posted on 27 Nov 2015

Estates: An Intimate History by Lynsey Hanley

I first read Lynsey Hanley’s memoir / political polemic when it was first published in 2007 and thought it was a knock-out at the time. For various reasons I’ve recently been reading large chunks of it again and I think even more highly of it now – the intervening years have done nothing to dull the edge and may, I think, even have sharpened it up.

Having been raised as a child on the Chelmsley Wood estate on the edge of Birmingham, Hanley left to go to university but found herself unable to shake off the desire to return and see whether she could understand better the impressions she had formed of the place. She approaches the subject of the physical and symbolic importance of the ‘housing estate’ as an explicitly political, class-based discourse and asks some really interesting and uncomfortable questions about how and why we have allowed this term to become, in her own words, a  ‘psycho-social bruise’ that is carried by people who live in these environments.

Hanley starts this investigation with some important questions uppermost in her mind – what, for example, is the relationship between class and the built environment and how has the term ‘estate’ come to be a euphemism for poverty and dysfunctionality? In doing this when she did she is re-entering territory that had seemed to have been abandoned by politicians and sociologists alike. From the Major government in the early 90s through Blair and Brown ( and continuing with Cameron) the political messages were clear – Britain is the land of opportunity, a meritocracy that rewards ‘hard-working families’ in which class no longer has a significant role to play. The old class divisions of the past are history – what matters at the dawn of the 21st century is individual effort combined with ‘playing the game’ and in this new world anything is possible for everyone. The goal of government is to increase ‘social mobility’ and unleash potential whatever your background.

For my taste, far too many academics went along with this baloney and found themselves on the ‘social class is dead’ bandwagon. Hanley, to her credit, saw through this charade and brought social class back in from the cold as a legitimate analytical perspective. In many ways Estates pre-dates what Owen Jones went on to do in Chavs – and he did it to considerably more acclaim than Hanley has received for her ground-breaking piece of writing.

There was a time when what we now call social housing was a badge of pride and something aspirational – the houses built by local councils really were homes for heroes following the slum and bomb-damage clearance of the post-war years. A combination of neglect by those very same councils, central government budget cuts and the growing snooty, middle-class stigmatisation of affordable housing to rent has turned what was envisaged as a New Jerusalem into a badge of shame.

In her new introduction to the 2012 reprint Hanley makes the point that whatever is done cosmetically to estate housing it will never be enough to cleanse them of the stigma that now attaches to them. Britain has a housing crisis – too few houses are being built, they are too expensive, they are private sector rather than public sector owned and people on modest or even average incomes are being forced into private rented accommodation where they are often shamelessly exploited by a new wave of buy-to-let landlords. The current government has no real answer to this because it is ideologically tied into the notion of a home-owners democracy – which is shorthand for good homes for the rich and ghettos for the poor - and it's flagship promise to the electorate is to sell off more of the social housing stock and build a bigger private sector. 

Housing is on the front line of the class war and, at the moment, the liberal, progressive Left is losing that war and the victims will be the same demographic that has always suffered - decent, working class families and individuals who will be forced to live in degrading conditions. Have we really already forgotten the lessons of the inter-war years?

 

Terry Potter

November 2015