Estates: An Intimate History

Council estates are often used in Britain as shorthand for poverty, crime and social breakdown, which is the opposite of what they were built to do. Lynsey Hanley asks how homes meant to improve lives came to carry such a reputation, and whether that reputation is deserved.

Hanley grew up on what was, at the time, the biggest council estate in Europe, and she later lived on an estate in London's East End. She blends that personal experience with wider history: the rise of social housing about a century ago, its adoption as a basic right by the architects of the mid-century welfare state, and its decline in the 1960s and 1970s.

The result is part memoir and part social history. General readers will find it engaging, and students of housing, urban history and social policy will find its account of how these estates were planned and later neglected useful.

Edition note: published by Granta Books in 2007, 256 pages, ISBN-13 9781862079090.