Introduction

In order to understand any neighbourhood, and the people who live in it, it is important to know the history of that neighbourhood, and the space that the people inhabit – not only their physical space, but also the space that they inherit, their social space. Within this chapter I introduce this neighbourhood of St Ann’s, some of the characters that live within it, and I also outline the historical context that has shaped and continues to shape St Ann’s and its residents.

This neighbourhood, like many poor neighbourhoods throughout the UK, has become stigmatised as valueless, broken, and ‘wrong’. It has become typical in the UK over the last two generations to use the words ‘council estate’ to lazily explain a multitude of social problems, from housing and unemployment to low pay, criminality and failure. Council estates have therefore become sites of ‘wrongness’, with a focus on the people who live in them and their ‘culture of lack’. If we are to believe our politicians, our media, and the multitudes of reality television programmes currently being shown on mainstream channels, such as BBC Two’s ‘We pay your benefits’, Channel 4’s ‘Skint, benefits Britain 1949’, and ‘How to get a council house’ (all of which were shown during July and August in 2013), people who live on council estates lack everything that is needed to become successful citizens in today’s modern Britain. They lack aspiration, moral values, a work ethic, and are too located in the places where they live, leading to ignorance, stupidity, and lack of aspiration – they have become ‘deficit’ in the public imagination. The ‘council estate’ appears to have become the symbol of the Conservative Party’s vision of what ‘broken Britain’ looks like, and residents of council estates have become, by their nature, the perpetrators of ‘breaking Britain’, and the cause of Britain ‘staying broken’.

Against this backdrop of the ‘broken’ Britain rhetoric it is important to contextualise the actions and meanings of those who live on council estates, as without context, any social practice becomes awkward and difficult to read. Therefore, it is fundamental to place any neighbourhood, whether upmarket or deprived, within a sequence of historical change. Within any city it is only possible to understand any ‘cross-sectional slice’ of an urban neighbourhood by knowing the evolution of that social space, and the people within it.