the london journal, vol. 33, No.

2, July 2008, 155–185

Building the Divided City: Race, Class

and Social Housing in Southwark,
1945–1995
HAROLD CARTER
St John’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Southwark is a borough across the river from the City of London. Until
late in the twentieth century, its Labour leaders used housing policy to
prevent gentrification from flowing across its northern boundary. Nonethe-
less, at the turn of the century, Labour lost political control. Ethnicity
became the dominant force in Southwark local politics; the wards that first
turned against Labour were those dominated by the White working-class.
This was by no means inevitable; rather, it was an unintended, and cruelly
ironic, consequence of 50 years of social intervention designed to build
social solidarity. Collective political action creates high levels of uncertainty
about who will benefit; communities depend on trust to resolve this
dilemma. But the narrow community that is capable of creating strong
social capital will often be unwilling to share the benefits it creates. The
restricted nature of the original housing programme (which favoured
relatively ‘respectable’ families) was concealed by an ideology that rendered
others invisible. When this consensus broke down, as slum-clearance
families started to be allocated most of the new housing, prosperous
working-class families started to move out of the borough. The new basis
for access was the idea of ‘rights’. But formal rights were hard to specify;
claims based on long-residence (for example) could seem just to established
families, but racist to newcomers. This lack of consensus provoked extensive
attempts to circumvent the system. In addition, needs-based housing
allocation of new rentals acted as a lens, focusing the worst-off families in
areas with high rates of tenant turnover. Thus, different parts of the borough
came to have sharply divergent interests. Competition for housing from
immigrants with a different ethnic group acted as a highly salient marker of
these conflicting interests, but did not cause them. Had different housing
policies been adopted earlier, it is unlikely that the conflicts would have led
to the emergence of ethnic politics in the 1990s.

© The London Journal Trust 2008 DOI 10.1179/174963208X307343

156 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

Introduction: the emergence of ethnic politics in an inner-London

borough
There is a long-established relationship between social class, housing tenure and
voting in England.1 The current inner London Borough of Southwark (made up of
three former Labour heartlands — the Metropolitan Boroughs of Southwark,
Camberwell and Bermondsey) remained unusually working-class until the end of the
twentieth century, and had one of the most extensive social housing programmes
in England; in terms of past voting patterns, it should have remained a Labour strong-
hold. Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, the Labour party had lost control of
many of the local authority wards that had made up its historic base; at the start of
the twenty-first century, it was overtaken on the Council by the Liberal Democrats.
The extensive gentrification of some Inner London boroughs in the final quarter of
the century has made many of them more middle-class, and thus it would not have
been surprising if the story in Southwark had been one of a middle-class influx.2
But this was not what happened. Labour started losing Southwark long before any
middle-class influx occurred, and even when gentrification did happen, mostly in the
late 1990s, the social composition of most wards in Southwark was not affected by
it. In fact, the wards that Labour lost to the Liberal Democrats were more working-
class than those it continued to hold; more likely to be made up of council-house
dwellers, and likely to contain more unskilled manual workers. By 1998, on average,
in wards entirely won by Liberal Democrat councillors, the total proportion of
households in social housing was 71 per cent; the figure for wards with all-Labour
councillors, by contrast, was only 58 per cent. 28 per cent of male residents in
Labour-controlled wards (and 26 per cent of female residents) were semi-skilled and
unskilled manual workers, while the figures for Liberal wards were 32 per cent and
28 per cent. Even in terms of national government’s ‘Index of Multiple Deprivation’,
Labour-voting wards were only very marginally worse off than Liberal-voting
wards.
Instead, Southwark seemed to be entering a new era — one of ethnically-polarised
political behaviour, especially amongst non middle-class residents. Figure 1 shows, on
its vertical axis, the political party which won each of the borough’s wards in 1998;
and on its horizontal axis, the proportion of that ward’s population made up of
(non-African) self-described Black residents in the 1991 census. All the wards that
elected Liberal Democrats had low proportions of non-African Black inhabitants, and
all the wards that elected Labour councillors had high proportions. The difference
was so sharp that there was virtually no overlap.3 Furthermore, the effect was
specifically linked to wards with non-African Black families (not the few wards
with Asian families, or the many with Africans) — so that the apparent picture was
tied to the presence (or absence) of one specific group, not of ethnic minorities in
general.4
This paper will show how this change came about. The emergence of ethnic divides
in Southwark politics was the product of specific historical circumstances; in particu-
lar, the interaction of the slum-clearance programme in the borough with changing
housing allocation policies which stressed need, rather than long-residence as the
basis for the allocation of housing. These conflicts had already led, by the late 1960s
(before substantial overseas immigration had occurred), to a collapse in local support
 HAROLD CARTER 157

figure 1. Proportion of self-described non-African Black population in 1991 census, for

Southwark wards electing different combinations of councillors in 1998. The 1991 Census of
Population: Ward Profiles (Southwark 1993); 1998 election results from Southwark Council;
Neighbourhood Statistics Dataset, Indices of Deprivation 2000

for the values of the social housing programme; at the same time, the first wave of
demolition and rebuilding had preserved the old character of the riverside areas as
almost exclusively white, working-class, neighbourhoods.5 Popular support for the
council’s housing policies was jeopardised because there were too few affordable
houses and too few good schools to allow everyone to get access to them, and by the
late 1960s there were no longer largely-unchallenged and locally hegemonic ideas of
‘fairness’ which could justify excluding newcomers, and could favour established
long-established residents. The objective conflict (for established local families in the
1960s and 1970s) started not with overseas immigrants (who were still excluded from
council housing by racist allocation policies), but with White families displaced by
the slum-clearance programme; increasingly, families ignored the spirit (and even the
letter) of existing allocation rules, and jostled to get access to housing any way they
could.
The arrival of substantial numbers of overseas immigrants, excluded from council
housing, led initially to a concentration of ethnic minorities in privately-owned
housing (often then scheduled for demolition) in the centre of the borough. As access
to council housing was opened up, minority families came to be housed primarily in
the second-wave council housing that was then becoming available — also, in the
158 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

centre. Because this was made up of (increasingly unpopular) system-built housing, it

had high rates of tenant turnover. As allocation policies shifted more and more
in favour of those in ‘housing need’ (rather than favouring the long-established, or
the ‘respectable’, as had once been the case), policy acted as a lens concentrating
progressively more deprived families in these same estates. Combined with physical
and social design failures (discussed below), this made such places unpopular and
dangerous.6 This made it hard to create solidarity between residents in those
areas and residents in the ‘better’ estates elsewhere. It also made the (mostly White)
residents in the first-wave council housing in the riverside areas increasingly desperate
to get homes near to them for their children, rather than seeing them located
elsewhere in the borough. This meant that struggles over access to and control of
housing became a central factor in local politics (a process made worse by rising
prices for new houses in the riverside fringe, once these started to be built — but not
caused by these processes of gentrification, since the vast majority of housing
remained socially-owned). These conflicts of interest between neighbourhoods, and
the accidental geographical concentration of ethnic groups produced by the phasing
of council-house construction and the arrival dates of overseas immigrants from the
Caribbean, provided the basis for the de-alignment of the White working class from
the Labour Party.7
This explanation of the rise of ethnicity in Southwark politics is markedly different
from some of the concerns about ethnic divisions in English cities which started to be
articulated at the start of the new century (discussed below), because it stresses the
historically contingent, almost accidental, basis of the divisions; if other policies had
been followed with regard to the phasing and location of slum clearance in the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s, it is very unlikely that Southwark’s politics would have fragmented
on ethnic grounds by the end of the century — though many conflicts of interest
would have remained, and would probably have undermined Labour’s rule in other
ways.8
This paper first summarises some of the concerns that have been raised with regard
to ethnic separation in other English cities, then sets out to show how events in
Southwark led to the emergence of ethnic politics, and concludes with some general
observations about the nature of — and problems intrinsic to — large-scale social
intervention.

