My old friend and sometime adversary, the architect Patrik Schumacher, once declared that the ‘unique and exclusive concern of architects’ is what he described as the first few millimetres of a building.[1] By this he meant a building’s form, its exterior and interior surfaces, the sculptured and engineered façade or envelope behind which whatever goes on inside is contained and perhaps hidden from the world. What Patrik implied with his call to exclusion is that this is of as little concern to the architect as what goes on in the world outside, the social, economic, environmental and political contexts in which the work of the architect exists, and at which his responsibility for his work ends. After more than a decade writing about architecture, I would say that, by and large, Patrik was correct. For the vast majority of architects — and not only those seduced by the parametric blancmanges for which his practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, is best known — architecture is, uniquely and exclusively, a practice of form and materials, on which the worlds both outside and inside its three millimetres imposes uses over which the architect has as little control or influence as he has a duty to consider. The unique and exclusive concern of architects is architecture, from the Greek architéktōn (ἀρχιτέκτων), meaning the master builder. What goes on inside the building, like what goes on outside, is none of their concern.
So much for the concern of architects. But what is the primary function of architecture today? Let me start with this proposition: the primary function of architecture today — when it’s estimated that three-quarters of all buildings in the UK are some form of housing but only 6 percent are designed by architects — is to realise the value uplift of the land on which that housing is built. Secondary and subsidiary functions include creating a deposit box for global capital that is guaranteed by the housing policy of the country in which that box has its physical referent — that is, the building — to increase its value and protect it from the periodic crises to which finance capitalism is structurally subject. In addition, by helping to increase the cost of housing to the point where its lack of affordability reaches a crisis that, in our own time, is global in reach, architecture not only increases the profits of property investors and landlords but also increases the control of banks over mortgagors, renters and the homeless. And in helping to create the shortage of affordable housing from whose scarcity the profits of developers and investors are extracted, architects also help ensure the credit rating of property developers and the banks that invest in their markets, primarily in the form of mortgage lending.[2] Finally, when not designing property investments, architects are increasingly acting as marketing agents brought in by politicians to promote new funding mechanisms and changes to policy — the prime example being the scam of so-called ‘affordable housing’ — under the guise of new housing typologies — the prime example in the UK being the contemporaneous ‘New London Vernacular’.[3] But these other and related functions of architecture derive from the first, which is to increase the value of the land for the development of which architects — exclusively and uniquely, to echo Patrik Schumacher — are brought in to design the forms and choose the materials that will serve that function, and to do so at a profit greater than the cost of introducing them into an industry that, the other 94 percent of the time, does very well without them.
If this answer to my question sounds unbelievable, incredible, impossible, cynical, conspiratorial or just plain mad, this book is for you. It’s field of study, of course, isn’t all housing, still less all architecture. Rather, its focus is very specific: the role of the UK’s housing estate regeneration programme in clearing publicly-owned land of its occupants and existing housing, both council and housing association — what the rest of the world refers to as social or public housing — in order to design, build, sell and rent the residential properties and associated amenities that will realise the latent value uplift of that land to the highest possible cost for that particular area at that particular time. Ideally and typically, such residential developments will have the prospect of even greater profits to come in the future through the social and economic process that has come to be called — inaccurately, by the apologists for this process — gentrification. Hence the subtitle of this book: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing — the latter term being the more accurate description of this process, and one, moreover, adopted by the residents of council estates evicted from their homes by so-called ‘regeneration’ schemes. Following on from the previous title in this series, The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance, the current volume, Case Studies in Estate Regeneration, focuses — not exclusively but perhaps uniquely — on the function of regeneration as a financial strategy, a political policy, a legal instrument, a programme of social cleansing, a campaign in the class war, and an architectural collaboration in convincing, bullying, bribing and threatening residents into voting for the demolition of their homes — and, for those who refuse, in physically evicting them by force — for no other reason and no other purpose than the profits extracted from this programme.
In this respect, although this book is about the estate regeneration programme in the UK — and primarily in London, where the density of council housing estates in the inner-city and the potential uplift in the value of the land on which they are built is greater than in anywhere else in the UK, and indeed than most places in the world — ‘regeneration’ is a buzzword that, by concealing the profit motives of the programme it describes, has been and continues to be applied across the world with wider reach, increasing violence and catastrophic social consequences.
Like everything about the housing crisis, with estate regeneration the devil is always in the details, and the articles collected in this volume contain increasing degrees of detail on this process as their author became increasingly knowledgeable about how it was carried out. So, although they begin with general observations about the process that has come to be known as ‘managed decline’, they end with extended investigations into the social, financial and environmental costs of demolishing estates, and exposes the role not only of municipal authorities, councils, housing associations and developers in this process but of architects too. And although every regeneration scheme is as particular as the profits it generates and the policy frameworks within which those profits are produced, the reader will hopefully recognise similar patterns in the programme of urban ‘regeneration’, which can be applied as far afield as Guangzhou and San Francisco, the banlieues of Paris and downtown Toronto.
