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Introduction

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London's Aylesbury Estate

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Oral History ((PSOH))

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Abstract

The introductory chapter notes the notorious reputation with which the Aylesbury Estate was fixed upon its inception, and makes clear the book’s aim of exploring the distance and overlap between representations of the estate and the residents’ lived experience. It further sets out the author’s intention of examining the Aylesbury’s community construction in the context of change, and against Southwark’s—and London’s—shifting social, political and economic landscape. The term ‘community’ is discussed, as are the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the ways they can be applied to an urban setting. The chapter also describes the author’s application of oral history.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Roy Cooper, ‘Top of the flops’, South East London and Kentish Mercury, 9 September 1976.

  2. 2.

    Cooper, ‘flops’.

  3. 3.

    Tony Aldous, The Times, 3 November, 1970; Oscar Newman, The Listener, 7 March 1974.

  4. 4.

    South London Press, 10 January 1975.

  5. 5.

    Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 5.

  6. 6.

    See for example: Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972); Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London: The story of a Capital and its growth, (London: Constable and Company, 1975).

  7. 7.

    Time Out, 7–13 June 1974.

  8. 8.

    Thomas L. Blair, The Poverty of Planning: Crisis in the Urban Environment, (London: Macdonald, 1973), 86.

  9. 9.

    Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins: The Way We Live Now, (London: Radius, 1991), 91.

  10. 10.

    Jenkins, Landlords, 264–5.

  11. 11.

    In 1979, council houses and flats accounted for nearly a third of Britain’s total housing stock. Now, less than a fifth of all homes are council owned, largely as a result of the Right to Buy. See Peter Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State: The Development of Housing Policy in Britain, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3.

  12. 12.

    Ruth Glass, Clichés of Urban Doom, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), x.

  13. 13.

    Tony Parker, The People of Providence: A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants, (London, Hutchinson, 1983).

  14. 14.

    Jerry White, Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars, (London: Pimlico, 2003), 6.

  15. 15.

    Suzanne Hall, City, Street and Citizen: The measure of the ordinary, (London: Routledge, 2012), 132–33; David N. Thomas, Organising for Social Change: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Community Work, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), 37–43; Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, (London: Vintage, 2008), 73.

  16. 16.

    Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory?: Theory and Practice, (London: Routledge, 2013), 149.

  17. 17.

    Southwark Notes, (19 June 2017), https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-luxury-of-not-being-burned-to-death/, accessed 5 May 2020.

  18. 18.

    Roughly half a mile north of the Aylesbury, the Heygate was opened in 1974 and demolished by 2014. Smaller at 1194 units compared to the Aylesbury’s 2700, more organised in its arrangement, and in some ways more successful, the story of the Heygate nevertheless shares a great deal in common with that of the Aylesbury. See: Michael Romyn, ‘The Heygate: Community Life in an Inner-City Estate, 1974–2011’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 81 (2016).

  19. 19.

    Roland Barthes, Mythologies, (London: Vintage, 2000), 143.

  20. 20.

    Quoted in Donald Macintyre, ‘Poverty’s the problem, work is the solution’, The Independent, 3 June 1997.

  21. 21.

    Chris Waters, ‘Representations of Everyday Life: L. S. Lowry and the Landscape of Memory in Postwar Britain’, Representations, no. 65 (1999), 134–37.

  22. 22.

    Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 149.

  23. 23.

    Lise Butler, ‘Michael Young, the Institute of Community Studies and the politics of kinship’, Twentieth-Century British History, vol. 26 (2015); Jon Lawrence, ‘Inventing the “Traditional Working Class”: A Re-Analysis of Interview Notes from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London,’ Historical Journal, vol. 59, (2016), 592.

  24. 24.

    Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 21.

  25. 25.

    Defensible Space was in many ways a muscular advance on Jane Jacobs’ 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which lamented the hollowing out of many ageing, inner-city cores. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Random House, 1961).

  26. 26.

    John M. Mansfield (dir.), Horizon: The Writing on the Wall, (BBC, 1974).

  27. 27.

    Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985).

  28. 28.