Ethnic segregation and politics in other English cities

At the same time as Labour appeared to ‘lose’ the White working-class in Southwark,
concern about ethnic divisions in other English cities started to mount. The Cantle
Report into the 2001 riots in northern towns said:
The team was particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities . . .
many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives do
not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful
interchanges.9

Researchers (including Michael Young, author of Family and Kinship in East

London) raised similar concerns about rivalry between the traditional white
working-class and Bangladeshi families in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets:
 HAROLD CARTER 159

Racial hostility and community divisions are partly related to questions about fairness in
the allocation of scarce resources within the welfare state . . . [w]hat they were against
was . . . that giving priority to the housing needs of . . . homeless squatters . . . entailed
a demotion of alternative claims based on membership of — and service to — the
community.10

An earlier study, by Jacobs, illustrated a different conflict — also in Spitalfields,

Tower Hamlets — between Bangladeshis and gentrifiers.11 Although this did not
revolve around publicly-owned assets, it was an ethnically-based political struggle
focused on the same core issue — how control of housing can be resolved, in a place
where there are sharply conflicting interests and where there is no over-arching
consensus.
These questions entered the mainstream political debate — on the left as well as
the right of British politics.12 Concern focused not only on ethnic-minority ‘extremist’
political groups, but also on the rise of far-Right politicians in areas such as
Calderdale in West Yorkshire and Barking and Dagenham in outer East London.
It is clear that in several places in England at the end of the twentieth century, there
were segregated communities of ethnic minorities. Phillips reported that there is
‘a clear racialisation of space in Bradford . . . evident in both the persistence of
ethnic clustering within deprived inner areas . . . and in the local people’s reading of
the socio-cultural landscape of the city’ — while in some streets 80 per cent of house-
holds were British Muslims. 13 Similar patterns existed elsewhere. But these places
were highly atypical of England, and did not in any case come close to American-style
ghettos. Many minority families lived outside the areas of minority concentration,
and there were very few places of any size where a single ethnic group (apart from
Whites) made up over 50 per cent of the local population.14
All data about segregation need to be treated with caution. Simpson has argued
that the main indices used to measure segregation may mislead, because static
measures of concentration may conceal a highly fluid population, and because small
changes in areas measured can produce spurious changes in the value of indices.15
What counts as polarisation depends on the area that is being considered; at a
national level, Britain has become more polarised in income and class terms (as
London and the south have become relatively more affluent), and this is clearly
affecting voting behaviour,16 while a different form of polarisation affects ethnic
minorities, which are concentrated in a few cities, and are still virtually absent in
many others. In contrast, going down in scale of area, the spread of gentrification has
made many London boroughs more similar to each other in terms of incomes, and
immigration has made them more ethnically mixed.17 Going down in scale again,
smaller areas within those boroughs may have diverged sharply from each other in
terms of their prosperity, social class mix, and ethnic balance. Finally, schools (even
smaller communities) tend to be significantly more segregated than the neighbour-
hoods that they serve.18 Even places which have an apparently vibrant social mix
— such as Brixton — may have inhabitants living next to one another whose
‘tectonic’ lives seldom interact.19 Thus, it is not clear what it would mean to say that
England, or London, or even Southwark, had become more or less segregated.
Whatever measure of segregation is used, however, the ethnic dimension of
Southwark politics in 1998 is hard to explain. Ethnic politics — where it existed at
160 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

all in England — was more often of importance in areas where there were Muslim
populations. In contrast, Afro-Caribbeans were by 1998 the most integrated ‘new’
ethnic minority group in British society — with higher rates of inter-ethnic family
formation, and substantial migration away from original areas of settlement and into
mixed-ethnicity suburbs.20 So why did political fault lines develop in Southwark in
the way that they did? Understanding this is important not just for analysing London
politics, but because of the contribution it may make to the wider debate about
ethnic politics and segregation in England.
As will be seen, this article offers an historically-based explanation. During the last
quarter of the century, many claims for access to council housing in Southwark came
from members of minority ethnic groups. The White families which had been
re-housed in the north of the borough would have resisted any immigrants who
could have reduced the chances of their children of getting homes. Competition from
members of ethnic minorities provided (in the context of a strongly racist local
culture) a basis for competition between ethnic groups, rather than simply between
individual families; this provided a stimulus for local political de-alignment amongst
the White working-class.

The history of collective provision in Southwark

In 1945, such a fragmentation of interests was inconceivable. Both leaders and resi-
dents assumed that it made sense to speak of a unified ‘working class’ interest in
Southwark. In 1951, Bermondsey and Southwark had a much higher proportion of
unskilled workers than London as a whole, and virtually no white-collar workers
(Table 1).
Social theorists and empirical studies have emphasised the extent to which social
homogeneity, and frequent contact, help to facilitate the emergence of collective
action. They do so by allowing trust-based delegation of decisions to community
leaders (instead of needing hard-to-specify rules with high transaction costs), by
creating reputational costs for ‘defection’, and by facilitating constant low-cost
monitoring of behaviour by a multitude of highly-motivated and well-informed local
residents with a stake in the outcome.21 The Southwark boroughs (like much of
the rest of working-class London) exemplified such social situations. Goss has
painted a picture of a hierarchical party structure, rooted in ‘a fiercely self-protective
community’.22 It was assumed, at least by those in power, that the needs of that
community were clear, and that obvious standards of fairness should determine
the allocation of scarce resources. At first, this seemed simple. Bermondsey Council
stated:
In 1945 . . . applications from persons rendered homeless by enemy action during the war
were given the first priority. Subsequently the waiting list was extended to include young
married couples who were unable to set up a separate home for themselves, applications
supported by medical evidence . . . and families living in overcrowded conditions . . . the
first condition which must be met before a housing application can be considered is the
establishment of a residential qualification in this Borough on 1st September 1939 . . . a
refusal of accommodation frequently results in an applicant being placed at the bottom
of the Waiting List.23
 HAROLD CARTER 161