Written between September 2016 and July 2019, these articles were first published on the website of Architects for Social Housing (ASH), the London-based architectural practice that was founded in March 2015 by Geraldine Dening, its Principal Architect, and myself, its Head of Research. They were written, therefore, in the three years between the so-called ‘Brexit’ referendum in June 2016 and the United Kingdom leaving the European Union in January 2020, at a time when the attractiveness of the UK — and of London in particular — as a financial authority and policy framework conducive to the investment of the roughly £100 billion of dirty money that is washed through the City of London every year and into UK residential property was declining. Created in its current form by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997 and formalised as a national programme by the Conservative government of David Cameron in 2016, estate regeneration is inseparable from this source of investment, which has financialised a housing market that, since the neoliberal revolution overseen by the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, has marketised the provision of housing in the UK. As that investment was withdrawn, therefore, scores of regeneration schemes lost their profit motive, and the lies told to council and housing association residents about the benefits of evicting their communities and demolishing their homes were exposed for what they were then and remain today. I have little doubt that any resident subjected to a ‘regeneration’ scheme will recognise their own experiences in this book, and hopefully — in addition to their own understanding — will learn from it something about the economic motivations of the estate regeneration programme, its legislative implementation, its policy frameworks, its practical enforcement and, most of all, the social consequences it has for both the residents evicted from their demolished homes and the severity of the crisis of housing affordability and security under which the majority of Britons continue to live.
For the estate regeneration programme is not merely a part of, or one aspect of, the housing crisis — something equivalent to the Right to Buy scheme that, since its introduction in 1980, has privatised over 2 million council homes in the UK. What this book argues is that estate regeneration, not only in London but increasingly across the UK, is one of the primary instruments of the housing crisis: expanding its reach, sharpening its severity, reproducing its effects, and increasing the profits that are its driving motor. As I wrote in volume two of this series, estate regeneration:
- Clears land for redevelopment and investment by global capital looking for a property market underwritten by government subsidies (such as Help to Buy, Rent to Buy and so-called Affordable Housing) that were designed to artificially raise UK house prices for both developers and investors;
- Builds residential properties for the highest possible price in order to realise the maximum value uplift in land prices;
- Removes from competition with the market the only housing — that is, both council and housing association housing — to have escaped the huge escalation in housing costs this programme is driving; and
- Displaces the residents of council and housing association estates in predominantly Inner-London boroughs through a programme of social cleansing designed to remove constituents more likely to be reliant on government and council-funded social services.
Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing documents in detail how this is done.
• • •
In this respect, these articles, to my knowledge, are qualitatively different from most other writings about the housing crisis, particularly when compared to those written by academics, who study this manufactured crisis from the vantage point of disinterested observers, and write about it within the limits imposed by the discursive restrictions of academia. The articles collected in this volume therefore represent something like a new essay form, from which academics — dependent as they are on grants and the censorship of the publishing industry — and journalists — equally constrained by the policy of their newspaper or journal and the parasitic relationship they have to the residents they interview — are economically, institutionally, politically and discursively barred. To take just one point of difference, these articles study the myriad of documents, including planning applications and, where available, viability assessments that, despite being the clearest indication of what will be built on the demolished estate, appear to be invisible to the writers of newspaper journals and academic papers.
I am not alone in doing so, of course. Other website articles that analyse such documents include those of Jerry Flynn for the 35% Campaign, the authors of Southwark Notes and John Boughton for Municipal Dreams, on whose research on individual estate regenerations I have occasionally drawn in my own case studies. Like ASH’s own website, however, these are rarely cited in the bibliographies of academic books required by the conventions of academia to cite books published by the authorised academic press. For all their professed good intentions — which occasionally are sincere — academics are caught in a self-referential world of continental theory they only partly understand, but which they appear to be certain has more bearing on a residents’ campaign than the legal documents that will determine their fate. I remember well the confusion that descended on the audience that had come to hear about the Focus E15 Mothers campaign to repopulate the Carpenters estate delivered by Paul Watt. Then a Professor of Urban Studies at Birkbeck College, now a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, Paul thought this was an opportunity to educate these working-class, single mothers living in a homeless hostel in Newham on the relevance of the work of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and psychoanalyst, Félix Guatarri, to London’s housing crisis. And let me add that Paul, despite his naive allegiance to the Labour Party, is one of the more socially engaged members of his profession.
