A good idea, fallen among Fabians

The Fabian Society - an organisation which I'm always rather impressed still exists, and which is probably, due to the contortions of New Labour, now somewhere on the Far Left of the Labour Party - has a new report out on council housing. This is the topic of my column in this week's BD and innumerable blog posts, so predictably I have something to say about it. As much as one can tell from the Independent article, it isn't entirely stupid. One of its central ideas appears to be that council housing once catered for a wide cross-section of people, and is now an emergency redoubt, creating what are rather hysterically described as 'social concentration camps', and more convincingly an 'apartheid' system in housing. This, as far as it goes, is true enough. If you delve into the history of council housing, you notice that it was originally aimed at the 'deserving' poor - the first and arguably finest of London estates, the Boundary Estate, merely displaced most of the residents of the famously horrendous Old Nichol slum that it replaced; there's a reference in an Orwell essay to the 'upper level' of the working class - skilled workers and council tenants. Meanwhile, if you shove a lot of the very poor together in an enclosed area then the results, as a general rule (very general - there are many well-managed and well-upkept council estates) are not going to be pleasant. The Fabian report also appears to be entirely sensible in pointing the finger at first, the system-built estates of the '60s, with their lack of attention to much other than stacking-em-up cheap, and second, the right to buy, as the culprits for the current state of council housing.

After that, sadly, if predictably, it all goes completely tits-up. When people talk about making council estates more 'mixed' (the report is titled In the Mix...), this mostly doesn't entail building more council housing. This is despite the vastness of waiting lists, now including many prospective tenants who were entirely 'respectable' before the 2008 property crash made their house/investment completely worthless. Yet when there was more council housing than there is now, it rather unsurprisingly had far less of a stigma - so, one would think, more council housing would be the best solution, and the easiest way to ensure 'mixed' 'communities'. However 'mixed' almost always means 'mixed tenure', and what this usually means in practice is the selling off of council housing to be replaced with a mixture of private homes, a quota of 'affordable' homes (a meaningless phrase, usually meaning 'affordable' to buy - and even that is resisted by property developers) and a small percentage of Housing Association homes, if you're lucky. This then merely increases council waiting lists, making estates even more overcrowded and yet more full of people who are utterly desperate, with even 'Priority' tenants sitting on waiting lists for years. The introduction to the Fabian report was written by Nick Raynsford MP, who also discusses the report in this Radio 4 feature. Nick Raynsford happens to be my local MP, and his office is on my street. A few years ago, this street had a Post Office, a General Hospital and a Primary school. Now, all of these have gone, but it does have three blocks of tiny, speculative 'luxury' flats, one of which is a gated community. Because of this, and some issues about rubbish collection, I am not well disposed to the man.

The Radio 4 programme contrasts Thamesmead with Greenwich Millennium Village, built in Raynsford's (and my) manor. Thamesmead is undoubtedly a melancholic place, but it's a remarkably shallow comparison, where it stands in once again for 'the failures of the past'. First, we have a few cliches about the place, mentioning among other things 'dark alleyways', which either refers to a scene in A Clockwork Orange actually filmed in Battersea, or the system whereby the housing blocks are raised on stilts with underground carparks beneath - actually a fairly sensible way of building on a floodplain, something wholly ignored by the Prescottopia of the Thames Gateway. Still, it conforms to stereotype, so never mind the actual reasoning behind it. Yet Thamesmead was itself intended to be a mixed area with a mixture of public and private housing, and the reasons why it wasn't, and doesn't look like one today, are political and architectural. The concrete walkways and lakes of the Tavy Bridge area were originally supposed to be the model for the whole semi-new town, but the backlash against Modernism led to later phases being constructed first in council-house 'vernacular' (often snapped up with right-to-buy), second in Barratt Homes neo-whatever, which never had any pretensions to being public housing, and third in the tacky newbuild aesthetic of the Blair boom. So at the centre is the much-mythologised 'concrete jungle' which stands alone for fairly obvious reasons. Meanwhile, the alternative, Greenwich Millennium Village, held up as a great example of a 'mixed community' is a place I know very well. 

It's actually almost as isolated as Thamesmead, an impressive achievement on the edges of Zone 2 rather than the outer reaches of Zone 5 - the only way to get from GMV to Greenwich itself is by the notoriously infrequent 129 bus. It's cut off from the surrounding Edwardian and Victorian areas by the Blackwall flyover, but it is very well connected to Canary Wharf, where most of its inhabitants work, creating horrendous early morning bottlenecks. It may have had a token bit of 'affordable' and 'key worker' housing (in the teeth of much opposition) but no council or housing association tenancies as far as I am aware. At its centre is the amusingly named 'Oval Square', the obligatory piazza, ostentatiously lacking any facilities other than an estate agent - not that it matters, as there are two huge strip malls with huge car parks just around the corner (and did I mention this was a 'sustainable' community?) You do sometimes see a handful of families in the area, but generally it's a homogenously middle class young professional enclave set amongst wasteland, with absurd rents and flat prices to match. That this is considered a model for anything other than a prospective posthumous Ballard novel is absurd, but very telling about what 'mixed communities' really entail.

GMV photos by I.T, Thamesmead by E&V