TABLE 1.
SOCIAL CLASS COMPOSITION OF LONDON BOROUGHS, 1951

Manual occupations Professional, etc., occupations Intermediate occupations

Shoreditch 94% 0% 5%
old Southwark 93% 1% 6%
Bethnal Green 93% 1% 6%
Poplar 93% 1% 7%
Stepney 92% 1% 8%
Bermondsey 91% 1% 8%
Finsbury 91% 1% 8%
Islington 90% 1% 9%
Deptford 88% 1% 11%
Hammersmith 88% 2% 10%
Hackney 87% 1% 11%
Battersea 87% 2% 11%
Camberwell 86% 2% 11%
Lambeth 86% 2% 11%
St Pancreas 86% 3% 11%
Greenwich 85% 3% 12%
Fulham 85% 3% 12%
Stoke Newington 84% 3% 14%
Woolwich 83% 4% 13%
London County (all) 83% 4% 13%
Lewisham 81% 4% 16%
Wandsworth 78% 5% 17%
Paddington 78% 6% 16%
Holborn 76% 8% 17%
Westminster 72% 10% 17%
Chelsea 67% 14% 19%
Kensington 67% 13% 20%
St Marylebone 63% 12% 25%
Hampstead 62% 12% 26%

Source: 1951 Census, Table 27, calculations.

Local values also demanded that certain types of behaviour should be discouraged.24
Michael Caine (who grew up near the Elephant and Castle) remarked:
The streets were as rough and dangerous as it was possible to get without anybody
actually declaring war.25

The councils were determined to have respectable tenants. Bermondsey had such an
extensive list of rules that the council’s official pamphlet commented:
162 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

After reading the conditions of tenancy, a tenant may wonder what there is left to do
with the premises occupied by him, other than to sleep and eat in them26

The leaders’ idea of socialism was rooted in solidarity and a broad faith in planning,
sprinkled with practical compassion, but underpinned a strong distinction between
treatment that should be accorded to the deserving and to the rest.27 Camberwell
stressed the need to rent its (few) council homes to tenants who ‘could be expected
to look after their property in a proper manner and meet their weekly commitments
regularly’, while Southwark seems to have promoted good tenants to better estates,
and transferred problem tenants to bad ones.28 Southwark housing visitors’ forms
had boxes to tick in which they were invited to grade the ‘quality’ of the family
to be re-housed, the tidiness of its house, and the condition of its furniture.29 The
ideology mixed a faith in modernity and science; a belief in practical improvement;
and a narrow focus on provision for working people. It was underscored by hostility
to the feckless, but also to outsiders. Above all it embodied a strong faith in
education. The objective was:
to lift up manual workers from their preoccupation with everyday conditions and endow
them with a sense of purpose…this task could be accomplished through education:
exposure to the ‘facts’ would enlighten even the most ignorant . . .30

This was a world of lost certainties. It owed little to Marx, and not much to the
Fabians. There was an elision between the public interest and the interests of the
party; employees of Bermondsey were compelled to live in the borough; nominations
to council housing were handled personally by councillors; and the Labour Chief
Whip was consulted about suitable candidates when the borough council staff
needed to take on casual labour.31 Small-scale and detailed control was a key feature
of life. But since it was strongly believed that everyone was in the same boat, and that
problems (and solutions) were obvious, the implicit conflicts of interests seldom
became explicit.
Trust in local leaders depended on contact between residents and activists — a
plethora of activities including monthly speaker meetings, social events, door-to-door
magazine sales, stage plays, weekly meetings of the Women’s section, dances,
and even (Party-organised) ‘first class’ shows — with free chocolate ice creams, and
comics — for local children. In 1952–3, Bermondsey Labour Party had around 3,800
members, out of only 19,000 or so households.32 Membership figures in 1952 for
Camberwell were comparable to those for Bermondsey. Even (old) Southwark’s 1,481
— though lower in proportion to population — was not negligible.33
Collective action was central to the appeal of Labour politics.34 The need to
provide council housing, in particular, stemmed from a set of problems which could
only realistically be solved by collective means. The scale of reconstruction required
can be visualised by comparing the area of bomb-damaged land with the size of
the whole of the City of London (London’s financial quarter). Southwark and
Bermondsey both had bomb-damaged land equivalent to 25 per cent of the surface
area of the City, while Camberwell had bombed land equivalent to 75 per cent of the
size of the City.35 In addition, there was widespread agreement about the need for
slum clearance. There were many once-attractive large Georgian houses — but most
were, in 1945, fetid slums.36
 HAROLD CARTER 163

Council housing would only become available slowly; it was thus essential that its
allocation should be seen as ‘fair’. However, the idea of fairness could not be clearly
specified because there were competing claims, all from people in different sorts of
‘need’. Sorting out these competing claims depended on trusting local leaders and
officials to use their discretion, within a framework of shared values. These shared
values started to break down in the 1950s and 1960s, due to four inter-related
causes.
The first was that construction was slower than the councils had hoped, and
depended on national economic events. Waiting lists hovered seven or eight times
above the annual level of public-sector building, and ballooned each time restrictions
on entry to the lists were relaxed. It was hard to expect families to queue patiently,
and to see housing go to those believed by councillors to be most deserving,
when they themselves were in great need. Pressure to get personal advantage in an
increasingly complex allocation system became intense.
The second cause of break-down was the emergence of conflicts of interest between
different sections of the ‘working class’. One source of conflict was rent levels, and
rent rebates — in effect, should richer tenants be expected to cross-subsidise poorer
ones? Established council tenants were often relatively well-off (because renting coun-
cil housing in the 1930s and 1950s had been expensive) — but rents on established
council houses were often lower than those on newly-built ones, because of inflation,
and because much of their cost had already been paid off. Poor people displaced
by slum clearance were offered expensive homes. The consequent demand for cross-
subsidy tested class solidarity — and often found it wanting. For example, in 1956,
Camberwell was about to start on its own major building programme, and needed to
raise rents on established houses (with rent rebates for the poor);37 this led to a major
rebellion in the Labour Group.38 Similar events after 1965 led to fierce protests in
Bermondsey and Southwark.39
The third cause of breakdown was the growing pressure to demolish homes, in
the hope of obtaining sites for development once bomb-damaged land started to
run out.40 Although demolition was widely supported in principle, the practical
experience of living in areas scheduled for demolition, with boarded-up houses and
years of planning blight, reduced local enthusiasm.41 As the rate of slum clearance
increased, conflicts of interest also started to emerge between those displaced by
demolition and those who had been waiting patiently on the ordinary waiting lists.
The fourth cause of breakdown also related to pressures created by demolition.
The councils’ demolition programmes started slowly (between 1951 and 1961,
the population only fell by 14 per cent in Bermondsey and 11 per cent in (old) South-
wark). But earlier demolition by the Luftwaffe along with migration out from Inner
London meant that the total population in 1961 was only half of its level in the
pre-war era (when local political habits had been formed) in those two boroughs, and
around 60 per cent of the pre-war level in ‘new’ Southwark as a whole. As planned
demolition got under way in the 1960s, this trend gathered pace once more
(Figure 2).42
As Goss has pointed out, demolitions disrupted the communal life in which
Labour’s support had been rooted. Some contemporary observers saw this clearly. A
Party branch reported:
164 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

figure 2. Census: Estimated Population of the three boroughs, 1921–1991. Census data,
1921–1991, author’s estimates.

