Question about Council Housing in the UK

Factual Questions
1

I’d always thought of Council Housing as being roughly equivalent to “The Projects” here in America: places like Cabrini Green in Chicago (one of the most recognizable projects in America due to being used in the opening of the sitcom Good Times and a few movies) and similar places in other cities: usually red brick, run down almost from the day they’re built, high-crime, etc… Basically, the slums or the ghetto but owned or subsidized by the government.

However, on TV shows featuring characters who live in Council Houses (the Tylers on Doctor Who, Onslow & Daisy on Keeping Up Appearances, etc.) the units tend to be much nicer looking than you associate with U.S. housing projects. I realize that the interiors especially are shot on sets, and on the show Good Times for instance the interior of the apartment is much nicer than most housing projects would realistically be (though no less indicative of spatial folding than the TARDIS) but even on Good Times the exterior shots look like a ghetto. The exterior shots of Council Housing on British shows look like units that are far from luxury but also far from slums; they’re very livable, small but comfortable lower-middle to middle-class housing.

So question: is British Council Housing generally nicer than U.S. Housing Projects, or is it romanticized for TV?

2

It varies, is the short answer!

3

As Candyman74 says British council houses vary a lot. You get everything from ugly, often crime-ridden concrete tower blocks, system-built in the '60s and early '70s to much more pleasant properties. Friends of mine live in a council house in Glasgow, and it is as nice as most modern private apartments I’ve been in in Dublin. I think a socially wider group of people avail of council houses in the UK versus American projects but that’s just a hunch and I’ve no evidence to back it up.

4

IIRC, J.K. Rowling lived in a council house in Edinburgh and said it was in disrepair when she lived there but when she went back to visit (after becoming rich and famous) she was surprised at how nice it looked. It’s been renovated, plus of course she’s in much more of a happy place now which may also help.

5

I don’t know what the actual variables are in the UK, perhaps the council area you live in is the primary factor, but they do seem to vary a lot. A lot of the older high-rises I’ve seen in Scotland and Northern Ireland seem to be being replaced by more modern low-rise blocks.

Here in the Republic of Ireland, a lot of council properties have been replaced by more modern dwellings in places like Ballymun. It mainly consisted of low and high-rise system built flats such as the “Seven Towers” which were immortalised in a U2 song, Running to stand still. These were worse than any projects I saw in the US in my travels other than perhaps Cabrini Green.

6

Craig Ferguson’s memoirs slag the cripplingly ugly council housing in Glasgow that his family moved into.

I’ve done some reading about the progression of public housing in the UK, though I’m not pretending to be any kind of expert. Apparently, the government had good intentions just as the US government had good intentions with building nice high-rises to replace slums. Council housing had a much higher proportion of two-story row housing rather than high-rises, but were similar in most other ways.

Why did they fail? A long list of reasons. Planners operated at a level almost entirely removed from the daily lives of the poor, whom they either condescended to or were actively bigoted about. They saw the physical failings of slums but were utterly oblivious to the social and community aspects and the networks of bonds and interrelationships that the groups had built over decades to boost their lives. Putting people randomly into new apartments as individuals rather than groups had the effect of stripping away all the old communities.

The housing itself never lived up to promises either. Some builders cut corners and created physically sub-par structures so that the range of construction values varied tremendously from site to site. The size and physical layout of the apartments were based on pre-war thinking and expectations, so they responded to needs and values that were obsolete by the time they went up and were incapable of upgrading to post-war norms. Especially in the UK, which was pretty much broke after the war, money was spent grudgingly on the poor so the ideals of the good intentions could never be reflected in reality even if the theories had any value to begin with.

It’s the best example we have of what happens when we try to engineer a solution without understanding the complexity of reality. Every time I hear talk about geo-engineering to reverse the effects of global warming I get chills. It will be this horror on a world-wide scale.

7

For a fictional treatment that tells a lot about the development of council housing in the UK since the '60s you should check out “Our Friends In the North” a brilliant mini-series following the lives of several Northerners (in the English sense) from the '60s to the '90s. It touches on some of the issues Exapno brings up in the above post.

Here’s an interesting article about a council estate in London that was set for demolition.

8

There are some really nasty council estates in the UK. But even then, they have public transport, tend to be near other major urban centres - and I mean within a ten minutes’ drive at the very most, and that would be really unusual - and they’re never, ever uniformly council estate; there’s always private housing, fields, parks, etc in between. I lived on one for a while - one so vile it eventually got torn down - and was still a five minute walk from a golf course and proper posh people.

Funnily enough, Rose in Dr Who lives on one of the roughest types of council estates, for London, and her Mum’s flat is really old-fashioned and a bit run-down. A lot of council housing is nice terraces or town houses and the flats, even in tower blocks, are generally in better nick than Rose’s Mum’s. Mostly it’s only by the doors that you can tell if a place is council or not.

9

From my brief views of the projects in NYC and TN, I would say that on average British council housing is nicer. But I may be wrong.

In Oxford I lived in a mixed Council/ex-Council street. About half the houses, which were cute 1930s cottage-style terraces, had been bought by their tenants and were either still occupied or had been re-sold.

