I recently had the great pleasure of speaking to Robin Bishop, resident of Alton Estate, Roehampton, and member of Alton Regeneration Watch (www.altonwatch.org.uk)​; an organisation that he described as 'keeping a sceptical eye' on the proposed regeneration of the estate. We met in Cafe Joy on Danebury Avenue, in the area proposed for demolition. He spoke - amount other things - about life on the estate, the closure of local services and amenities (especially those for children), managed decline, the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’, the misguided concept of ‘designing crime out of an estate’, the general lack of meaningful diagonal between residents and the council; also the developer, the ‘consolation’ company and course the architectural natural of the site.

Thanks to Cafe Joy for letting us sit on their sofa for hours and chat. They service rather good tea and coffee, thoroughly recommended!

Robin - Alton Estate:  An injury to one is an injury to all

Social Housing Sound Archive is a collection of sound recordings made by musician and recordist A.J. Holmes.

’Social Housing’ is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which is owned and managed by local authorities or by non-profit organisations (such as housing associations) initially built to house the ‘deserving poor’, working class and now intended to be let at low rents to those who are most in need.

Although I have a keen interest in the history of social housing in general the primary focus of the of this page is British council housing, prioritising estates in London which are current being demolished or under threat of demolition.

My aim is to document these environments and the most importantly the communities that they are home to; if only for posterity. 

I have a great personal affinity with such environments, as for most of the my life I have lived in council housing. I grew up on a estate in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, called Marks Gate, which is much like many post-war council estate all over Britain. It is modest in design and scale, consists mostly of timidly modernist houses, low rise flats and one Scandinavian style, system built, tower block, charmingly named High View House. It is a 1950’s (completed in 1959) appendage to the Becontree Estate; the inner-war housing project often referenced to as the largest ‘Public Housing’ (an earlier, international term for council or state own housing) estate in the world. In this respect it is ‘on the periphery of the periphery’, as Barking and Dagenham is located on far edges of east London (the exotic far east, if you will) and Marks Gate is on the furthest edge of that, sandwiched between the A12 trunk road and Hainault Forest, green belt. 

I currently live in a very pleasant 1930s built Neo-Georgian block of flats on an LCC (London Country Council) estate in the London borough of Hackney. I’m very proud to say that I’m a council tenant and extremely sad and infuriated by the decline and current state of social housing in the UK. I was burn in 1971 so most of the childhood was lived in the ‘pre-right to buy’ council housing area. Which was an extremely pleasant environment to grow up in. Though out my life I have observed the top down systematic erosion of these environments, through wilfully neglect, to the stage where a horrific tragedy like Grenfell Tower was - whoever shocking - unsurprising. Totally eradication of social housing now seems to be official government policy, with hundreds of council estates  - in London alone - subject to ‘regeneration schemes‘ resulting in particle or full demolition and thousands of families losing their homes and / or secure tenancy, with communities being displaced and dispersed all the country. 

In the wake of the terrible tragedy of Grenfell my only hope is that we have all turned a corner in our understand of the severity of the current housing crisis in the UK. Acknowledge that is not acceptable and that it must changed for the good of us all. 

I also hope that the inhumane ‘social cleaning’ that is currently taking place under the guise of so called ‘regeneration’ schemes can be radically re-considered. In the mean time I intend to continue documenting these environments and communities, in the hope that most of them will still be there for future generations to benefit from. If they are not, then may these records at least provide some indication of what was lost.