Abstract
In the book’s opening chapter, we discuss the introduction of the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Right to Buy’ policy of 1980 and the implications it would have for social housing in the UK and, more specifically, estates like Lashall Green (LG), the focus of this book. We also describe the physical geography of the estate and its environs, before surveying key areas of the sociological and anthropological literature with which we engage extensively in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The Festival, which ran from May to October 1951, was funded by the British government and directed by newspaper editor (with the Daily Express and the Saturday Review, among others), Gerald Barry.
- 2.
Lansbury was chairman of the Labour Party between 1927 and 1928, and led the party between 1932 and 1935. He campaigned on issues as diverse as workhouse reform, women’s suffrage and working conditions in the colonies and protectorates of the British Empire.
- 3.
Though the term ‘tenement’ strictly refers to an apartment or room rented by a tenant, it has come to denote a poorly maintained and overcrowded block of apartments situated in a poor, inner-city area.
- 4.
A decline in the number of council homes being built is important here. Whereas Clement Attlee ’s Labour government of 1945–1951 sought to replace homes destroyed during the Second World War by constructing more than one million homes—80 per cent of which were council houses—of the 2.63 million homes built under the New Labour government in office between 1997 and 2010, just 0.3 per cent were under local authority control.
- 5.
More than 1.8 million council homes have been sold to tenants at sub-market rates since the introduction of Right to Buy (Foster 2015).
- 6.
The names of people and places, besides London, have been changed in the interests of ensuring anonymity.
- 7.
As we will explore, estate agents and mortgage lenders play a role here. Mortgages are easier to obtain for flats situated in blocks that are under six storeys high and constructed using bricks rather than reinforced and/or prefabricated concrete blocks. Lenders may also refuse to fund the purchase of ex-local authority property located above commercial premises and overlooking railway lines (Rudgard 2016). Being five storeys high and brick built, LG was classed as ‘prime ex-local authority’ housing stock by nearby estate agents.
- 8.
For a detailed analysis of ‘white flight’, see Frey (1977).
- 9.
We will provide a full explanation of this paradoxical term in Chap. 2.
- 10.
A number of the estate’s buy-to-let landlords comfortably cleared this threshold, of course.
- 11.
‘Wet houses ’ are hostels for the alcohol and drug dependent. Their nickname results from the fact that residents are permitted to consume alcohol on hostel premises.
- 12.
With more than 370 ‘creative businesses’ located in the borough, these graduates had largely studied non-traditional subjects while at university.
- 13.
Here Du Bois implied that the sociological theorising of his day was based on the kind of causal observation made while peering from the window of a passing car (Morris 2017).
- 14.
See DeSena and Krase (2015) for a detailed account of the gentrification of Brooklyn involving an ethnographic, ‘from the street’ approach.
- 15.
For a more comprehensive review of the work carried out globally, see Prato and Pardo (2013).
- 16.
We are aware that the concept of social capital itself has been subject to significant and sustained criticism (see Fine 2000). As a result, we will try to avoid using the concept in an uncritical and unreflective way.
- 17.
Though connections and observations made in the local youth club proved invaluable, because of ethical considerations we deemed it inappropriate to conduct interviews with residents who were under the age of eighteen. See Armstrong and Rosbrook-Thompson (2011) for a study of young people in a similar urban setting.
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Rosbrook-Thompson, J., Armstrong, G. (2018). Introduction: A Living Tapestry?. In: Mixed-Occupancy Housing in London. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74678-4_1
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