We lost a very large membership when the Borough Council decided to clear Cranham
Road and Parfitt Road where we had about a 90 per cent membership. . . . we have had
a couple of new blocks of flats opened which have been canvassed although the initial
result has been disappointing . . . this is possibly due to the fact that in these flats which
were built by the L.C.C. there is a large number of people new to Bermondsey and do
not yet feel that they belong43
 HAROLD CARTER 165

The social activity of the party remained in much better health. The Loan Club paid
out ten times more in 1961 than it had seven years earlier; there were outings for the
elderly, and for children. But the party was failing to involve new members. Although
membership of the local party in Bermondsey was still high, only 100 were said to be
active in any way.44 Numbers and subscriptions gradually declined. There was little
interest in policy, and Party branches complained that few people came to meetings.45
The women’s section described its sessions as ‘small’. The Young Socialists
complained:
During the year this section of the Party has hardly functioned. The large number we
recruited in the previous year got out of hand, most of them had no interest in the party
at all . . . since 1948 twenty three couples that have met in the Young Section got married
and faded away, that is most of them.46

Established leaders aged and were not replaced; over half the councillors of 1953 were
still in office in 1961 (by comparison, of those elected in 1948, only 5 councillors had
remained in office in 1953).47 The party was like a car running on empty, with only
inertia to keep it going.48
Disengagement with local social-democratic politics — well under way by the
mid-1960s — did not come about in Southwark because of gentrification, or because
of an endogenous change in the class structure of the local population. The decline
in local Labour activism predated any significant change in Southwark’s class
composition. It remained solidly working-class as late as 1971 (Tables 2 and 3). Gen-
trification came very late to Southwark (though Dulwich in the south of the borough
had long been a middle-class stronghold). There was a sharp increase in the local
proportion of professionals and managers from 1981 to 1991, but it was from a very
low base.49 The late 1990s saw attempts (discussed later in this paper) to gentrify the
riverside, and even Bermondsey, but the tide did not reach far inland.
Southwark was able to remain working-class mainly because of its social housing
programme. By 1981, the council owned nearly 80 per cent of the dwellings in
old-Southwark, 90 per cent of dwellings in Bermondsey, and half of the dwellings in
Camberwell (Table 4). Refusal of a council home thus meant a resident might have
to leave the borough, and local families remained desperate to get access to local
homes for themselves and their children. But there were no longer any shared rules,
supported by a significant proportion of the population, about how this power to
allocate housing was to be used.
Two elements, both key to the ideology of local leaders, were now locked in
conflict. The first was their desire to favour the ‘respectable’, people like themselves,
who formed the bedrock of many Labour Party branches. The second was their
faith in, and enthusiasm for, large-scale planning and the pursuit of modernity as a
solution to the problems of social injustice; the frenetic pace of demolitions in the
1960s and 70s created a vast pool of people who had to be re-housed. There was
no easy way to balance their claims against those of traditional beneficiaries of the
system.
These tensions were amplified by the personal and political ambitions of those
leading the programme, especially after existing checks and balances were swept
away by the merger of the three old boroughs in 1965, leaving a free-fire zone for
personal ambition. Later, former Housing Chairman Charles Sawyer remarked:
166 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

TABLE 2.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC COMPOSITION OF SOUTHWARK (MALES), 1971
Economically active males, by socio-economic group, 1971

1971 Southwark Ward, Professional Employers Other Skilled Service Unskilled Other
and former borough to workers and non-manual workers employment, workers self-
which it has been managers semi-skilled, employed
assigned agriculture
Abbey % 3% 6% 15% 38% 14% 17% 5%
Bricklayers % 1% 6% 17% 31% 18% 20% 6%
Dockyard % 1% 4% 18% 32% 16% 21% 6%
Riverside % 0% 4% 18% 31% 16% 21% 4%
Rotherhithe % 1% 7% 14% 38% 17% 15% 6%
OLD BERMONDSEY 1% 6% 16% 34% 16% 19% 5%
% (est)
Friary % 0% 4% 17% 35% 20% 14% 6%
Alleyn % 1% 8% 21% 38% 15% 7% 6%
Bellenden % 2% 10% 23% 31% 14% 11% 7%
Brunswick % 1% 7% 22% 35% 16% 14% 3%
Burgess % 1% 4% 16% 36% 22% 14% 4%
College % 15% 23% 27% 20% 7% 4% 3%
Consort % 1% 6% 18% 33% 15% 19% 5%
Lyndhurst % 4% 9% 23% 36% 15% 7% 4%
Ruskin % 13% 18% 28% 21% 11% 4% 3%
Rye % 3% 15% 29% 30% 12% 6% 4%
St Giles % 2% 9% 14% 35% 18% 15% 4%
The Lane % 2% 7% 13% 42% 18% 12% 5%
Waverley % 1% 9% 19% 34% 19% 8% 5%
OLD CAMBERWELL 3% 9% 20% 33% 16% 11% 4%
% (est)
Browning % 0% 6% 18% 32% 22% 14% 6%
Cathedral % 2% 5% 19% 32% 15% 16% 7%
Chaucer % 1% 6% 18% 33% 18% 14% 6%
Faraday % 0% 6% 18% 39% 17% 14% 4%
Newington % 2% 6% 19% 36% 15% 12% 5%
OLD SOUTHWARK 1% 6% 18% 35% 17% 14% 5%
% (est)
TOTAL NEW 2% 8% 19% 34% 16% 13% 5%
SOUTHWARK %
TOTAL OF ALL OTHER 6% 14% 24% 27% 13% 7% 5%
GLC BOROUGHS %*

Source: C.R. Morrey, 1971 Census: Demographic, Social and Economic Indices for Wards in Greater London (1976), Vol
2 pp 45-46 and Vol 1 (multiple pages).

*Calculated weighted figure from borough proportions multiplied by number of economically active males.

