In many respects, music and atheism might seem to be strange bedfellows, given the religious – or at least metaphysical – language that often shapes accounts of musical experiences. For centuries, music has been attributed with the power to calm and restore order and equilibrium in times of trouble and turmoil. Shakespeare supposed music to be the food of love, while in the nineteenth century, Walter Pater (1919 [1873], 111) asserted that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. This condition of music – its ability to somehow lift spirits and provide a sense of well-being – is reflected in such metaphysical and spiritual language. Moreover, the church paid for a very large proportion of music written by western classical composers, until the late classical period, that once tied music squarely to religion. Masses, requiems, motets, cantatas, and oratorios served religious themes and liturgical purposes.

This chapter examines the beginnings of regeneration including consultation. It briefly reviews the impetus for regeneration, and then goes on to analyse two examples of early-stage regeneration: the first is the long-running Canning Town/Custom House scheme in Newham, and the second is Northwold estate in Hackney. The consultation process is then examined in depth from the perspective of residents, followed by a briefer analysis of professionals’ perspectives. The final lengthy section teases out the complexities of residents’ responses to comprehensive redevelopment involving extensive demolition.

Introducing regeneration

Residents are by no means necessarily opposed to regeneration per se. Given that their homes and estates had been neglected, unsurprisingly many welcomed regeneration of some kind – at least initially, as noticeable at the NDC estates. The immediate impetus for regeneration has primarily originated with councils and housing associations in a topdown manner, either by responding to central government regeneration programmes (for example SRB, NDC, and so on), or by addressing their own regeneration agendas which have latterly involved ‘solving’ London's housing crisis via estate densification. Somewhat less often, regeneration has been prompted by bottom-up pressure as residents have lobbied the council to do something – anything – to improve the quality of their homes and estates other than merely reactive repairs. For example, in 2003 Carpenters residents formed a protest group called ‘Tower Block Action Group’ which staged a series of actions to highlight the problems they were having, including an infestation of ants, asbestos, poor repairs and lack of safety (Strauss, 2007). This protest helped to prompt the long-running and still unresolved regeneration scheme at this estate (Chapters 4 and 12). Another example is Bacton estate in Camden, where residents approached an architectural firm to improve their blocks (Wainwright, 2016; Karakusevic Carson Architects, 2017).

A statutory part of estate regeneration in England is consultation, which is theoretically supposed to give residents genuine input into what happens to their homes and neighbourhoods. Having any consultation can be considered as progressive given how regeneration can proceed without it in certain countries (Porter and Shaw, 2009; Morris, 2019). International studies have, however, critically noted that consultation regarding estate regeneration has tended to be tokenistic in nature, effectively operating at the lower end of Arnstein's ‘ladder of participation’ (Teernstra and Pinkster, 2015; Gustavsson and Elander, 2016).

“I’m praying to god, ‘don't regenerate my estate’ because regeneration has become a nasty word” (Social housing tenant, at a meeting held to discuss regeneration in the Tottenham area of north London, 2016).

This statement, made by an anxious tenant, encapsulates the main theme of this book. Regeneration refers to an urban policy involving spatially targeted reinvestment in and revitalisation of physically deteriorating, economically under-resourced and socially deprived areas – in this case public/council/social housing estates. Even though some regeneration aims can be considered laudable, the practice of regeneration in London has meant that it has become a ‘nasty word’ among estate residents as they see their homes bulldozed and their communities scattered. Much has already been written about this topic by academics, journalists and housing campaigners, but this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of what it means for London social tenants and homeowners to live through the regeneration of their estates over years and even decades. It focuses on regeneration schemes that involve ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ – demolition of an existing estate and rebuilding it as a ‘mixed-tenure neighbourhood’ with large numbers of market properties for sale or rent. Such comprehensive redevelopment fundamentally changes estates in ways that residents don't expect, and are not properly told about by the politicians, officials and consultants who promote it as a way of solving London's housing crisis.