In contrast to which, the immediate purpose of the case studies collected in this book is to document — first and foremost for the residents threatened with the demolition of their homes — the evidence of the difference between the promises made to them by their landlords, whether local authority or housing association, the actual consequences it will have for them, and what alternative options have been suppressed or simply ignored. Part of what makes the articles in this collection so different, therefore, from the research projects of grant-hunting academics and the lachrymose lamentations of liberal journalists is the work of Architects for Social Housing.
For seven years, between 2015 and 2022, ASH worked with and, occasionally, against residents in their struggle to save their homes from demolition by estate regeneration schemes. When we were asked by individual campaigns to draw up a design alternative to demolition, this resulted in several years of mostly pro bono work by working teams composed of architects, architectural assistants, engineers, quantity surveyors, researchers and housing campaigners, which produced architectural alternatives for six estates. These included Knight’s Walk (2015), part of the Cotton Gardens estate in Lambeth, where we succeeded in stopping the demolition of half the homes; the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in West Kensington (2016), where our feasibility study, submitted as part of the residents’ Right to Transfer, helped save both estates from demolition; the Northwold estate in Hackney (2017), where our designs helped saved the estate from demolition by the housing association to which it has been stock transferred by the council; the Central Hill estate in Crystal Palace (2018), for which we produced a book-length case study, and which at the time of writing still stands; the Patmore estate in Wandsworth (2019), which wasn’t threatened at the time with demolition, but whose housing cooperative asked us to draw up a vision for its future within the London Mayor’s Opportunity Area; and the St. Raphael’s estate in Brent (2021), where our designs, again, successfully helped save the estate from demolition.
As an extension of this design work, in 2015 ASH created Open Garden Estates, an annual open day held on the same weekend as the Open House London festival, on which the public was invited into threatened London estates to hear about the residents’ campaign to save their homes from demolition; and by 2017 we had assembled a network of around 17 or 18 estates that had signed up to participate. Together with our consultative work for numerous such campaigns, including on Cressingham Gardens estate and Macintosh Court in Lambeth, the Montague estate in Waltham Forest, the Carpenters estate in Newham, and Montreal Square in Cambridge, this gave ASH an understanding of the process of estate demolition and its economic, political and legal contexts that is unique, to my knowledge. Perhaps only the architects of this programme — the think tanks and estate agents that write UK housing policy — have a more in-depth knowledge of its hidden workings, and they are very much on the other side of the barriers to us.
In contrast, the numerous books on the housing crisis published by leftist and liberal academics and journalists — and in the 2010s they were legion, as publishers and grant bodies recognised a selling point when they saw one — continue to astonish me with their political naivety about what a parliamentary party will do once in power at local, municipal or governmental level; their class myopia, evidenced in their unshakeable assumption that the middle-class professionals implementing the estate regeneration programme mean well; their willful ignorance of legislation and of the violence with which housing policy is applied by councils, the lawyers they employ with the rents of the tenants they are brought in to evict, the private security firms they employ to intimidate residents who put up a fight and, when necessary, the police forces they call in to physically eject squatters and campaigners from occupations. Perhaps most of all, however — although this doesn’t surprise me in the least — is the ongoing refusal of our staunchly liberal ‘intelligentsia’ in both the media and academia to face the reality of finance capitalism that the housing crisis dragged into the light as perhaps no other social phenomenon did in that decade in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08.[4]
ASH is also in what is not the unique but certainly the unusual position of being able to publish our own books and book-length reports, whose production, in the absence of funding from academic or governmental bodies, we cross-subsidise with our architectural and pedagogical work. At the time of writing these include The Ethics of Estate Regeneration: Architects for Social Housing in Response to the Royal Institute for British Architects (2016); West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates: New Homes and Improvements without Demolition. Feasibility Study Report (2016); Homes for Londoners: Good Practice Guide to Resisting Estate Demolition (2017); The Truth About Grenfell Tower: A Report by Architects for Social Housing (2017); Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018); The Costs of Estate Regeneration: A Report by Architects for Social Housing (2018, included in this volume); Inequality Capital: A Power Walk by Architects for Social Housing (2019); For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022), and the first two volumes in the ASH Papers, Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History (2024) and The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance (2025). This means that, unlike academics and journalists, we are constrained by no publisher, editor, funder, journal, department or employer to continue to tell the lies and refuse to tell the truth about the causes of the housing crisis and the role of the estate regeneration programme in exporting it across the UK. As the third volume in the ASH Papers, this book collects case studies on individual estate regeneration schemes that were not expanded into a book or report, but which received a wide readership on the ASH website, and have often been the object of requests and inquiries about when we were going to collect them in book form. This volume is the response to and, hopefully, the satisfactory fulfilment of those requests.