Column showing employment in armed forces & others not shown (New Southwark = 3%, other boroughs = 3%).
 HAROLD CARTER 167

TABLE 3.
LONDON BOROUGHS, SORTED BY PROPORTION IN HIGHEST SOCIAL CLASSES, 1971
Economically active males, by socio-economic group, 1971

Economically Male professionals, Other Skilled Semi-skilled Other

active males employers non-manual manual males and unskilled economically
and managers males males active males
Tower Hamlets 53,413 7% 13% 33% 38% 10%
Newham 74,286 8% 18% 33% 34% 8%
Barking 49,943 9% 18% 38% 29% 6%
Hackney 66,142 10% 17% 35% 28% 11%
Southwark 80,523 10% 19% 34% 29% 8%
Islington 63,404 12% 21% 28% 29% 11%
Lambeth 94,190 14% 25% 26% 26% 10%
Waltham Forest 72,459 14% 22% 35% 21% 9%
Hammersmith 59,275 14% 24% 27% 25% 10%
Lewisham 80,035 14% 24% 31% 22% 9%
Greenwich 66,368 15% 23% 29% 23% 9%
Harringey 72,584 16% 22% 30% 23% 10%
Wandsworth 92,109 16% 26% 29% 21% 9%
Hounslow 66,441 18% 23% 31% 21% 7%
Ealing 96,003 18% 23% 31% 22% 7%
Brent 88,388 18% 21% 29% 23% 10%
Havering 77,544 19% 24% 32% 17% 7%
Bexley 67,005 20% 27% 30% 17% 6%
Hillingdon 75,143 21% 24% 30% 16% 10%
Enfield 82,992 22% 22% 30% 18% 8%
Merton 54,587 22% 26% 28% 16% 7%
Redbridge 74,150 24% 27% 26% 15% 8%
Camden 64,293 24% 26% 19% 20% 11%
Croydon 99,935 27% 26% 25% 15% 7%
Sutton 50,641 28% 25% 26% 13% 8%
Kingston upon 43,728 30% 26% 24% 14% 7%
Thames
Westminster 78,757 30% 23% 13% 19% 16%
City of London 1,749 30% 37% 4% 13% 16%
Harrow 62,241 30% 26% 23% 12% 9%
Richmond upon 54,132 30% 27% 22% 14% 8%
Thames
Bromley 91,990 31% 29% 21% 12% 7%
Kensington & 58,491 33% 27% 11% 16% 12%
Chelsea
Barnet 92,505 34% 23% 20% 13% 10%

Source: C.R. Morrey, 1971 Census: Demographic, Social and Economic Indices for Wards in Greater London (1976),
Vol 2 p 204 and Vol 1 (multiple pages).
168 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

TABLE 4.
THE EVOLUTION OF TENURE, 1961–1991

1961 1971 1981 1991

Bermondsey
Renting from local authority 49% 77% 87% 56%
Housing association rented 5% 10%
Private rented and ‘other’ 49% 19% 4% 11%
Owner occupation 2% 1% 2% 23%
Camberwell
Renting from local authority 26% 40% 54% 44%
Housing association rented 6% 9%
Private rented and ‘other’ 56% 37% 15% 12%
Owner occupation 18% 20% 25% 34%
Old Southwark
Renting from local authority 33% 54% 77% 64%
Housing association rented 9% 12%
Private rented and ‘other’ 66% 42% 11% 11%
Owner occupation 1% 1% 3% 13%

‘New Southwark’
Renting from local authority 32% 51% 65% 51%
Housing association rented 7% 10%
Private rented and ‘other’ 55% 37% 12% 11%
Owner occupation 13% 13% 16% 27%

These figures are estimates. Source: Census 1961 Table 20, p. 225, Table 15, p. 127; Census 1971 Ward Data (Tables
pp. 45–6 multiplied by Table 03; approximately re-aggregated to old boroughs; ‘New Southwark’ proportions from
p. 196ff; adjusted for failure to report ‘other’ tenure); Census 1981, GLC Statistical Series No 30: Ward and Borough
Indices for Central London, Table 24 (Housing Association figures from 1991 Census); Census 1991, Southwark Council
— Information from the 1991 Census of Population.

I regret the whole thing. I think the whole scale of what we did was mad. There was a
feeling at the time that any development of less than 1,000 dwellings wasn’t worth both-
ering about.50

Officials vied with one another by promoting ever-larger schemes. The redevelopment
of the Elephant and Castle area created two miles of underground pedestrian tunnels
(later to become havens for violent crime).51 The building manager of the new author-
ity was appointed because of his declared commitment to the use of the council’s own
direct-labour force to build major housing schemes. He did so in constructing the
North Peckham Estate, to see costs soar out of control and the project fall far behind
schedule. But the extensive use of direct labour suited so many interest groups at once
that the scheme was able to go ahead.52 System-building was encouraged by the sub-
sidy regime — and once it was accepted as the goal, demolition was often necessary
to assemble large-enough sites.53
There was also widespread popular support for the ideology of demolition.
Clearance fitted readily into a prevailing faith in modernity, reason, science and
 HAROLD CARTER 169

planning — widely shared across both main political parties, but especially strong
within Labour, where it was often contrasted with the chaos of markets.54 There was
general agreement that ‘London’s slate had to be wiped clean.’55 In so far as housing
policy generated criticism, it generally did so because clearance was not taking place
quickly enough.56 The interior of the new dwellings carried their own message
of modernity. Flats often included a communal laundry ‘equipped with automatic
washing machines and gas-heated drying cabinets’ and living rooms ‘wired for radio
rediffusion services by British Relay Wireless Ltd.’57 Conditions in the new homes
were self-evidently cleaner, more attractive and more modern than those they
replaced.58 The pictures in the council’s plans — such as that shown in Figure 3 (of
a project which replaced a graceful but decayed Georgian square) — resembled Space
Fleet headquarters in Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future (a popular comic strip); they
embodied the same optimistic futurism, and the same aesthetic.
Plans grew increasingly ambitious. In the 1965 development plan, there were about
a dozen development areas of more than 15 acres, with the largest being just under
60 acres, while overall, the council advanced a programme for the demolition of
a further 500 acres. At the same time, the Greater London Council proposed to
demolish 250 acres in the borough on its own behalf — one-and-a-half times more
than the area that the Luftwaffe had already flattened.59 The council then moved to
a policy of ‘prior demolition’ — which meant, knocking houses down before it knew
what it was going to do with the site.60 Areas were frequently designated for demoli-
tion eight years or more before anything happened — houses were either boarded up,
or occupied by squatters.61 The new council almost met its target of building 12,000

figure 3. Proposed redevelopment of Nelson Square, 1947. LSL301.543 No 54

170 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

homes over the ten years after 1965 — double the rate of construction achieved by
the three boroughs since the end of the war.62 While over 60 per cent of dwellings in
the new-Southwark area in 1961 were houses, by 1991 over 60 per cent of dwellings
were purpose-built flats.63
But these new buildings came at a cost — both to the environment of the borough,
and to those residents who were not in clearance areas. By 1976, the great majority
of new council houses went to people whose homes were being demolished. Only a
quarter of housing allocations went to those who had been waiting on the general list
(25 per cent of all house moves within Southwark in 1976 were due to demolition or
renovation, as against 2 per cent, nationally, while 50 per cent of tenants living in
their first council home in 1976 were there only because their previous home had been
demolished).64
For many people on the general waiting list, the response was despair — 45 per
cent of those who remained on the waiting list said they had ‘no idea’ when they
would be re-housed, and 15 per cent expressed the opinion they would ‘never’ be.65
The size of the programme created bottlenecks, irrational allocation decisions, and
an impression of incompetence. As early as 1971, the council was conducting 17,200
interviews a year with prospective tenants — often, families faced multiple inter-
views.66 The rules for allocating housing became increasingly complex. The 1985
housing chairman said:
It is so complicated that only two people in the whole council understand it. . . . Our
tenants don’t understand it . . . People MUST be able to understand it.67