In theory, the Carpenters estate in Stratford, in the east London borough of Newham, has been ‘regenerating’ since 2004. In reality, regeneration hasn't properly started. Instead Newham Council has ‘decanted’ most of the tenants, leaving the estate half-empty for 15 years. Mary and her husband (a retired elderly white working-class couple) had been living at the Carpenters estate for over 40 years, and had bought their house under the Right to Buy (RTB) policy, having first rented from the council. For Mary and her husband, regeneration had appeared to plague them in their twilight years. One question I asked my interviewees, was “who do you think is going to benefit from the regeneration?” This is Mary's reply: “I haven't got a clue, it certainly wasn't us, it wasn't for the likes of us.”

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.

This chapter outlines the rise and fall of public housing in London with reference to national and local housing policy. Two historical periods are identified: an expansionary period that covers the first 80 years of the 20th century, followed by a contractionary period from the 1980s until the 2010s. This periodisation is theoretically located within the development of the Keynesian welfare state and that form of welfare state's unravelling under neoliberalisation, an unravelling that has intensified under recent austerity policies. Before outlining this periodisation, it is first contextualised with reference to housing as the ‘wobbly pillar’ of the welfare state.

The wobbly pillar of the welfare state

Most nation states rely upon market and informal housing provision, with the latter prominent in the Global South. It is only within the cities and towns of the Global North that public/social housing has existed to any substantial extent. Public housing was a key part of postwar welfare states in Western capitalist societies (Harloe, 1995; Balchin, 1996). Many Northern European cities – and North American and Australasian cities to a much lesser extent – are physically marked by the presence of public/social housing estates (Urban, 2012; Jacobs, 2019). During the 1950 to 1980s, these estates were often large-scale and took a modernist architectural form (Urban, 2012; Hess et al, 2018). Public housing was also prominent in the former state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, although the collapse of these regimes has resulted in wide-scale housing privatisation (Balchin, 1996; Hess et al, 2018).

Social housing is provided at sub-market costs due to state legislation and funding (although owner-occupation has also been heavily subsidised by the state in numerous ways; Merrett, 1982). Public/social housing entails the decommodification of housing in capitalist societies in that citizens can meet their basic need for shelter without having to pay market costs (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Jacobs, 2019). Decommodified public/social housing is most prominent in the social democratic and corporatist/conservative welfare state regimes of Northern Europe, rather than in the liberal welfare state regimes of North America or the marginal welfare regimes of Southern Europe (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Balchin, 1996). This pattern is linked to how workers’ political parties (social democratic, labour and communist) were able to extract key concessions from capital, especially in the postwar period.

This chapter examines the aftermaths of regeneration at three estates – West Hendon, Woodberry Down and Carpenters – and analyses what kinds of new places and inequalities are being produced. Regeneration has been going on for 15–20 years at these estates. Not only is this timescale much longer than the 1990s’ CEI and SRB schemes (Chapter 3), but these later work-in-progress schemes are unlikely to be completed within the next decade, if then; hence any aftermaths are provisional. I encourage readers to refer to Chapters 3 and 4 for details regarding housing tenure and rehousing provision at the three estates, which are distinct from one another in relation to tenure patterns, governance and finance. This chapter provides an experiential socio-spatial perspective on the emergent new places. As such, the chapter does not assess the estates’ respective micro-political economies à la Hodkinson (2019), although brief comments are made about governance in the next chapter.

The West Hendon and Woodberry Down cases illustrate how the long-term, incomplete and dualistic nature of degeneration/regeneration means that two places are in symbiotic tension: the old estate which is undergoing degeneration, displacement and demolition, and the redevelopment which is under construction and receiving new tenants and owners. West Hendon and Woodberry Down represent hybrid schemes comprising elements of both places. Four aspects of these hybrid places are analysed: the old part of the estate as a residential area; residents’ views on new homes and new landlords; the new redevelopment as a neighbourhood; and whether ‘mixed communities’ are being created. The final section returns to the Carpenters estate, where regeneration has hardly begun despite having been under ‘regen’ for 15 years.