• • •
The origins of this volume, however, as of that preceding it in the ASH Papers, go back to a book that we did not publish, titled Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars. This was published by Karakusevic Carson Architects in April 2017 to accompany their exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, which showcased 24 case studies of new developments across Europe and the UK, many of them estate regeneration schemes in London.[5] These included the Colville estate, King’s Crescent estate and Nightingale estate in Hackney and the Bacton Low Rise estate in Camden, all four of which have been demolished and redeveloped to designs by Karakusevic Carson; the demolished and redeveloped Agar Grove estate in Camden, designed by Hawkins/Brown and Mae; as well as the demolished and redeveloped Tower Court in Hackney, designed by Adam Khan Architects, and the regeneration of the Silchester estate in Kensington & Chelsea, designed by Haworth Tompkins. Oliver Wainwright, the architecture and design critic at the Guardian newspaper, called the book: ‘A fascinating overview of social housing today. Complete with the essential nitty gritty details of plans, sections, budgets and time-frames, it’s both a practical manual and optimistic manifesto for what it’s possible to achieve, against all the odds.’
Such case studies have become endemic to the rash of publications setting out the legislation, business models and design principles of the estate regeneration programme in the UK. In February 2015, Urban Design London published its Estate Regeneration Sourcebook, which contains 14 case studies of regenerated estates, again including the Colville and King’s Crescent estates. In February 2016, the research arm of Savills real estate firm published Completing London’s Streets: How the regeneration and intensification of housing estates could increase London’s supply of homes and benefit residents (2016). In March 2016, four architectural practices not in the Karakusevic Carson book — HTA Design, Levitt Bernstein, Pollard Thomas Edwards, and PRP — published Altered Estates: How to reconcile competing interests in estate regeneration, which contains 12 case studies of estates redeveloped to designs by these practices, including the South Acton estate, Aylesbury estate, Packington estate and Crossways estate. In December 2016, the Conservative government published its ‘Estate Regeneration National Strategy’, which contains 16 case studies of regenerated estates, including the demolished Ferrier estate and Myatt’s Field North estate, now redeveloped, respectively, as Kidbrooke Village and Oval Quarter. In 2017, London First, a business advocacy organisation, published Estate Regeneration: More and better homes for London (2017). In April 2017, the Labour Party published ‘Local Housing Innovations’, which contains 44 case studies of new housing in Labour-run boroughs, many of which are engaged in council-led estate regeneration programmes. In February 2018, the Greater London Authority published ‘Better Homes for Local People: The Mayor’s Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration’, which contains 7 case studies, including of the Wornington Green, Kings Crescent, Acton Gardens, Carpenters, Alma and Beavers Lane estates. In 2021, Brendan Kilpatrick of PRP Architects — who once described ASH’s costed design alternative to the demolition of Central Hill estate as ‘a noble idea but not really practical’ — published Estate Regeneration: Learning from the Past, Housing Communities of the Future, which has case studies of around two-dozen estates, including the redeveloped Aberfeldy, Clapham Park, Myatts Field North, South Kilburn and Stockwell Park estates. That same year, Karakusevic Carson extended their previous volume into Public Housing Works, which contains no less than 39 case studies. And, more recently, in September 2021, Lichfields planning and development consultancy published Great Estates: Planning for Estate Regeneration in London, which was illustrated with photographs of the redeveloped Dover Court, Kings Crescent estate, Packington estate, South Kilburn estate and Woodberry Down. Doubtless there are many more of this ilk.
Although published by government departments, mayoral offices, political parties, estate agents, business think tanks, planning and development consultancies and architectural practices, all these publications and case studies had one thing in common: they all depict estate regeneration as the solution to the UK’s housing crisis, the new developments as unqualified improvements on the demolished estates, and the communities of residents as willing and satisfied customers in the regeneration of their homes. To this end, what was uniformly missing from all these publications is the ‘nitty gritty details’ — to use Oliver Wainwright’s phrase — of how many homes for social rent were lost to these demolition schemes and how many properties for market sale were built in their place; how much public land was sold for the redevelopment and how much council housing was privatised as the ‘affordable housing’ typically provided in its place by a housing association; how much the rents and service charges went up on the new development and how many former residents were socially cleansed from their estate as a result; and how many of the properties for market sale at half-a-million-pounds and more were being lived in by their owners or rented out on the private rental market by Buy-to-let landlords. What is missing, therefore, is everything that would allow the reader to make a judgement about whether these ‘exemplars’ of estate regeneration were solving the housing crisis — as they claim to be — or exacerbating it.
