Abstract
Rosbrook-Thompson and Armstrong draw on four years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a mixed-occupancy housing estate in the Central London borough of Northtown. Their analysis considers how social and cultural categories cut across ethnicity. Many housing estates are today home to an incredibly diverse array of residents of various statuses, from owner-occupiers to renters and council tenants. This chapter addresses life in a ‘superdiverse’ estate, examining intra-group differences in an attempt to make sense of the encounters, solidarities and tensions experienced by residents: tenants of over 50 years; recent arrivals from within the European Union and further afield; undergraduate and postgraduate students unable to find accommodation within university halls of residence; and young professionals in search of affordable housing. Rosbrook-Thompson and Armstrong describe how these residents live in proximity to one another and how their lives intersect, often in unexpected ways.
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- 1.
The Festival, which ran from May to October, was funded by the British government and directed by newspaper editor Gerald Barry (with the Daily Express and the Saturday Review, among others).
- 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 to 1951 sought to replace homes destroyed during the Second World War by constructing more than 1 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.
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 concrete. Being five storeys high and brick-built, LG was classed as ‘prime ex-local authority’ housing stock by nearby estate agents.
- 7.
For a detailed analysis of ‘white flight’, see Frey (1977).
- 8.
Where universities have been less inclined to divest themselves of their estates, and/or when companies identify a market for luxury student accommodation not catered for by official halls of residence, these companies have bought up land and former office blocks in order to create rooms and self-contained flats for students.
- 9.
In British law there is a distinction between possession of an amount of drugs consistent with personal use and intent to supply, respectively. Police officers infer intent to supply from a number of factors including possession of a variety of drugs and a substantial amount of drugs divided into individual denominations. The penalty for possession of a quantity consistent with personal use is police caution (though in many instances individuals are let off altogether), while for intent to supply the maximum sentence for class-A drugs is life, and class-B and -C drugs 14 years.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the many people of Lashall Grove who gave their time to share their thoughts and memories.
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Rosbrook-Thompson, J., Armstrong, G. (2018). The Beginnings and the Ends: A ‘Superdiverse’ London Housing Estate. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_7
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