Streets Apart - A History Of Social Housing

Episodes

SeriesTitleFirst
Broadcast
Comments
01After Grenfell20170908

In the final episode of the series, Lynsey returns to Grenfell Tower two months on and suggests how we could build a new future for council housing in this country.

Throughout the series, Lynsey has tracked the decline of council housing while also trying to put paid to the myths of our postwar housing story. Now she looks at how New Labour and the governments after them tried to transform estates through one controversial method - regeneration.

Lynsey goes back to her home estate of Chelmsley Wood and finds places that have changed out of all recognition. She asks a local councillor what this means for long term residents of the estates. She then visits Liverpool where she meets a group of tenants who were told their estate was going to be knocked down in the 1980s. They took control of the process, worrying they would be moved away from the city and into the suburbs. This is a model example of resident driven regeneration, but usually it doesn't happen like that.

Lynsey explores how, in many cases, residents are ignored by local authorities and housing associations. Often regeneration can mean moving tenants off estates and replacing them with wealthier "customers" in affordable housing and market sale homes. Lynsey asks what this means for housing in Britain. How is it that council tenants are not listened to by those in power? Is it this mindset by that leads to an event like Grenfell Tower?

But Lynsey will also suggest now is the moment to revive the dream of council housing. She asks why we put so much emphasis on health and education, while believing that housing is beyond the reach of the state. She suggests that what we need isn't poor housing for poor people, but a national housing service that serves everyone just like our NHS and schools.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley looks at the future of social housing after the fire at Grenfell Tower.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Council Estate Of Mind20170907

Lynsey Hanley explores how council housing has become diminished in the 21st century.

In the decades after Margaret Thatcher's right to buy policy, council housing went through a crisis in this country. As housing stock was sold off and money for new building was rationed, social housing came to be seen as undesirable and council tenants as a new "underclass".

In this episode, Lynsey explores the effect that had on the people who lived on council estates. She investigates a cultural process that turned council estates, in the public imagination, from places of safety and stability into places of chaos and danger. She talks to the sociologist Lisa Mackenzie, who spent 20 years researching and writing about the estate she lived on in Nottingham, about the gap in understanding between estate residents and the rest of the public.

Lynsey also looks at the issue of migration. There is a perception in some media that many of the problems on estates are down to mass migration. Lynsey hears from migrants at a hostel in East London who tell a very different story. Social housing in 2017 is now so scarce, it's only available to the most desperate and vulnerable.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley explores how council housing has become diminished in the 21st century.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Dreams And Dystopia20170905

Lynsey Hanley looks at how councils built on the edges of cities to meet housing needs.

Thamesmead in South-east London has been described as "frightening" and "dystopian", a "concrete jungle" set apart from the rest of the city. But that is not how many residents found it when they first moved in. It was a safe and secure place with spacious flats furnished with the latest mod-cons. Much of Thamesmead's reputation stems from the fact it was used by Stanley Kubrick as the setting for his controversial film A Clockwork Orange. But despite arguments over its architecture, it does represent a significant moment in the history of estate building - the era of building outwards.

After the collapse of Ronan Point, planners and local councils had decided building upwards wasn't practical anymore so they started to create estates on the outskirts of big cities, meant to act as small dormitory towns for places like London. But as Lynsey finds out, this drive to house people often led to physical isolation, with transport links shoddy and irregular, and social isolation as estates became places other people saw as dangerous.

Lynsey visits Thamesmead and Gleadless Valley in Sheffield. There she meets residents and tries to understand what estates mean to the people who live on them. She explores how estates came to be seen in such unfavourable terms and talks to the architect Douglas Murphy about Thamesmead. It's a place where the mix of urban and rural, concrete tower blocks and lakes populated with swans, makes perfect sense and no sense at all.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Garden Cities of Tomorrow20170831

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of Ebenezer Howard and the garden cities.