To rectify these omissions — which are the first and most important criteria by which any estate regeneration scheme should be judged, and hopefully before it is imposed on residents — in 2017 Architects for Social Housing published an e-book of 17 case studies that I had written over the previous two years, accompanied by 11 further articles that looked at the function of estate regeneration in London’s housing crisis. The present book, and the previous volume in the ASH Papers, are the realisation in printed form of this e-book. As these articles show in considerable and verifiable detail, the reality of estate regeneration is in every respect — the space standards, design and build quality of the new-builds, their tenure security, affordability and meeting of housing need — at odds with that presented in the publications by the (then) Conservative government, the (then) Labour opposition, the Greater London Authority, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the think tanks writing UK housing policy, the estate agents and consultancies advising the London councils demolishing the estates, and the architectural practices contracted to design the new developments. ‘At odds’ is putting it mildly.
I will leave it to the reader to judge which is the more accurate representation of a national programme that has affected and will affect the homes and lives of millions of people in the UK; but after a decade in which estate regeneration has followed the model written into housing legislation, funded in policy and promoted in these reports, the need for sub-market housing in England alone has risen from 70,000 in 2015, when ASH was founded, to 187,000 in 2024. Even this, however, is short of the real figure, as this estimate, which was made by Savills, includes shared ownership and equity schemes and so-called affordable rent at up to 80 percent of market rate in their definition of submarket housing, when the overwhelming housing need in England and across the UK is for homes for social rent, which these new categories were created to supplant.
As I said, when writing about the housing crisis the devil is in the details, and the case studies collected in this volume present all the details — nitty gritty and far worse — that the reports, articles and books about estate regeneration do everything they can to censor, suppress, leave out and pass over in their eagerness to celebrate the success of this multi-billion-pound programme of demolition, privatisation and social cleansing.
• • •
I have described something of the origins and history of Architects for Social Housing in the preface to the previous volume in this series, and will not repeat it here; but I want to add what I wrote about the estate regeneration programme in our book, Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition, which was published in a limited edition of 200 copies and at present is only available as an e-book.
One of the most contentious terms to emerge from the estate regeneration programme is the accusation of ‘social cleansing’. This has raised the hackles of politicians, architects, journalists and academics, who trace the origin of this term back to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and denounce any comparison between the two. However, although obviously different in the degree of their effects, ‘social cleansing’ very accurately describes those effects when applied, as a housing policy, to the forced eviction and dispersal of estate communities preparatory to the demolition and redevelopment of their homes, and the replacement of those communities with a different demographic, socially and economically. The overwhelmingly working-class residents that live on estates targeted for demolition undergo years and sometimes decades of mental stress, the threat of homelessness, slurs on their character and behaviour (‘criminal, anti-social, benefit-dependent’) and unrelenting pressure and propaganda from professional consultancies — including architectural practices — during the ‘regeneration’ process, before being evicted from their destroyed communities. After seven years of working with and advising dozens of estate communities in London and across England, it doesn’t seem to ASH inaccurate or unwarranted to describe this process and its effects as ‘social cleansing’. Most importantly of all, this is their term, coined by residents to describe what they are undergoing, and it is not for us or anyone else — and least of all for middle-class professionals — to tell residents what they can and cannot say, or how to describe their experiences. Too much of that is being done already.
The other term we claim as our own. In July 2021, Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent, called the then Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a ‘liar’ in the House of Commons, and in consequence was ordered to withdraw her words and leave the House. She wasn’t the last MP to do so, but it’s a contradiction of our Parliament that, although MPs are permitted to lie in the House of Commons, they are not permitted to call someone a liar for doing so. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the MP for Brent did not employ the same frankness and honesty to describe the actions and words of Brent council and its consultants in their fraudulent and bullying consultation with the residents of St. Raphael’s estate to convince them to vote for the demolition of their own homes.[6] In our experience, this extends to all Members of Parliament, who, when not repeating their lies, are universally silent about what the councils in their constituencies are doing to their electorate.[7] ASH, however, is lacking in neither frankness nor honesty, and we do not shy away from calling a lie a ‘lie’ when it is, and showing why it is with documented and verifiable proofs.
While not a ‘campaign group’, as we are typically described by both academics and the architectural press, ASH is not a typical architectural practice. We recognise no bond of collegiality or duty of professional loyalty to the architectural practices that are complicit in the demolition of the UK’s council and social housing estates, which we have publicly denounced for what it is on numerous occasions. To cite just one example, when ASH made public the opposition of its residents to the demolition of Knight’s Walk — one of the case studies in this book — Alex Ely, the founder of Mae Architects, which was not only designing the redevelopment but conducting the fraudulent consultation process for Lambeth council, described our article as ‘disingenuous propaganda that undermines fellow professionals’. It’s an image of the ivory tower from which architects view their work that Ely thought loyalty to our profession was what was at stake in the demolition of a council housing estate. This book doesn’t shy from exposing the architectural practices complicit in this programme. If architects are offended by my naming them, they should be more offended by what they are doing. As soon as they stop, so will we.
