However, businesses within estates were generally slow to set up, and then often limited and expensive. To some extent this is to be expected in estates with a maximum of 2,000 relatively lowincome households (Chapters 4, 10).