West Hendon/Hendon Waterside (Barnet)

By 2019, West Hendon had morphed into a mishmash of the remainder of the old estate and the new rebranded ‘Hendon Waterside’ development. The latter is physically dominated by a 28-storey private tower block; there are also other private blocks, mixed-tenure blocks, plus a dedicated social housing block with 71 units. West Hendon/Hendon Waterside has a bewildering set of governance arrangements involving a housing association, private developer, property management company, utility company, as well as the council and the ALMO (Barnet Homes). The West Hendon Partnership Board monitors the regeneration and includes stakeholder and resident representatives.

Having outlined the multiple discontents that estate regeneration involving demolition gives rise to, I hope that the question raised in the Introduction – ‘why do London estate residents pray that regeneration won't be coming to their neighbourhood anytime soon?’ – has been answered. This concluding chapter summarises the key findings and makes various policy recommendations.

Policy and estate regeneration

Chapter 2 examined the rise and fall of public housing in London. The expansionary period involved local government initiatives up until the 1940s, and then reached its apogee under the post-war Keynesian welfare state. The development of public housing in the capital was enabled by the Labour Party's unbroken 30-year control of the LCC which embedded council estates into the physical landscape of the city – municipal socialism in action. The expansionary period allowed hundreds of thousands of working-class Londoners to escape from the manifold inadequacies of the PRS via the decommodification that public housing facilitated.

In challenging notions of a Butskellite consensus in post-war housing policy, I identified how Conservative local government interventions in London began to undermine housing decommodification during the 1960s and 1970s via a series of proto-Thatcherite reforms, including encouraging discretionary sales of council housing. During this period, Labour councils consistently reversed these reforms. Wholesale housing recommodification was then initiated by 1980s’ Thatcherite privatisation and demunicipalisation policies, notably the RTB, which brought about the neoliberal decoupling of public housing from the UK welfare state. New Labour continued this decoupling, albeit in a less damaging form. It was more generous in terms of overall public spending on local authority housing, notably via the DHP which helped to redress the Conservative government's disinvestment and the national £19 billion backlog of repairs. However, New Labour's interlinkage of the DHP with its demunicipalisation governance agenda rendered it cumbersome and over-complex, resulting in delays and lack of universal coverage in London. Austerity policies have further intensified the city's social housing depletion. Chapter 2 outlined the reasons for the contraction of public/social housing in London, with estate demolitions resulting in an estimated gross loss of between 17,000 and 37,000 social rental properties from 2002 to 2017, and net loss of over 8,000 such homes from 2004 to 2014 (Chapter 3).

Chapter 3 traced the development of urban policy in London with reference to estate regeneration via an early–contemporary binary periodisation from the 1980s to 2010s.

This chapter illustrates five ways that estates have become devalued places to live in residents’ eyes, beginning with the domestic scale in relation to overcrowding and un-homing. Second, it examines the crucial impact of landlord neglect in relation to repairs and maintenance. Third, the RTB is revisited with reference to its acceleration of population transience due to the rise of private landlordism. The fourth devaluation theme is crime and disorder, while the final section discusses symbolic devaluation through territorial and tenurial stigmatisation.

Small places: overcrowding and poor housing

Despite generally positive evaluations of their homes, residents – but especially tenants – also expressed reservations which in some cases spilled over into outright rancour and frustration at the poor housing conditions they were forced to live in. These included overcrowding, poor quality (age, damp, fixtures and fittings) and inadequate landlord repairs and maintenance. One fifth of NES tenants were dissatisfied with their homes, but only 6 per cent of leaseholders (Watt and Allen, 2018). Tenant dissatisfactions at Northwold estate included:

As R370 highlights, lack of space and overcrowding was a significant problem for some families. Worsening overcrowding is intimately linked to the shrinking aggregate size of the social rental sector since councils and housing associations are unable to transfer their overcrowded families to more suitable, larger properties; this situation has worsened under austerity (Orr, 2018). While single-person and couple household interviewees waxed lyrical about their homes’ spaciousness, several nuclear families and lone parents complained about inadequate space. Those worst affected had made transfer applications, but this resulted in years of waiting and frustration, while never-ending overcrowding contributed towards intra-household tensions.

