Abstract
This chapter is a literary urban studies reading of the imaginative place of the ‘council estate’ as discursively constituted in the UK since the mid-twentieth century. Its case studies are representations of two peripheral estates (built 1960–1980) in the West Midlands, a multipolar urban region with Birmingham as its largest city. One is a polemical literary memoir about ‘estate’ lives and the politics of class. The other is a set of late-1980s photographs collected as a book—with an equally polemical commentary in an accompanying film—in the 2010s. Proposing expanding possibility rather than the creation of an ideal world, the redefinition of utopia by Lefebvre and, later, Pinder indicates potential positive futures for the stigmatised place of the estate—and urban England.
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Notes
- 1.
The coordinates of Lion Farm are 52°29’33.1”N 2°02’00.0”W, and Chelmsley Wood, much bigger in area, centres approximately on 52°28’42.2”N 1°44’02.2”W.
- 2.
On the website lionfarm.co.uk, the earlier photographs are inside the tab ‘Estate Images 1990/91’ and, with gallery view toggled, can all be seen at the bottom of the window. A button labelled ‘i’ gives titles (e.g. ‘Cheviot House’) for most of the individual images.
- 3.
I am grateful to Jens Martin Gurr for referring me to this article by Suttles.
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Finch, J. (2021). Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience. In: Salmela, M., Ameel, L., Finch, J. (eds) Literatures of Urban Possibility . Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_11
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