#Fight4Aylesbury – An Insight into the Social Housing Crisis at Ground Level
- Charlotte Gregory
- Apr 24, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 6
Thanks to Aysen Dennis, Alessia Gammarota and others who put together the Fight4Aylesbury exhibition, to Dr Anna Minton, for leading the discussion on Sunday 23rd April, and to Jenny Draper on YouTube for spreading the word.
Dr Anna Minton, author of Big Capital: Who is London For? led a discussion at the Aylesbury Estate as part of the #Fight4Aylesbury exhibition on April 23rd 2023. She was expecting to have led this discussion from a sofa in the living room of the flat we had all come to visit, but so many people came along that we all poured out into the corridor instead! We filled the corridor from end-to end, squeezed up against the walls and welded-shut doors of formerly occupied flats, some of us cross-legged on the floor, others sitting on chairs dragged from Aysen’s flat.
Dr Minton met Aysen Dennis, resident at the Aylesbury for over 30 years, back around 2015, just as she had started writing her book Big Capital. That year saw the national March For Homes, followed by a number of residents organising the Aylesbury Occupation – a series of sit-in protests of empty flats at Chartridge House. The Aylesbury Occupation lasted from February to the end of March 2015, with the last occupiers cleared in April of that year. A resident at the time who supported the Occupation but did not join them said they were the "foot soldiers on the ground" of the fight for the Aylesbury. Another resident, Aysen’s sister Pinar, used to cook food for the protesters, then cart it to them, as her way of supporting the cause.
After this protest, Southwark Council decided to erect a fence around the block, with steel spikes and guards posted at a singular entrance – due to the size of the block, flats were up to half a mile away in either direction, meaning residents were isolated and the most vulnerable of them had incredible difficulty getting in and out of their own homes. This extreme situation led to the Aylesbury being referred to colloquially as “Alcatraz”. Dr Minton commented that this fence “bore no resemblance to any regeneration scheme” that she’d ever seen, and had two experiences trying to visit a resident to interview for Big Capital and both times was faced with rude rebuttals from the security guards, which her contact explained was “standard practice”. The Council at the time stated that the fence was erected to protect local residents, but who were they really protecting, and from what? Was it really necessary?
At the time, Southwark Council offered £117,000 for a two-bedroom flat, making it impossible to buy an equivalent in Central London. In a 2015 inquiry, it was discovered that the Council had bought 40 properties in the Aylesbury for less than £100,000, three of which were bought for between £50,000 and £65,000. These amounts are around £300,000 less than the average asking price in new developments, meaning tenants are priced out of council options such as Shared Ownership. Does this count as fair?
In the 2015 public inquiry it was expected that the Secretary of State would accept the Council and its "managed decline" of services. In the Aylesbury, there was no maintenance, no heating, no bin collections, fire escapes were blockaded, and there were no lift services (as a side note, even as we were in the exhibition, one of the lifts went out of service. Specifically, the lift where "Southwark Council" had been scratched out and "Social Cleansing" scrawled in its place). Incredibly, then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Sajid Javid found the Council were in fact in breach of Article 8 of Human Rights, as well as the Equality Act of 2010 for its disproportionate negative impact on Black and minority ethnic people from the Council’s ongoing neglect and harassment at the Aylesbury.
The inquiry ruled that the compulsory purchase order – where the Council offered significantly lower amounts for flats than their market value - would deprive residents of their dwelling and of their financial security, therefore the ruling of the public inquiry was a major victory for the residents. The Council appealed the decision, lost, then appealed again.
When Dr Minton was finishing Big Capital, it seemed as though the leaseholders had won, creating a positive precedent, but in the end the Council somehow still won on a technicality. One victory was that at least by the end of Phase 1 of the Aylesbury "redevelopment" higher purchase prices were being achieved.
Dr Minton published Big Capital in June 2017, just two weeks before the Grenfell Tower fire. With what she labelled as a “shocking combination of events”, Dr Minton was invited onto Newsnight and writing for the Guardian – which for any writer having just published a book would normally be fantastic publicity, but instead she was caught in the maelstrom of publicity "for the most appalling reasons".
When Grenfell Tower caught fire in June 2017, the initial narrative focus directly afterwards was that it was somehow the flat's problem or the residents’ faults, however this narrative quickly fell through and the focus started to shift towards discussing why the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation and Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council hadn’t taken pre-emptive responsibility for the cladding. People started to discuss Social Housing in a positive way, focusing on resident-driven constructive change. At the time, Grenfell Tower was seen as a "never again" situation, and it was imperative that we had to learn from it, and move forwards with those lessons in mind.
This period has now passed. This clearly isn't a "never again" scenario - this is a recurring narrative. Anna Minton noted as an example - the death of a two-year-old in Rochdale from black mould in his flat. The housing authority, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, failed to take responsibility for his death.
Managed decline, deliberate dereliction, and demolition practices predominantly target working class homes, and given the demographics of these homes therefore disproportionately affects minorities. Councils argue that demolishing and rebuilding estates into luxury developments allows them to pay for affordable housing, an argument known as Cross-Subsidy. Dr Minton recommends a book called The Prostitute State which goes into further detail and explores the revolving doors of corruption and personal greed within local politics.
The current political culture is one which demonises the homes of the working class – the current government doesn't seem to believe in Social Housing as a solution and this mindset started back in the Thatcher years. Incredibly, Thatcher's Conservative government managed to build more social housing than Blair's New Labour did, however Thatcher's stance was towards "building to buy" and the Right to Buy scheme that Labour had originally instigated before the Conservatives were re-elected - the idea that residents would then be working the rest of their lives to afford the home they lived in, a sharp contrast to the core idea behind social housing, where residents can already afford the home and then can spend their wages for their own means as they already have housing security. The error of Blair’s approach with regards to improving the UK’s housing stock was that his government focused heavily on demolition as a solution, during a time where the social and environmental impacts weren’t widely discussed. Now we discuss the knock-on effects of this, individual councils still attempt to get away with the demolish-and-rebuild approach as much as they can.
In the UK, there is no legal Right to housing and shelter, nor is there at present a framework for this, and rights are steadily being chipped away instead of us gaining more. We are at a tipping point with regards to the Housing Crisis, as is evidenced with places like the Aylesbury, and have been for several years now. Something has to shift.
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