Nor do we write as academics, whose lack of a practical understanding of the mechanics and effects of the regeneration process is unfortunately apparent in so many of the books to emerge from academia. This is, perhaps, an understandable consequence of the authors’ own positions as passive and theoretical observers of the estate regeneration programme, rather than its active and practical opposers. Couched in the language of objectivity and their claim to be reporting ‘both sides of the argument’, this precludes them, for example — as Professor Murray Fraser, the Vice Dean of Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, once informed ASH — from ever publicly criticising a named architectural practice — in this case Karakusevic Carson — no matter how many housing estates it had collaborated in socially cleansing of their residents, or from questioning the lies councils publish on their websites about estate demolition schemes.[8] The resulting ignorance, of both architects and academics, is at once a professional and a class divide. No-one who has not worked with residents for years on end, as ASH has done, through the incremental steps by which an entire community is deprived of its voice, its reputation, its rights and finally its homes can fully understand the duplicity and violence of the estate regeneration programme in which professionals are complicit.
I remember the conviction of Anna Minton, the Guardian journalist turned academic — at the time Reader in Architecture at the University of East London and now Honorary Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction — that Lambeth’s Labour-run council would never demolish an estate as beautiful as Central Hill. I assume this was because she believed the middle-class professionals who sat on the Cabinet and had gone to the same university as her had a particular sensitivity to beauty, or that the Labour Party are always on the side of the working class. We were incredulous at her credulity then, even more at her failure to read the numerous articles we had published exposing every step of Lambeth council’s demolition scheme. As it turned out, ASH’s design alternatives and campaigning helped to stop the demolition of its 456 homes for several years; but as I write, in 2025, Lambeth council is looking again at redeveloping the estate.
Let me say it again. The social cleansing of working-class communities by the forces of global capital is not a game in which politicians can score points off their political opponents. It is not an archive for journalists and academics publishing books on architecture, urban design and ‘gentrification’ to apply for grants and further their career.[9] And it is not an opportunity for architectural practices, consultancies, housing associations, builders and property developers to win lucrative contracts from councils, municipal authorities and central government. Of course, it clearly has become all these things; but for residents of estates targeted for regeneration, the attempt to resist the demolition of their homes is experienced as a life-and-death struggle by the most economically vulnerable and threatened social class in the UK to survive the forces of global capital and the housing legislation and policy written to attract its investment in UK property.
As this book will demonstrate in considerable detail and with hopefully irrefutable data, the social cleansing of estate communities is also not an unfortunate consequence of the failure of UK housing policy on estate regeneration to rehouse residents, but rather the product of its success in clearing land for investment. The national programme of estate regeneration through which global capital is courted, laundered, accommodated and subsidised in the UK is built on a tower of lies as in need of exposure, accountability and change as those which led to the Grenfell Tower fire, which itself — it has conveniently been forgotten — was the consequence of an estate regeneration scheme. There is nothing, either in current government legislation or in the housing policies of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green parties, that will stop councils from implementing the model of estate demolition and redevelopment documented in these case studies. This book, therefore, is another of ASH’s attempts to help residents, communities and, perhaps, those architects looking for an alternative to such practices, to resist these forces and bring about better, more sustainable, more equitable ways to house ourselves without committing the people of the UK to a lifetime’s labour paying off their debt to a banking system that is privatising the public realm and replacing it with the inexorable demands of capital.
• • •
Because ASH is an architectural practice and not a campaign group, I have included, in addition to these 13 case studies of individual estates, first — and as an introduction to the volume — the account of our mapping of London’s estate regeneration programme for a retrospective of our work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Held from 14-20 August, 2017, this map identified and located 237 housing estates in London, both council and housing association, that since 1997 had undergone, were undergoing, or were targeted with a regeneration scheme that had or would result in the privatisation of the housing, either by stock transfer to a housing association or by its refurbishment at a cost that financially prohibited the residents from returning; the demolition of the housing and their redevelopment as a mix of affordable-rent, shared-ownership and market-sale properties; and the resulting social cleansing from the estate of the majority of the existing residents.
Finally, from the knowledge ASH acquired through our practice, Geraldine Dening and I collaborated on the final article in this volume, which was originally published as a separate report titled The Costs of Estate Regeneration. Through in-depth analysis of the economics of this process, this proved — and proves still — that as soon as the decision is made to demolish a housing estate, the cost of demolition, of compensation for tenants and leaseholders, and of replacing the existing homes, means that it becomes financially necessary to allocate at least 50 percent of the new-build properties for market sale, a further 25 percent for some form of shared ownership or equity scheme, and the remainder for some category of affordable rent, with few or no tenancies for social rent. The social cleansing of the existing community, therefore, is not only or even a result of the greed of developers and the placement in local authorities of consultants and lobbyists for the building industry, but is financially built into the estate regeneration programme and triggered whenever ‘regeneration’ means demolition.