Despite the large scale of the building programme, waiting lists got no shorter.68 By
1986, the general waiting list for housing had increased to 12,000 people, and 11,000
more were hoping for a transfer.69 A cartoon from a local housing newsletter
captured the popular mood (Figure 4):
As well as altering the life chances of individuals, housing allocation policies
changed the nature of local communities. By the late 1960s, the policy of placing
‘good’ families and established tenants in the best estates had created a pool of
more-attractive housing with low tenant turnover, while families re-housed after
that date had to make do with what they were offered.70 The characters of good and
bad estates became self-reinforcing. By 1981, the council adopted an overt policy of
transferring ‘problem families’ to less attractive estates.71 In many neighbourhoods,
environmental conditions, anti-social behaviour, vandalism (and the specific fear that
their own children might become vandals if they stayed) made families keen to move
away.72
These pressures created a stampede for the lifeboats. As affluence increased, many
middle-income families (even amongst the manual working class) sought to buy their
own homes. But the policies of the council, which sought to acquire and demolish
most of the privately-owned housing stock in the north of the borough, and in the
longer-term also aimed to demolish the affordable but decrepit houses in the centre,
made this hard to achieve, because no houses were available. Thus, better-off families
from working-class backgrounds often moved away to the suburbs — ‘flight’ by
families in the face of a council that was unable to respond to their needs, but not
‘White Flight’ of the kind seen in American cities, and not provoked by the arrival of
immigrants from overseas.
 HAROLD CARTER 171

figure 4. Charlie. LSL301.54 Southwark Council for Voluntary Service, Housing Advice
Resource Unit newsletter, 1984

The issues were summed up by The Reverend John Martin, Vicar of St Anne’s,
and the Reverend Mervyn Wilson, Rector of Bermondsey, in 1973:
(We) are being constantly impoverished by the departure of members and leaders . . . a
large majority of young people are leaving Bermondsey, and . . . they are the ones with
the higher earning power . . . There has also been a largish arrival of so-called ‘problem’
families, non-rent payers, disturbers of the peace, unmarried mothers. These tend to be
concentrated in the oldest and cheapest estates73

Faced with an opaque, apparently unfair and clearly inflexible allocation system,
individuals took action to make it more responsive. The illegal ‘buying’ of rent books
covertly reintroduced market mechanisms.74 Others secured access to housing by
meeting legal criteria of priority need. The Homelessness Act of 1977 gave priority to
unintentionally homeless households, and by 1983, statutory homelessness — which
included ‘eviction’ from the family home — was the second largest overall means of
obtaining a dwelling in Southwark.75 Personal need had to be matched to official
categories of ‘need.’ A poignant example came in 1991 when Hanna Baiden, a 36-
year-old mother living in extremely crowded conditions, refused to take the advice of
housing staff and claim that she needed to be re-housed because of racial harassment.
She said:
172 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

I told staff straight away that I would not say I was the victim of racial harassment. Black
or white, we all get on very well together here and there is no need for me to do that.76

However, she could not, therefore, be re-housed. Allocation was becoming a

bridge-game, in which categories of need had to be used as trumps.
It was into this failing and fractured community that immigrants from overseas
started to arrive in greater numbers. Immigrants had a political salience much
greater than their numbers warranted. Local Labour Parties in Southwark (and
elsewhere in London) contained some uncompromisingly racist members, and even
Members of Parliament and council officers talked of immigrants as potential vectors
for disease and disorder, or as competitors for scarce resources.77 Nonetheless, in
1951, 97 per cent of the population of each of the three Southwark boroughs had been
born in the British Isles, and many had been born locally.78 In 1961, it was still the
case that 97 per cent of Bermondsey residents, 96 per cent of Southwark residents,
and 94 per cent of Camberwell residents had been born in the British Isles. The
impact of new arrivals from overseas was dwarfed by, and preceded by, the much
larger out-movement of original residents (Figure 5) — a process described by Peach
as ‘counter-urbanisation’.79

figure 5. Estimated ‘White’ and Minority population of new Southwark, 1951–1991. Census,
1951–1991; multiple tables
 HAROLD CARTER 173

At first, the new arrivals stood little chance of getting a council home — and even
if they did manage to get onto a housing list, the grading systems employed by local
housing officials normally directed them to the least attractive properties.80 Settlement
from overseas in the 1960s was thus concentrated overwhelmingly in Peckham and
elsewhere in Camberwell — places where private-sector housing was still available,
but blighted by the prospect of future demolition. These houses much later formed
the basis for a Black lower-middle-class housing area, owner-occupied and quietly
successful, which offered a marked contrast to the large-scale housing schemes which
were available to later waves of immigrants. At the same time, in a limited process
of gentrification, a small number of White families moved into larger houses in
Camberwell and parts of Peckham (these were later to form the nucleus of the suc-
cessful revolt against demolitions, which eventually replaced the old-guard in the
Labour leadership).
In contrast, council housing construction had started in the riverside boroughs
which had been most heavily bombed, and local White families were already estab-
lished in the new homes there by the mid-1960s. Figure 6 shows the distribution of
ethnic minorities by local authority ward in 1971, compared with the physical distri-
bution of council dwellings; the exclusion of immigrants from council housing is
evident. These wards, still overwhelmingly White, were to form the nucleus of the
political revolt against Labour in the 1990s.
In the 1970s, ethnic minorities either remained where they had first settled,81 or
(gradually) gained access to the new giant council housing schemes in the centre of
the borough. But these estates had become unpopular and dangerous places, long
before immigrant families could get access to them.82 The Aylesbury estate — started

Fig. 6. Ethnic Minority Wards and the location of Southwark council Housing, 1971. LSL maps:
GLC-owned housing (1961) and Southwark-owned housing (1975)
174 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

in 1966 — required £2.3 million spending on repairs, four years after it was com-
pleted at a cost of £12 million, mainly because of the extensive vandalism it had
already suffered, and it soon became notorious for crime and decay.83 Soon after
1976, the Aylesbury, and the nearby North Peckham and Gloucester Grove estates
were all being categorised as ‘hard to let’.84 In 1979, the Transport and General
Workers’ Union complained that local assaults on bus crews were a ‘traumatic and
nightmarish experience’.85 The North Peckham and Brandon estates were associated
with repeated rapes.86 Shops in the Gloucester Grove estate were all burned out in
1984.87 In that year, the Express Dairy stopped all deliveries to the North Peckham
estate after five milkmen left in one year; the manager commented:
We had a milk float stolen. We even had a milkman kidnapped.88

