The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House, BBC Four

In 2004 Michael Collins wrote a fascinating book, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. It was part memoir of his south-London childhood, part history of the area and part polemic. Two-thirds was an excellent read, a thoroughly researched and well-written account of the many generations of his family who had lived in Walworth, but the last third was a confused mess of an argument about what he saw as the plight of the modern-day white working class - marginalised and despised by the middle-class media and forgotten by the establishment. I had a similar response to this programme; it was meticulously researched and engagingly presented, but had at its heart a deeply flawed conclusion.

Collins told us the film (directed by Chris Wilson) would explain why the extraordinary social experiment that began with a bang at the start of the 20th century ended with a whimper 80 years later. He began and ended his story on the Heygate Estate in south London, opened in 1974 and now due for demolition, mostly boarded up and waiting for the wrecking crews to move in. It’s a desolate place and perfect as the location for fantasy films such as Hereafter and the dystopian bollocks of Harry Brown.

But in bookending the film on the Heygate, Collins’s weaknesses as a historian and analyst were revealed; to him it was a symptom (with no local context given) of the failure of council housing, to me it stands as a success story made rotten by greed. Full disclosure here: I know many families (including close relatives) who lived happily on the Heygate but who were moved out by the council when they realised a tidy profit could be made under the cloak of a vast “regeneration" scheme in which property developers get the prime locations and the locals - if they’re allowed to stay at all - get what’s left. It’s what a late friend of mine, a local activist, called social cleansing; council housing hasn’t failed here, rather a political agenda has been won at the expense of tenants.

There was much to enjoy in the film as a potted history of social housing - from Victorian do-goodery, through Lloyd George’s homes fit for heroes and Aneurin Bevan’s postwar vision of estates being self-contained communities with shops, health services and social clubs, to its zenith in 1975, when a third of Britons lived in council homes. Collins travelled to several estates, including Letchworth, Stevenage, Park Hill in Sheffield and Thamesmead in south London, to tell the story.

The archive footage, much of it original and some from Collins’s own family, was fascinating, and Collins’s sympathetic interviews with former and current council tenants were positive and uplifting. “My mam thought it was heaven without the gates,” said the son of one family who had moved from overcrowded squalor into a postwar estate, where amenities such as inside lavatories and laundry facilities were the norm. Particularly affecting was the sequence in which a group of Liverpudlians, two of them well into pension years, revisited the Myrtle Gardens estate, which was opened in 1937 and was their happy home for decades. It’s now a gated private development.

Having told the history so interestingly and vividly, Collins then came to his analysis and was keen to point out that it was two changes in legislation by Labour governments 30 years apart that did for council housing.

The first was removing the words “working class” from the 1947 housing act (as the target of its intentions), which in his view meant the really needy were denied housing as it was only the earning aspirationals (factory managers rather than factory-line workers, for example) who moved into the newly created garden cities, with their neat lawns and rigid rules about keeping windows and net curtains clean; and the reform of 1977, which introduced different rules about eligibility and meant that children of council tenants no longer had priority on waiting lists. These two points were made without any real evidence to back them up.

What wasn’t explained was how and why council housing went from being respectable to being synonymous with unsafe and undesirable, surely the crux of the matter. And Margaret Thatcher, architect of the Right to Buy scheme under which one million council homes were sold between 1980 and 1990 alone, was mentioned only in passing, but she is surely the villain of the piece. It is, after all, difficult to be a council tenant - good or bad - when council homes are being sold off and none built in their place.

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