Overcrowding in London impacts most heavily on BAME households, especially Bangladeshi and black African households, and is reflective of deeply embedded racial inequalities (GLA Intelligence, 2014; Elahi and Khan, 2016). While overcrowding was not restricted to BAME households among my interviewees, it was certainly a distressing problem for several BAME families.

Profile of interviewees

This chapter examines what happens once regeneration-as-demolition begins in earnest. In stark contrast to the official regeneration rationale – creating better places and lives – it argues that residents experience physical, social, symbolic and psychosocial degeneration. If regeneration involves spatially targeted reinvestment in and revitalisation of physically rundown and socially deprived areas, degeneration is regeneration's demonic alter ego in the form of financial disinvestment in those areas and their accelerated physical, social and symbolic deterioration over and above any original problems they might have. Such degeneration encompasses multiple overlapping strands: enhanced landlord neglect, loss of valued estate facilities, boarded-up properties, increased population transience, living on a building site and heightened stigmatisation. As degeneration takes hold, estate residents’ support for and engagement with regeneration dissipates, and trust breaks down. Degeneration/regeneration elongates into the distant future and creates a psychosocial limbo-land in which residents put their lives on indefinite hold.

Enhanced neglect and managed decline

Regeneration ushers in degeneration via heightened landlord disinvestment which is experienced as ‘enhanced neglect’. Such enhanced neglect involves ‘managed decline’, which refers to the notion that ‘the area's problems could be solved by allowing the neighbourhood to get worse and worse until it was no longer viable and had to be pulled down’ (Davidson et al, 2013: 62). Residents thought managed decline was occurring via the actions and inactions of the official regeneration partners, initially to soften them up for major redevelopment, and then later to pressurise them out of their homes. An exhibition held at a ‘Northumberland Park Decides’ meeting included photographs of rundown areas and asked, ‘Is this managed decline?’ (Photograph 9.1) at Northumberland Park estate.

Managed decline was a prominent theme raised by Cressingham Gardens residents (Local Dialogue, 2016; Cooper, 2017). Steve was a Cressingham Gardens tenant and he linked managed decline with the potential redevelopment value that the estate could have – that is, a state-induced rent gap:

Since the 1970s, social housing estates within Western capitalist cities have been linked to marginalisation processes in relation to poverty and deprivation. This chapter examines marginalisation at London's estates with reference to three analytical frameworks: residualisation, social exclusion and socio-tenurial polarisation. While acknowledging that such approaches have considerable credibility – especially in socioeconomic terms – the chapter develops a multi-stranded critique of how they frame and analyse marginalisation. This critique embraces three main themes: employment and class; social inclusion and diversity; and tenure preferences. This critique draws upon interview data regarding tenants’ labour and housing market experiences. The final section focuses on the shifting interrelationship between homelessness and social housing.

Public housing and marginalisation

The marginalisation of UK public housing has been examined through various analytical frameworks including residualisation (Forrest and Murie, 1991), social exclusion (SEU, 1998) and socio-tenurial polarisation (Hamnett, 2003). Residualisation means public renting transformed during the 1970s to 1990s from general needs housing, catering for a broad swathe of the working class, to a residual ‘tenure of last resort’ for a poor, largely ‘non-working class’ (Forrest and Murie, 1991). The latter include deprived and socially marginalised groups that were too poor to enter owner-occupation – the unemployed, sick and disabled, lone-parent families, the homeless, BAME groups, unskilled workers, and so on (Forrest and Murie, 1991; Hamnett, 2003).

If residualisation began during the 1970s, it intensified during the 1980s due to a series of policy and social developments. The Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 contributed towards residualisation by allowing those with ‘priority need’ greater access into local authority housing thereby eroding its base in the general population (Somerville, 1994; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2016). The RTB was a key policy driver of residualisation because it allowed better-off tenants in more affluent rural and suburban districts to buy their houses, leaving behind a rump tenure of older, decaying council flats in inner-city areas (Forrest and Murie, 1991; Murie, 2016). Public housing also became residualised within the welfare state since it suffered more from Thatcherite cuts than any other welfare area (Balchin, 1995), as discussed in previous chapters. In addition to these policy factors, deindustrialisation was a major cause of residualisation (Forrest and Murie, 1991).