By 1991, the borough was markedly ethnically divided. These divisions (shown in
Figure 7) largely reflected the historic availability of housing as successive waves of
families had been re-housed — the moves of White families into council houses in the
north, the arrival of the first wave of Afro-Caribbeans who were forced into owner-
occupation in Peckham, the re-housing of the next wave of Afro-Caribbeans into
less-attractive council housing in the centre of the borough, and finally the arrival of
African refugees (who were evenly spread). The spatial locations of these groups
provided a basis for the later development of political cleavages.
All parts of the borough clamoured for investment, since large-scale social provi-
sion in the 1960s and 1970s had left a legacy of practical and political problems.
Partly, the problems resulted from the physical decay of much of the new housing
stock, creating an (unmet) need for spending on repairs. Southwark estimated in 1993
that repairs simply to maintain the existing stock in adequate condition, without

figure 7. Location of Minorities, 1991 and Political Control, 1998. Census, 1991, multiple
pages. Southwark Borough Council, election results, 1998.
 HAROLD CARTER 175

improving it at all, would cost £532 million.89 The nature of the problems can be
illustrated by two examples — in August 1990, British Telecom refused to service
telephones on the Gloucester Green and North Peckham estates, saying that the con-
dition of the buildings made them too dangerous for its engineers to enter,90 while in
October 1997, mother Tracey O’Donnell dumped a dead rat on the desks of housing
officials to force them to pay attention to her problems:
they told me I only had mice . . . I slapped the dead rat on their desk and they went
crazy . . . They almost ran screaming from the building, saying I had contaminated it.91

But it was not clear whose needs should be met. The council was plagued by conflicts
of interest between different goals, all of which could be seen as furthering ‘working
class’ interests, but many of which were in direct conflict with one another. By 1985,
nearly 20,000 of Southwark’s tenants (about one-third of the total) were in arrears,
but the council was unwilling to act against them, or to raise rents, since to do so
would be to shoot itself in the foot when 68 per cent of all households were its
tenants.92 Council leaders were also shackled in their pursuit of residents’ welfare by
their reliance on trades union support in the local Labour Party. Successive scandals
(including the ‘torture’ of elderly residents in the ironically-named Nye Bevan lodge,
while councillors and trades union bosses drank together a few feet away in the
purpose-built bar of the same building) came to dominate press reports.93 In 1986,
the Audit Commission warned that the council was:
hamstrung by union resistance to changes in working practices94

Some of these problems were capable of at least a partial solution. The reforming
Leader elected in 1986, Anne Matthews, was perceived as coming from the left of the
party (a woman who had worked in the traditionally male trade of carpentry, she
was associated with a range of ‘new left’ causes), but was determined to reverse the
record of poor service. She was not a part of the cosy drinking-club culture that had
grown up between leading councillors and union officials. When asked what she
would like to achieve in her last year in office, Anne Matthews replied that she would
like to achieve ‘clean streets and a decent repair service’.95
The process of solving the practical problems that faced Southwark was deeply
divisive within the party. However, the modernisers were aided by trends in the
national Labour Party, and by the progressive expulsion of their scandal-prone
opponents in a bitter internal struggle focused around issues of councillors’ expenses
claims, rent-arrears due to Southwark on their homes, and conflicts of interest with
grants made by the Council to organisations with which they were personally associ-
ated.96 Symbolic both of the changes, and of the difficulty they faced, was South-
wark’s 1988 employment of a major management consultancy firm — inconceivable
three years earlier. On the other hand, the consultants were not allowed to work
on-site: they were confined to a school gymnasium in Greenwich, because they were
not allowed to cross council employees’ picket-lines.97 Southwark was on the cusp of
change.
By 1992, the housing revenue account (ring-fenced by central government in 1990)
became self-financing; housing benefit take-up improved; rent arrears were driven
downwards; allocation systems were streamlined and made ethnically neutral; the
176 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

treatment of homeless families was improved.98 Similar changes took place in plan-
ning — though in this case, not primarily initiated by the council. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s, Labour in Southwark had been caught in an ideologically unwelcome
planning dilemma. It vehemently opposed office development in the riverside area
(because it would change the working-class nature of the area, and would not offer
jobs to local people), and use of land for private-sector housing (because there was a
perceived land shortage, and it wanted to build council homes). The Council also
resisted attempts to revitalise the riverside area through cultural activities (and, in
particular, the re-creation of a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre); ‘Shakespeare
is tosh’, Labour Leader Tony Ritchie was reported as saying.99 This led to an attempt
to impose a rigid planning policy, specifically designed to give no discretion to
(mistrusted) planning officials:
change of use of industrial or commercial floorspace will not be permitted.100

It became increasingly clear, however, that ‘the opportunity cost of office develop-
ment in North Southwark may well be no development at all.’101 Southwark’s
business rates were by 1983 the highest of any inner London borough and this, when
added to rent levels, made it the third most expensive area for a business to locate in
the capital (behind Westminster, and the City).102 In this context, control of much
of Bermondsey (the principal riverside and Dockland area) was taken away from
Southwark by the Conservative government, and placed in the hands of the London
Docklands Development Corporation (a central-government creation). The L.D.D.C.
announced major proposals for the market-led redevelopment of the Surrey Docks,
with a mixture of industrial units, warehousing, and homes.103 Southwark flatly
refused to cooperate with the new body for several years.104 The L.D.D.C. was
encouraging the construction of the sorts of affordable houses for sale that residents
of the area had long shown a wish to have, and was also offering houses at low
prices to local authorities;105 but it was seen as having taken Southwark’s land, as a
Tory creation, as creating office jobs rather than real jobs, and as an affront to the
principle of democratic control.106 Not until 1985/6 was Southwark tentatively to
start cooperating with developers in the L.D.D.C. area. By then, the corporation had
spent £19 million on improvements which were expected to create around 2,000 jobs,
1,000 new homes, and a pier; land prices had risen from £250,000 an acre to over
£1,000,000. It had also built substantial quantities of industrial space, especially
for small start-up firms, which were fully let.107 It was becoming too successful to
ignore.
The pattern of joint development established in a first trial co-operation with
house-builders Barratt became a model for much of the development elsewhere in
Southwark, after 1986; a mixture of council homes, housing association property, and
modestly-priced homes to buy.108 By 1991, for the first time in the twentieth century,
the borough’s population had started to grow, principally due to the sale of (initially)
moderately-priced houses with gardens in the reclaimed dockland area, intermixed
with expensive luxury dwellings (especially closer to the river) — a prime example
was the Cherry Gardens Estate, which juxtaposed social housing on ‘one of the
most valuable river sites’ with upscale commercial development.109 Young people
— and families with children — were moving in. Increasingly, the council used its
 HAROLD CARTER 177