    See Graham Towers, Shelter is Not Enough: Transforming Multi-Storey Housing, (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2000), 115–17.

  29. 29.

    Nicholas Boys Smith and Andrew Morton, Create Streets: Not Just Multi-Storey Estates, (London: Policy Exchange, 2013), 33–35.

  30. 30.

    Jude Bennington, Tim Fordham and David Robinson, Housing in London NDCs: Situations Challenges and Opportunities, Research Report No. 59, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, (2004), 29.

  31. 31.

    Paul Watt, ‘Social Housing and Regeneration in London’, in Rob Imrie, Loretta Lees and Mike Raco (eds.), Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City, (London: Routledge, 2009), 232; Hall, City, 48–49.

  32. 32.

    Ravetz, Council Housing, 6.

  33. 33.

    See, for example, Peter Somerville, ‘Resident and Neighbourhood Movements’, in International Encyclopaedia of Housing and Home, (London: Elsevier Press, 2012); John Grayson, ‘Campaigning Tenants: A Pre-History of Tenant Involvement to 1979’, in Charlie Cooper and Murray Hawtin (eds.), Housing, Community and Conflict: Understanding Resident Involvement, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); Quintin Bradley, The Tenants’ Movement: Resident Involvement, Community Action and the Contentious Politics of Housing, (London: Routledge, 2014).

  34. 34.

    John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, (London: Verso, 2018).

  35. 35.

    Ravetz, Council Housing, 186.

  36. 36.

    Ravetz, Council Housing, 3.

  37. 37.

    Lynn Abrams and Linda Fleming, Long Term Experiences of Tenants in Social Housing in East Kilbride: An Oral History Study, (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Project Report, 2011); Ben Jones, The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity, and Social Memory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Mark Clapson, Working-Class Suburb: Social Change on an English Council Estate, 1930–2010, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Seán Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919–1956, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories.

  38. 38.

    Lisa McKenzie, Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain, (Bristol: Policy Press, 2015).

  39. 39.

    Creation Trust is a community organisation set up as an advocate for residents in the most recent stages of the Aylesbury regeneration process.

  40. 40.

    Also used were five oral testimony interviews gathered by a separate Creation Trust project, Put It On The Map! (2011), which encouraged Walworth residents to engage with the area’s history. See: http://www.putitonthemap.org/, (accessed 31 May 2016).

  41. 41.

    Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8–9.

  42. 42.

    Anna Green, ‘Individual Remembering and ‘Collective Memory’: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates’, Oral History, vol. 34 (2004), 42.

  43. 43.

    Ben Jones, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Autobiography, Community Publishing and Working Class Neighbourhoods in Post-war England’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 7 (2015), 369.

  44. 44.

    Frisch, Shared Authority, 188; Jorma Kalela, ‘The Challenge of Oral History—the Need to Rethink Source Criticism’, in Anne Ollila (ed.), Historical Perspectives on Memory, (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999), 153.

  45. 45.

    Santa Arias, ‘The Geopolitics of Historiography from Europe to the Americas’, in Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 123.

  46. 46.

    Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Edward W. Soja, ‘Taking Space Personally’, in Warf and Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn, 21; Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Spaces, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

  47. 47.

    David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  48. 48.

    For a detailed examination of the Aylesbury ident, see Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 101–103.

  49. 49.

    Pat Davies, 27 February 2015.

  50. 50.

    The Guardian, 14 March 2014.

  51. 51.

    Katrina Navickas, Why I am Tired of Turning: A Theoretical Interlude, (London: History Working Papers Project, 2011), 4.

  52. 52.

    Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, (London: Pion Limited, 1976); Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974).

  53. 53.

    Tuan, ‘Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective’, in Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson (eds.),

    Philosophy in Geography, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 387.

  54. 54.

    Paul Watt, ‘From the Dirty City to the Spoiled Suburb’, in Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (eds.),

    Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 82.

  55. 55.

    Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 416–21.

  56. 56.

    Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 419.

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    Michael Romyn

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Romyn, M. (2020). Introduction. In: London's Aylesbury Estate. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51477-8_1

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