ASH’s design alternatives to this programme, which are both architectural and economic, are outlined in this report; but they can be read in greater detail in our book-length reports, which are available, for free, from our websites.
Finally, a word about why we are publishing the ASH Papers. More than in the previous volumes in this series, in the process of transferring these online articles into book form I have been struck by how many times the links to the sources of the documentation I discuss are broken or have simply been removed from the host website. Sometimes, undoubtedly, this is a result of the restructuring of the website of a local authority or of the Greater London Authority, in the course of which that document has been secreted anew in the labyrinthine passageways of cabinet decisions and planning applications; but sometimes, too, it appears to me, it has been deliberately removed to rewrite the past that is so easily rewritten when information is recorded in digital form. I’ve noticed this to be particularly the case with local gazettes dependent upon the borough council for their funding, from which articles exposing or criticising the actions of that council or the political party to which the administration belongs have been wiped from the historical memory. Whenever this has occurred, I make a note of this in the accompanying footnote.
Indeed, as this practice has become more prevalent, widespread and brazen over the past five years of rewritten history, whether about how people behaved under lockdown, the repeatedly deferred deadlines for climate catastrophe, or when the war in the Ukraine was started and by whom, the necessity of recording history in book form has become more pressing and important. If for no other reason, these articles are collected here because, with the passing of a new law on ‘disinformation’ — which increasingly means anything contradicting the governments in Westminster, Brussels or New York — or the implementation of a new programme of surveillance, they can be removed from public access by the deletion of our website as part of the expanding censorship that has become normalised in the West on the justification of successive crises every bit as manufactured as the housing crisis.[11]
Even for those not interested in the causes of this crisis, therefore, which continues to define much of finance capitalism today but which has been pushed off our front pages by numerous other crisis events, the analysis of how the housing crisis has been created and for whose benefit should be of interest to anyone sceptical of the reality of the COVID, environmental and Ukraine scams, and concerned at the economic and political consequences they are used to justify. The paradox — more accurately, the hypocrisy — of capitalism is that, while loudly protesting the freedom of the market from state control, there is no business venture of any national or international reach today that is not predicated on the state transferring tax-payers’ money into private hands on the justification of responding to this or that crisis. In this respect, the UK’s estate regeneration programme is exemplary of how the private and public sectors work in so-called ‘partnership’ to enrich the former and impoverish the latter. The housing crisis, therefore, which is increasing in severity across the globe, has much to tell us about the environmental, health and geopolitical ‘crises’ that are making globalists immeasurably wealthier at the cost of the immiseration, surveillance and control of the populations of the nation states on which the solutions to these crises are imposed by our governments.
Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing is the third volume in the series titled the ASH Papers, which is collecting in book form the more important articles published on our website. The projected next two volumes will be titled, respectively, Culture Wars: Art, Politics and Capitalism, and For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism.
Simon Elmer is the author of Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing (2025), from whose preface this article is taken. His recent books include The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance (2025), Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History (2024), The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy? (2024), The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (2023), The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), two collections of articles on the UK lockdown, Virtue and Terror (2020) and The New Normal (1920-21); and with Geraldine Dening, Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022), For a Socialist Architecture: Under Socialism (2021) and Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018).
Notes
1. Schumacher made this comment in his presentation to the Architecture Society of the University of Cambridge titled ‘Architecture and Urbanism in the 21st Century’, which was held in the Department of Architecture on 13 May, 2019. The previous day, at the invitation of students from the same society, ASH gave a two-part presentation that introduced students to the writings of Patrik Schumacher under the title ‘For a Socialist Architecture’. See ‘Part 1: The Facts in the Case of Patrik Schumacher’ and ‘Part 2: The Principles of Architectural Practice’, Architects for Social Housing (14 May, 2019).
2. In March 2025, the US agency, S&P Global Ratings, accused the government of Hong Kong of not aggressively addressing its supposed surplus of housing, and warned that the continuing fall of prices in residential property markets would undermine the credit strength of rated developers. See Vivian Au, ‘HK to push ahead with sale of housing plots’, Sunday Morning Post (9 March, 2025).
3. In 20212, the same year this guide was published, the National Planning Policy Framework introduced the category of affordable housing, the functions and failures of which I discuss at length in my book.
4. The best of these, some of which reference ASH’s work, include Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (Granta Books, 2007); Fugitive Images, Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain (Myrdle Court Press, 2010); Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city (Penguin, 2012); Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2013); David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012); Danny Dorling, All that is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, and What We Can Do About It (Allen Lane, 2014); Lisa Mckenzie, Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain (Policy Press, 2015); David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2016); Peer Smets and Paul Watt, eds., Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective (Emerald, 2017); Anna Minton, Big Capital: Who is London For? (Penguin, 2017); Jane Rendell, The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition (I.B. Tauris, 2017); The Revolutionary Communist Group, Whose Land is it Anyway? Housing, Capitalism and the Working Class (RCG, 2018); John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (Verso, 2018); Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure; The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018); Karen Jubey, ed., Housing as Intervention: Architecture Towards Social Equity (Wiley, 2018); Anitra Nelson and François Schneider, Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2019); Keith Jacobs, Neoliberal Housing Policy: An International Perspective (Routledge, 2019); Raquel Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance (Verso, 2019); Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, 2019); Paul Watt, Estate Regeneration and its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2020); Juliet Davis, The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design (Bristol University Press, 2022); and Rowan Moore, Property: The Myth that Built the World (Faber and Faber, 2023).
5. Since the time of the exhibition, Karakusevic Carson Architects have expanded their list of demolished estates to include Hereford House, Exeter Court and St. Raphael’s estate in Brent (the latter of which ASH helped defeat with our design alternatives); the Alma estate in Enfield; the Broadwater Farm estate in Haringey, the Steyne estate in Ealing; the Ledbury estate in Southwark; the South Thamesmead estate in Bexley; Horatia and Leamington Houses in Portsmouth; and the Regent Park Estate in Toronto. Canada. See Karakusevic Carson Architects, ‘Projects’. It is typical of the obfuscation in which the causes of the housing crisis are shrouded that, in January 2024, Paul Karakusevic joined a number of other architectural practices (including Public Practice, Adam Khan and Mikhail Riches) that are colluding in the demolition of the UK’s council housing to launch a ‘New Manifesto for Public Housing’. See Paul Karakusevic, ‘A Public Housing Manifesto’ (8 February, 2024).
6. See ‘Manufacturing Consent for Demolition’ and ‘Good Practice in Consultation on Estate Regeneration’, in Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (Architects for Social Housing, 2022), pp. 105-106 and 132-133.
7. See, for example, Simon Elmer, ‘A Vote for Labour is a Vote for . . . Helen Hayes’ (5 May, 2017); ‘A Vote for Labour is a Vote for . . . Florence Eshalomi’ (8 November, 2019); and ‘A Vote for Labour is a Vote for . . . Emma Dent Coad’ (15 November, 2019), all published in Architects for Social Housing.
8. This was relayed to us after our failed attempt to persuade Professor Fraser to put just some of the resources placed at his disposal by the European Union via the Centre for London Urban Design (CLOUD) to our — in the event — successful attempt to stop the demolition of the St. Raphael’s estate in Brent. See Architects for Social Housing, ‘St. Raphael’s Estate: ASH presentation to the Bartlett School of Architecture (housing design research workshop)’, Architects for Social Housing (5 February, 2020).
9. The prime example, to my knowledge, is the Economic and Social Research Council-funded project overseen by Professors Loretta Lees, Philip Hubbard and Nicholas Tate, ‘Gentrification, Displacement, and the Impacts of Council Estate Renewal in C21st London’, Urban Transformations (November 2016-July 2019), which after three years and a (from memory) £200,000 grant came to the astonishing conclusion that 1) most of London’s estate regeneration schemes are demolition schemes; 2) the majority of the new-build properties are for market scale and the rents on the affordable housing are higher than social rents; and 3) the original residents are therefore unable to return. See London Tenant Federation, Just Space and Loretta Lees, ‘Estate Watch London, and beyond’, Radical Housing Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (December 2020). ASH could have told them this, and indeed had demonstrated it on numerous occasions, for far less, and then put the money towards designs that would have saved a dozen estates from demolition.
10. My own attempt to record this history has extended beyond the period covered by the first three volumes of the ASH Papers, and includes Virtue and Terror: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 1 (published between April and September 2020) (Architects for Social Housing, 2023); The New Normal: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 2 (published between November 2020 and October 2021) (Architects for Social Housing, 2023); The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (Architects for Social Housing, 2022); The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (Architects for Social Housing, 2023); and The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy? (Architects for Social Housing, 2024).
11. The ‘Online Safety Act 2023’ (26 October, 2023), which came into effect on 28 March 2024, empowers the Office of Communications to force the providers of online platforms operating in the UK to censor and impose restrictions on what we can and cannot write and read online, with corporate fines set at up to £18 million or 10 percent of global turnover.
A Communist in Hong Kong 
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