In 1898, a young court stenographer from London called Ebenezer Howard published a book. It was called Garden Cities of Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform and it would go on to transform the history of housing around the world. The book proposed using architecture to remodel city-dwellers' lives. Howard imagined a utopian metropolis, away from corrupted cities, in which the city and the countryside merged. There, workers from London could free themselves from the oppressive conditions of the city and live fruitful and happy lives.

Lynsey vists Letchworth, the first garden city, founded just six years after the publication of Howard's book. At Letchworth she finds a pretty little town predicated on the ideals of the arts and crafts movement and funded by wealthy progressive thinkers like George Bernard Shaw. But moving past the quaint buildings and green space, Lynsey also discovers the ideals of Howard and the architect Raymond Unwin ushered in a new era for housing reform and are still valid to this day.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of Ebenezer Howard and the garden cities.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Grenfell Tower20170828

The Grenfell Tower disaster is a defining event in the history of social housing in Britain. Grenfell has brought to light some of the failures and attitudes that underpin our relationship to class, poverty, race and inequality. In this first episode of a ten part series, Lynsey Hanley will examine what Grenfell means for both social housing and for us as a society.

Lynsey argues Grenfell represents the culmination of the long story of how we have sought to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged in society through housing.

She talks to the Labour MP David Lammy about his upbringing. He tells her how social housing was once desirable, something people aspired to. But was the original dream of good quality housing for the poorer members of our society flawed from the beginning? Lynsey asks why we don't have decent housing for all, avoiding the stigma of paternalism and segregation by income and status. Did an original flawed plan create a marginalised class of people set away in isolated estates?

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

In the wake of Grenfell Tower, Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Model Villages, Model Workers20170830

Lynsey Hanley heads to Port Sunlight on the Wirral. There she explores the Lever brothers' dream of housing workers in picturesque conditions.

Port Sunlight was the apotheosis of a movement started by men like Sir Titus Salt, who built Saltaire in 1851, to move workers out of congested and polluted cities and improve their productivity.

The idea of the model village goes back a long way in the English imagination. From Thomas More's Utopia to 17th century landowners trying to create a pastoral idyll on their estates, the thought of creating an ideal community is one that has captivated the wealthy and benevolent for centuries. But it was in the Victorian period that the idea really took off. Rich industrialists, schooled in high Victorian paternalism, wanted to create model communities for their workers to live in.

At Port Sunlight, started by the Lever Brothers in the late 19th century, Lynsey explores how these communities were places built in the image of their creators. These men thought of themselves as upstanding and benevolent, and believed in their own ability to tidy up the messier elements of human settlement.

Were model villages the vanity projects of industrialists that tried to impose Victorian values on the poor - or serious attempts to give workers a better quality of life and freedom from the slums?

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley visits the Victorian model villages.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01New Towns, New Culture20170901

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of post-war house building and the rise of the new towns.

World War Two presented planners with the opportunity to plan on an unprecedented scale. This led to the New Towns Act of 1946 which gave the government powers to create massive new and self-sufficient towns. Many in Britain still lived in appalling conditions in the country's towns and cities. Fixing that was part of Labour Health Minister Aneurin Bevan's plan to create a welfare state that would make sure people were looked after from the cradle to the grave.

But it wasn't just the Labour party that was interested in house building, the Tories were determined to compete with Labour as to who could build the most houses. This was a time of big thinking about housing, when both parties believed housing was one of the most important issues of the time.

Lynsey visits Harlow to find out what it was like for people who had to move to the new towns. Some saw them as an intense relief from the terrible conditions of London's slums, others found them disorientating and depressing - a condition that came to be known as 'new town blues'. Harlow was designed to be a self contained community rather than a satellite town for London.