The research and resulting book is informed by my ethical and political commitment to the social value of public housing. Since my youth, I have believed that public housing is an extremely positive feature of contemporary society which should be both preserved and expanded. This dates to when my family moved to a council estate on the outskirts of Halifax in West Yorkshire when I was 12. I am eternally grateful to the post-war welfare state that we were able to make this move at a time of need due to my dad's illness.

The book's academic roots lay in research that Mike Savage, Sara Arber and I undertook on Guildford council housing during the 1980s (Savage et al, 1990). This was followed up with research on Camden council housing during the 1990s (Watt, 1996), which was extended into a PhD – ‘The Dynamics of Social Class and Housing: A Study of Local Authority Tenants in the London Borough of Camden’ (Watt, 2001; see Watt, 2003, 2005, 2006). The book refers to this Camden research, and also draws upon (and updates) my various publications on specific London estates and on the city's housing generally:

• • Aylesbury estate – territorial stigmatisation and poor housing conditions (Watt, 2020c);

• • Carpenters estate – regeneration and the 2012 Olympic Games (Watt, 2013; see also Frediani et al, 2013); housing activism (Watt, 2016; Gillespie et al, 2018);

• • Clapham Park and Ocean estates – the NDC and stock transfers (Watt, 2009a, 2009c);

• • Northwold estate – regeneration (Watt and Allen, 2018);

• • West Hendon estate – displacement of temporary tenants (Watt, 2018a);

• • London housing crisis (Watt and Minton, 2016), housing activism (Watt, 2018c), and homelessness (Watt, 2018a, 2018b, 2020b).

My interest in regeneration developed out of the PhD research, but was spurred by my political involvement in a campaign against stock transfer in Buckinghamshire during the early 2000s (Watt, 2008). Subsequently I have acted in a scholar-activist capacity in various London housing and regeneration campaigns, the main ones being Demolition Watch London, Focus E15 and DCH (Watt, 2016; Gillespie et al, 2018). This scholar-activism crossed over into book-related fieldwork at the Carpenters estate (Watt, 2013; Gillespie et al, 2018), and to a lesser extent at the Aylesbury, Cressingham Gardens and Northumberland Park estates. In addition, I undertook the NES in liaison with the Save Northwold campaign (Chapter 4; Watt and Allen, 2018).

This chapter assesses how and why residents came to value their estates as places to live. It begins by considering their attachment to their dwellings as homes. The importance of place belonging is then analysed at the spatial scale of the estate in relation to neighbourliness and community. This leads on to an examination of the intermediate scale – blocks of flats and rows of houses. The next two sections show how estates have been affected by the Right to Buy policy in relation to place belonging, by considering, first, RTB owners and, second, middle-class homeowners who bought their homes on the open market from the original RTB owners. The final section considers whether London's estates form 21st century urban villages.

Homes and home-making

This section focuses on the domestic dwelling space and shows how residents valued their houses and flats as ‘homes’. Most secure tenant and leaseholder interviewees expressed place attachment to their dwellings, albeit that owners were more likely to be positive than tenants. The NES found that nearly three quarters of respondents were satisfied with their flats or maisonettes, with satisfaction higher among leaseholders (91 per cent) than tenants (68 per cent) (Watt and Allen, 2018). Homes provided ‘ontological security’ (Easthope, 2014) and this attachment is related to the dwelling's physical qualities, their own home-making efforts, and sentimental attachments.

In terms of physical qualities, two facets stood out: solidity and generous space standards. The term ‘solid’ – meaning well-built, structurally sound buildings – was commonly invoked when people described their homes. Frank was a builder and when I asked him about his flat at Northumberland Park estate, he hit the kitchen cupboard wall in order to demonstrate its sturdiness: “this is four inches thick, it's old school, well-built, they’re solid and warm flats”. In a joint interview with two tenants at West Hendon, neither could see a good reason for demolishing their ‘solid’ and ‘real’ homes: