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London has, right now, the chance of a remarkable transformation. Some of the city's biggest, most troubled, most ugly, most intractable estates, where tens of thousands of people live, could at last be replaced.
Plans have been drawn up and decisions made. In some cases residents have been moved out, and demolition has started. A blight of decades could at last be eradicated. It is a heroic collective project.
But there is a snag. These plans need money, and a major source of money was going to be the sale of new homes on the redeveloped estates.
As we all know, selling homes isn't such good business as it was a year or two ago, which leaves the prospect of this transformation delayed, postponed and uncertain. At worst, the effect will be to leave rotting blocks standing empty or neglected for years.
The names of such places are charming. Ferrier in Kidbrooke evokes sweet-voiced singer Kathleen; Woodberry Down in Hackney sounds like it's full of bunny rabbits; while Aylesbury in Southwark is named after a country town in Buckinghamshire.
In reality all are gigantic developments where utopian ideas of "estates of the future" didn't work out.
Ranging in size from 1,200 to 2,700 homes, they have common problems. By concentrating large numbers of council tenants in one place, they created ghettos, without the social mix you find in other parts of London.
They were vulnerable to whims in housing policy, which might for example decide to move problem families to a particular place, and trigger a sudden decline.
Architecturally they are not pretty. Woodberry Down, conceived in 1934 and completed in 1962, has the brick blocks and long-access balconies typical of the time.
The later Heygate, in Southwark, consists of long concrete blocks of astonishing severity, while the Ferrier also has long, potentially threatening access balconies, and is system-built, meaning that it is made of concrete panels formed in factories and assembled on site.
None have been improved by years of poor maintenance. They leak, they rot and they attract rodents.
Over the past few years, ambitious plans have been developed for their replacement, all of which seek to rectify their obvious ills.
For the Ferrier, for example, architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands have proposed a "modern suburb", where access balconies are abolished and semi-private courtyards are created, rather than the no-man's-land of indeterminate green space of the previous estate, which was prone to be colonised by gangs.
Connections with surrounding neighbourhoods, formerly poor, will be improved, and a more pleasant architectural style adopted. Modern standards of sustainability can be applied.
There will also be a mixture of householders, from tenants of housing associations to owners of their own homes.
This mixture conforms to the current belief that social diversity is good - but it also, very conveniently, offered a way of funding such new developments. The sale of new houses at market rates would help finance the whole project.
Despite their apparent bulk, estates like the Ferrier are surprisingly inefficient in their use of land, meaning that, when rebuilt, they can contain more homes than were there before.
And so partnerships were formed with developers like Berkeley Homes at Ferrier and at Woodberry Down. In the very recent past, such developers seemed all-powerful and able to transform swathes of London at will.
They seemed to know everything there was to know about building homes in large numbers. When these estates were first built, local councils did so with the help of vast loans, which would take decades to pay back. The new idea was to subcontract to the private sector.
But now that the bounty of rising property prices has dried up, developers are looking a little more mortal.
At Woodberry Down the plan to "cross-subsidise" the rebuilding with private house sales evaporated, and £16 million of public money was required to get things moving. This comes from the Homes and Communities Agency, a new body with £5 billion to spend on affordable housing in London over three years.
The HCA is also spending £45 million on the Ferrier Estate and has funded the building of 260 new homes on the Aylesbury Estate, the biggest and trickiest of all.
It was here, hours after he was elected in 1997, that Tony Blair rushed for a photo-opportunity in front of its crumbling blocks, and declared that there "will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build". There are plans to rebuild the entire estate but, again, they were going to need funding from selling homes.
The HCA money means that, at last, the redevelopment of the Aylesbury can begin, but as the plan for the estate is to build 4,200 new homes, the first 260 is only a start.
At the current rate, it will take decades to complete the project and while Southwark insists that changes in the market will not delay it, other experts in the field say that "there is a very serious problem with the lack of development finance" for large projects such as these. In other words, the Aylesbury will remain much as it is now for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, on the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, residents have been moved out of its long grey slabs. The main sign of life is now the flicker of welding torches, as workmen "tin up" the empty flats, covering the windows and doors with steel to keep out squatters.
The blocks are due to be demolished in 2010 but no one knows for sure when new homes will be built in their place, leaving the prospect of a large hole in the centre of Elephant and Castle.
At the Ferrier, they have also emptied many of the blocks, which will now be demolished, leaving land that will be empty for years.
Here Berkeley Homes says it will pay for temporary uses of this land, such as "a tree nursery or landscaped area", to prevent it becoming a dangerous blight. But the thousands of demolished flats will be replaced slowly, leaving a deficit in the number of affordable homes in the area.
The proposed replacement of these big estates is not universally popular with their residents. They complain of "privatisation", of the effects of handing control of council property to private developers, and the fact that space standards have shrunk since the estates were first built, so that new flats will be smaller than old ones.
On the Ferrier Estate residents are vociferously objecting to a large reduction in the amount of subsidised rented housing. Some argue that wholesale demolition, as opposed to refurbishment, was not necessary.
But the current plans for these estates' replacement are now the best - and represent the only hope of changing them.
At least they would do, if the hoped-for cash from home sales had not shrivelled. The Homes and Communities Agency's money will go only so far.
An extra £500 million for housing was announced in the Budget, to be spent across the whole country, but it is not equal to the scale of the problem.
It is, in the end, a hard choice. On one hand, very large sums of public money would have to be found, more than the HCA's impressive-sounding £5 billion for London. This does not seem likely. On the other, these places will remain blighted for years, even decades.
If anyone can think of another way forward, they will earn the eternal gratitude of the estates' residents, and of all Londoners.
Nice places: 21: National History Museum, SW7
Usually this column likes to point out the lesser-known beauties of London. However, sometimes a well-known landmark is so splendid, so ripe with creative energy, yet perhaps also taken for granted, that it demands inclusion. The Natural History Museum is one of these.
Conceived in 1860 and completed in 1881, it grew from the faith in knowledge and progress, and in Victorian Britain's place at the forefront of both, that had motivated the Great Exhibition of 1851, from which the South Kensington museum district grew.
It also celebrates the 19th century's triumphant unravelling of the mysteries of nature, from the discovery of dinosaurs to the theory of evolution.
Inside, it is rational, with a plan ordered to reveal specimens in a logical and scientific way. It has a practical steel structure which, pleasingly, echoes the ribcage of the diplodocus in its central hall.
Outside it is romantic, with multicoloured terracotta tiles stacked into layers like the Dorset cliffs and Sussex quarries where fossils were found. Its style is South German Romanesque, for no obvious reason except that it gave its architect Alfred Waterhouse licence to pile up ornaments and turrets.
The museum is grand, but not pompous. It is flamboyant and arrogant like its first superintendent, Sir Richard Owen, who shamelessly built his fame with the help of the work of others.
It is cathedral-like, without being religiose. As an emblem of the abundance and fascination of nature, it is hard to beat.
Reader views (7)
Sad to say the UK social housing rules and 'points system' produce perverse incentives and outcomes. I live amongst it and see how only the least hardworking get the reward of a 'free central London flat'... /guys out of prison get housed for example, drug dealing etc with their drug dogs - and the council does nothing to enforce broken tenancy agreements. Foreign aquaintences say that this is known abroad so people head here to fit themselves into a 'vulnerable' categorie so that they qualify for long term life on benfits in Uk and work cash on the side! In other EU countries one can only stay on benefits for max 6 months so this problem does not arise. Plus we have the worst drugs problem here. Drug use must be decriminalised as the police do not bother with going after dealing on estates. if drugs were dealt by the state at cost price these (neighbour) scumbags would not be able to deal and would have to go to work!
- Ivegotanasbo, London
"London has, right now, the chance of a remarkable transformation" - yes, but as far as council estates go said "transformation" will only come about if you send back all the imported scum living on them, then actually enforce rules of conduct on those remaining.
- Croyboy, Croydon
I know people who have bought homes on 'mixed tenure' estates and they now bitterly regret it. Many of the social tenants have no interest in keeping the communal areas clean and tidy and cause numerous problems for the private owners. That is why developers for some time have built the homes for social rent in separate blocks from the private housing. The two just do not mix.
- Paul Mc Donald, London UK
i would say that 95 percent of housing estates are probably total dumps, and the reason why, the councils have stuck scum and more scum into flats that have been left by people who had lived there for many years, my mother lives in camden on an estate and when she first moved there it was full of english irish scots welsh and many italian families, all these families respected the estate and kept it clean, they all knew each other , but now all the scum who have moved in and i am including many people from other countrys, just throw there rubbish out the window as they are to lazy to put it in the bin.
- Donna Smith, london england
Helen from Norwich,
I personally know the two Southwark estates in the article and you may be surprised to know that all the amenities you describe are already there and have been from day one. When these estates were initially built they were populated by honest working class folk from the slums of Walworth and many original tenants still live there. The problems started arising in the early 80s, when the tenants started dying or moving out as the area started changing and "new" people including immigrants moved in. The whole tone of both estates diminished very quickly with crime and drugs starting to eat into their very core. This has continued and although the Aylesbury is not as bad as was 10/15 years ago you certainly wouldn't want to live there if you were indigenous to the locality and had a choice.
Both estates offered largish comfortable accommodation to the locals and many people were happy to have these modern homes. Hhowever 35/40 years down the line the original tenants of the Heygate are living in a ghost town as Southwark cannot offer them anywhere decent to move to and the Aylesbury is practically a foreign country and is known locally as Little Lagos!
- Mark, South-East London
How about this for an idea? Build some roads, put houses on either side with front and back gardens,and maybe plant a few trees. Et Voila, no estates just nice pleasant places to live where no one is afraid to venture and there are no dark alleys to hide in. Now, that really would be progress.
- Mikkiduk, Hackney, London
I can think of a way forward: The residents of these estates should find employment rebuilding them. This would give them jobs, something worthwhile to do, lasting skills, some community cohesion (working with your neighbours builds tolerance and cooperation) and a real say in what happens (for instance, room would be made for pets, a club house for youngsters and teenagers, perhaps communal washing areas like some places in America, prhaps small allotments). Such work schemes must not deprive these residents of their social benefits, otherwise they would be even poorer and more dispirited than before.
- Helen, norwich