But, as Lynsey finds out, all that is changing in 2017. She talks to hyper local journalist Michael Casey about the housing crisis and how, even in Harlow, social housing now seems like a relic from another era.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of postwar house-building and the rise of the new towns.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Right To Buy20170906

Lynsey Hanley explores how the right to buy changed council housing forever.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister defeating Labour in a resounding victory. Her early years were tough but she did enact one policy that helped transform how the state provided housing to the British people - the right to buy. Implemented by her young Minister for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, the policy gave council tenants the right to buy their own homes at prices that were much lower than the market rate.

In this episode, Lynsey investigates the history behind the policy. According to the writer and journalist Andy Beckett, the idea that tenants could buy their own council homes goes right back to the very earliest days of social housing. The Labour Party had been arguing among themselves for years about whether to implement some form of right to buy, but it was natural territory for the Tories and Mrs Thatcher with ideas about individualism at the forefront of their thinking. Just like the Victorian ideologues of old, Margaret Thatcher thought empowering a "respectable working class" would help end poor Britons' dependency on the state.

Lynsey also examines the effect of right to buy. Because the Conservative Party was so keen on this idea of the "property owning democracy", they prevented councils from building to replace the houses bought through the scheme. The ideal was that everyone would, eventually, own their own home. But this had unintended consequences and led to a massive reduction in social housing stock. Did that lay the foundations for the crisis in housing we see today?

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley explores how the right to buy changed council housing forever.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01Streets in the Sky20170904

Lynsey Hanley explores the era of council housing that was defined by high rise living.

In 1957, a gigantic, futuristic new council block started to appear on the hillside above Sheffield train station. Four years later it was finished and residents from the old slums that used to dot the area started to move in. The building's name was Park Hill and it would become a vessel for everything people hate - and love - about late 20th century council housing in Britain.

The architects of the building were two young Cambridge graduates called Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith. They took their inspiration from a fashionable French architect who went by the name Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier had grand ideas about space, light and order but he also thought modernist buildings needed to try and recreate the street patterns of old back to back houses - but 50 feet up in the air. This idea was known as 'streets in the sky' and it would come to dominate the thinking around estate architecture for a generation.

In this episode, Lynsey explores the trend of building upwards.

Park Hill was just the beginning of an era that saw our city skylines dotted with tower blocks and high rise buildings. All that came to an end with the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968, but it is a period that still dominates our thinking about estates. Grenfell Tower was designed and conceived of at this time.

Lynsey visits Park Hill to find out what it was like to live in this radical new building. She also meets the residents who live there now and asks whether a recent regeneration has changed the social fabric of the building beyond recognition.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley explores the era of council housing defined by one thing - high rise living.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.

01The First Council Homes20170829

Lynsey Hanley visits the first ever council housing in Liverpool.

In 1842, Friedrich Engels went to work in his father's Salford mill. Shocked by the poverty he saw, he penned his observations in The Condition of the Working Class in England. For Engels, bad housing was the poor's unifying characteristic: "Every great city has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded together." Ever since, his identification of a direct link between poor housing and poverty has guided social reform.

Those ideas found their first expression not far away from Salford, in Liverpool, where the Saint Martin's Cottages - commonly thought of as the first municipal housing in the world - addressed the problems of Irish migrants fleeing the potato famine and living in appalling condition's in Liverpool's cholera-ridden slums. Eldon Grove was an example of later social housing in Liverpool - once beautiful, it now lies derelict.

Lynsey Hanley visits the Saint Martin's Cottages and Eldon Grove. She reflects on the fact that early ideas about council housing were aimed specifically at the skilled working class. This started a trend, which lasted right up to the end of the Second World War, that council housing would be aimed at the better off and socially better regarded strata of the working class. This kind of thinking about housing was based more on a pragmatic belief that workers would be happier if they had better living conditions than any more utopian ideal about providing everyone with safe and stable environments to live in.

Presenter: Lynsey Hanley
Producer: Sara Parker and Joe Sykes
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley visits the first ever council housing in Liverpool.

Lynsey Hanley tells the story of social housing in Britain.