I owned my home but my next-door neighbours were council tenants. (They very much knew how to game the system, and I used to resent that anything that went slightly wrong they managed to get sorted for free, as well as getting their bathroom converted to a wet room and their front yard landscaped, due to a speculative future disability. They both had full-time jobs and apparently saved so much money that they were able to burn their internal and external lights, and run a large fountain, 24/7. I used to think maybe I should set up a direct debit to pay my £1,200 annual council tax directly into their bank account, but it wouldn’t have made up the shortfall by a long way.)

On the other hand, a mile or so up the road is Blackbird Leys, which is a huge and desolate council estate, mainly housing, but with a couple of nasty tower blocks in the middle. I’m sure it’s not as bad as we middle-class folks think, but it has a terrible reputation for high crime and antisocial behaviour.

But Oxford is a fairly prosperous small city. There are also sink estates in economically deprived areas, which are probably as bad as anything in the US, though as Sam says, there are public services that extend into them.

10

It’s worth noting that the US experience with social or public housing is widely varied as well. While Chicago’s highrises were a disaster, New York’s were not, and many other cities succeeded in providing good affordable housing for the poor.

11

See, that’s what I’d think of as a rough housing estate. It’s still on the tube and train, twenty minutes’ walk from Borough Market, and surrounded and pebbled by older older housing that survived WW2. If you set off at one end of the estate and walked as the crow flies for five minutes, you’d be out of the estate. And elephant is a really rough area; I always imagined Rose as living somewhere down there - I think Dr Who Confidential might have said so much.

Thamesmead, near Elephant, is the biggest most Communist-looking estate in London. Some of the ‘Grim England’ scenes that you sometimes see when people want to portray the country badly are filmed there. It’s the only place I know in the city where you can arc your head back and only see tower blocks; it’s like Bratislava. But, TBH, the flats themselves are actually really nice.

My Dad was from that area (Woolwich dockyards) and I once saw a picture of him standing outside his childhood house in about 1951 and looking proud. I thought it was his shed. No, that was his house; they were proud because it had survived all the bombings, despite being made of wood. They had running water to a sink, but that was it. The tower blocks were like heaven to them.

12

They were both working, so they’d be paying rent and the same rate of council tax as you. They just had a good landlord. Affordable housing is something that the UK needs more of, not less. Another Thatcher idiocy.
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13

Unfortunately a lot of these still haven’t been replaced and the people in them are living in absolutely shocking conditions, like in Dolphin House in the South Inner City where residents have reported things like syringes floating up through their pipes and into their bathtubs. During the election I was leafletting in O’Devaney Gardens with some folks from the North who had come down to lend a hand and they couldn’t believe the state of the place, they’d never seen anything like it. Croke Villas is so bad you half expect to see flies on the children’s faces.

I haven’t been inside any of the US projects, though, only past them, so I can’t really compare.

14

I’m not familiar with all those places but I’ve friends who’ve lived in one or other so although it saddens me it doesn’t surprise me.

15

:eek:

To be perfectly honest, I would live in her mother’s flat. I have lived in much worse privately owned rental properties here in the US. Hell I have even lived in what is a slum area in Norfolk VA that made her mum’s flat look positively luxurious.

16

Yes, I’m in the UK and from what I remember of those Doctor Who episodes, Rose’s flat seemed nice enough, at least the interior of it. Although I admit, I’ve never lived in council accommodation, so I don’t have anything to compare it to.

17

It’s the style I’m thinking of - outdated. The building and the estate are definitely the roughest type.

ETA: Council tenants are responsible for providing their own furniture and decor, including flooring and bathroom fittings (there’ll be a loo and a bath, but, heh, bog-standard ones), so the interiors vary very widely.

Jjimm’s neighbour getting a new wetroom and a landscaped garden is astonishing when they didn’t even have a disability yet. The application process takes ages and requires a medical assessment; it took four years to get an adapted bathroom for my Grandad, and he was in a wheelchair.

18

Most of my patients live in Council housing.

It varies between 100 year old redbrick terraces which had to be converted to indoor plumbing (think Coronation Street), to nice apartments built in the last 5 years, to pretty much everything in between.

All, however, have running water, (metered) electricity and central heating, and are maintained to a pretty high standard by the council.

Usually the kids don’t have their own bedrooms, but there are rarely more than 2 kids to a room.

Some of the housing is pretty nice- open plan kitchen/dining rooms, private gardens with decking etc.

There are corner shops, pharmacies and churches everywhere, and in this (admittedly horribly deprived area) there is still a faily good sense of local community.

Some people live in private rented accommodation, but use their housing benefit to pay the rent, others live in council or housing association owned property. Some council tenants will save up and buy their property eventually.

Even on a “concil estate” you’ll have owner occupiers and people renting former council houses from former residents who have moved elsewhere.

You need to remember that you don’t have to be unemployed to get housing benefit- people on low income can get it too.

Although there are of course a fair few of my “unemployed” patients working cash in hand casual jobs- a type of benefit fraud known as “doing the double”.

Other examples of realistic UK council housing in film and TV- Attack the Block, Trainspotting, Shameless, Skins, Misfits.

19

Irishgirl - Slight hijack, do people in Belfast still stay they’re “on the brew”?

20

I’ve never really been clear on what the “council” is. Is it a government entity? Is it the equivalent of a US town or county? Is it a particular body within the government? Any light someone can shed would be helpful.