As Goetz (2016) argues, there is limited research on social housing tenants’ resistance to redevelopment and this chapter contributes towards addressing that deficit. It begins by analysing housing activism with reference to council housing, and situates the recent crop of estate-based anti-demolition campaigns in relation to earlier anti-stock-transfer campaigns. The following section highlights campaigners’ ‘novice’ status in terms of housing politics. The impacts of collective resistance are then examined, first under what I have termed the ‘paradox of community’, and second in relation to nonengagement. The final section assesses how success can be assessed vis-à-vis resisting regeneration-as-demolition.

Housing activism: from pragmatism to contesting neoliberalism

Tenants’ struggles against landlord rent hikes and evictions have a long history in both Britain and the US (Madden and Marcuse, 2016). London has been a prominent site of tenant activism: for example, the 1958 Camden rent strike and the campaign against the 1972 Rent Act. There is debate over whether tenant activism is the Marxist class struggle in the sphere of labour reproduction (Glynn, 2009; Gray, 2018) or represents an ‘urban social movement’ in relation to collective consumption (Lowe, 1986; Bradley, 2014). Lowe (1986: 83) argued that local authority tenant activism in Britain was predicated upon a sense of solidarity arising from its location within an ‘overwhelmingly working-class social and cultural milieu’ as well as a shared consumption sector position.

Following a sustained period of public housing residualisation, Cole and Furbey (1994) criticised radical analyses (Marxist and urban social movement) as wish-fulfilment on the part of left-wing intellectuals who failed to understand the fundamentally pragmatic nature of local authority tenant activism. Much contemporary tenant activism in Britain is pragmatic, localist and defensive in orientation as tenants become involved in TRAs to improve their estate facilities and housing conditions (Bradley, 2014). This was highlighted by interviewees who were either current or previous active TRA members. TRAs operate in a trade union capacity by pressurising the council regarding maintenance and facilities. Olive had been active in her TRA at the Heygate estate and noted how most tenant issues related to repairs: “I mean if we had too many complaints [about repairs] then we would ask for someone to come [from the council], and then you would have a full house.