This chapter outlines the rise and fall of public housing in London with reference to national and local housing policy. Two historical periods are identified: an expansionary period that covers the first 80 years of the 20th century, followed by a contractionary period from the 1980s until the 2010s. This periodisation is theoretically located within the development of the Keynesian welfare state and that form of welfare state's unravelling under neoliberalisation, an unravelling that has intensified under recent austerity policies. Before outlining this periodisation, it is first contextualised with reference to housing as the ‘wobbly pillar’ of the welfare state.

The wobbly pillar of the welfare state

Most nation states rely upon market and informal housing provision, with the latter prominent in the Global South. It is only within the cities and towns of the Global North that public/social housing has existed to any substantial extent. Public housing was a key part of postwar welfare states in Western capitalist societies (Harloe, 1995; Balchin, 1996). Many Northern European cities – and North American and Australasian cities to a much lesser extent – are physically marked by the presence of public/social housing estates (Urban, 2012; Jacobs, 2019). During the 1950 to 1980s, these estates were often large-scale and took a modernist architectural form (Urban, 2012; Hess et al, 2018). Public housing was also prominent in the former state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, although the collapse of these regimes has resulted in wide-scale housing privatisation (Balchin, 1996; Hess et al, 2018).

Social housing is provided at sub-market costs due to state legislation and funding (although owner-occupation has also been heavily subsidised by the state in numerous ways; Merrett, 1982). Public/social housing entails the decommodification of housing in capitalist societies in that citizens can meet their basic need for shelter without having to pay market costs (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Jacobs, 2019). Decommodified public/social housing is most prominent in the social democratic and corporatist/conservative welfare state regimes of Northern Europe, rather than in the liberal welfare state regimes of North America or the marginal welfare regimes of Southern Europe (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Balchin, 1996). This pattern is linked to how workers’ political parties (social democratic, labour and communist) were able to extract key concessions from capital, especially in the postwar period.