land ownership and planning powers to get the maximum social gain, in docklands
and elsewhere, to such effect that by 1993, the council was meeting ambitious house
building goals while hardly doing any building itself.110
However, these reforms left major conflicts of interest unresolved.111 Expensive
developments created tensions with some existing local residents, as well as with
un-reconciled political activists; thus, they often met intense political opposition
locally, including the use of direct action campaigns. These tensions increased, as the
success of the schemes led to prices which soared beyond locally-affordable levels,
even for those in well-paid ordinary jobs.112 The council was committed to trades
unions, but it also needed to manage its workforce. There was still fierce competition
for access to social housing, but what was a fair system for allocating it?113 In the
absence of widely-shared community values, there was no easy way of deciding these
questions.
Black-markets in housing allocation continued to be widespread; in 1989, North
Peckham Tenants’ Association claimed that ‘as many as one-in-three flats’ were
obtained by paying key money.114 Faced with a sharp rise in homelessness in 1999,
the Housing Director said that the increase was primarily caused by the sons and
daughters of Southwark residents who, unable to find private rented accommodation,
were getting themselves registered as homeless. The director of the long-established
social landlord, the Peabody Trust, commented that: ‘the system is phenomenally
rigid. It is the last relic of state planning.’115
Ethnic minorities were no longer excluded from social housing — the new
allocation rules gave priority to applicants in greatest need. But these reforms, which
generated procedural fairness, substantially increased the competition faced by White
working-class families. This generated competing claims about what constituted
substantive fairness. For example, the Commission for Racial Equality condemned
Southwark for racist housing allocation when it gave priority on its new and attrac-
tive Bramcote Estate in Bermondsey to local families. These were old-established
residents, 95 per cent of them White, who had been waiting for many years for
re-housing — but Bramcote accounted for over 50 per cent of the council housing
available in Southwark that year.116 The council had to walk a tight-rope, and
each time it decided against established residents, it risked alienating its former core
working-class supporters.
Increasingly, there were reports of violence and intimidation to stop Black families
from settling when the council offered them homes in the north of the borough.117
When Black families were given houses in the showpiece Cherry Gardens council
estate, they suffered serious racist attacks.118 Southwark had an active anti-racist pro-
gramme, but racist action by neighbours, and anonymous attacks, were too common
for the council to have a real impact on the problem.119 Even the attempt to introduce
‘professional witnesses’ seemed unlikely to make much of a dent in the problem;
Southwark owned many estates, and thousands of individual buildings. Faced with
such hostility, Black families themselves became reluctant to move to Bermondsey
and Rotherhithe.120
The second unresolved conflict of interest related not to individual competition for
access to housing, but to competition between different areas. Collective provision,
by concentrating the most needy, had acted as a lens, focusing deprivation.121 Despite
178 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

growth in the London economy, and the increasing proportion of Southwark

residents who worked in successful economic sectors, many parts of the borough
remained extremely poor.122 Educational provision, inevitably neighbourhood-based
at primary level, became a symbol of the borough’s problems.123 A report by the
Office for Standards in Education in 1996 suggested that eight out of ten children
in Southwark were below national standard levels at the age of seven.124 In 1999, the
report of the Chief Inspector of Schools said that the council had:
lost the trust and respect of its schools, some of which can no longer discern any useful
purpose that the authority serves.125

These problems were too deep-rooted to be solved by administrative reform, and

central government attempts at intervention failed.126 In 2002, Southwark had the
worst test results for 11-year-olds of any British education authority.127 The condi-
tions in some parts of the area were such that, however strong the educational and
family values of those who lived there, they would face severe barriers to achieving
their potential.
Crime, and especially drug dealing and gun crime, had become so common in parts
of Peckham High Street (next to the award-winning new library and the gleaming
new Peckham Pulse healthcentre) that the local Police Superintendent said that it
should be entirely demolished.128 In addition to major crime of this kind, low-level
violence, robbery and vandalism continued to be very common on the large housing
estates.
Faced with so many neighbourhood-based problems, Southwark’s leaders turned
to proposals for economic and social regeneration. But these also risked pitting
the interests of residents against one another — not simply because regeneration
demanded the use of scarce resources for which different areas had to compete, but
because there was no shared, borough-wide vision of what ‘regeneration’ might mean.
The division of Southwark into autonomous management areas had the potential
to worsen rivalry between neighbourhoods, as they competed for scarce local and
central funds.
By the second half of the 1990s, these issues had become matters of general
debate.129 Having used its control of housing and planning to resist pressures from
gentrification in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Southwark’s Labour Council in the 1990s
reversed its stance and, as well as allowing market-led gentrification to occur,130 even
attempted to impose it by displacing some of its existing tenants. The highly conten-
tious Southwark Estates Initiative proposed to evict established council tenants from
homes in high-value sites, sell the sites, and use the money to renovate other parts of
the housing stock; critics described the proposals as ‘social cleansing’.131
The council pursued market-led regeneration in areas where the private sector
could be persuaded to invest on a grand scale. This involved the use of the council’s
assets to enable small amounts of public sector finance to act as a catalyst for a
wider regeneration, and came increasingly to be linked with the use of showy archi-
tectural projects — luxury flats, a proposal for Europe’s highest skyscraper on a site
by London Bridge, a proposal to redevelop 172 acres around the Elephant and
Castle to build a shopping mall and new housing, and so on.132 Controversially, the
policy of market-led regeneration was associated with statements by the Regeneration
 HAROLD CARTER 179

Director, Fred Manson, about the need to reduce the proportion of welfare clients
and council tenants in Southwark.133 Manson (a friend of fashionable architect Lord
Rogers) was a strong advocate of a high-modernist approach to a new urbanism — a
vision to match that of the 1950s and 1960s.134 The most radical option (which had
been advocated, but not implemented, in the 1980s under the Conservatives) was
disposal of a large part of the council’s housing stock to external bodies. This was
opposed by Labour nationally prior to 1997, but was later adopted (and backed by
financial incentives) by the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown.135
All of the new proposals risked increasing social and political divisions, and
depended on a continuing property boom. Symptomatic of the problems were three
events. First, the two most senior officials in the council dealing with regeneration
issues resigned simultaneously in 2001.136 Second, tenants were invited to support
ambitious proposals for the demolition of the notorious Aylesbury estate, coupled
with its removal from direct Council control; instead, in December 2001, they voted
70 per cent in favour of its retention.137 Third, tenants in the areas threatened with
demolition under the Southwark Estates Initiative protested, marched and voted
against the scheme — however, the council said it might in any case go ahead, since
tenant consent was not required.138
At the end of the century, collective provision of housing and other goods remained
valuable for many citizens. Large-scale solutions needed to be found. But while post-
war leaders had a clear vision of the nature of the public they were to serve, at the
end of the century there were fewer community-wide goals. There was an increasing
divergence between the values and interests of those living in different parts of the
borough. Political support for collective provision became increasingly uncertain,
because the struggle for control of collective assets divided communities, rather than
uniting them.
Nationally and locally, Labour’s leaders at the turn of the new century responded
to this challenge by seeking to rebuild a new consensus — based around ideas of
citizenship, welfare-to-work policies, Anti Social Behaviour Orders, and the manage-
ment of tenant behaviour backed by the threat of eviction. This was, in effect, to seek
to manage the lives of the poorest and most excluded citizens — the ‘rough’ minor-
ity — in order to persuade them to take on board the values of the ‘respectable’,
skilled and aspirant, in the hope that the respectable would once more become sup-
porters of collective action to solve social problems.139 This, however, posed issues
of the extent to which such controls were compatible with liberal social values; and
questions about whose vision of appropriate behaviour it was legitimate to impose.

Conclusions
This view of Southwark’s contemporary history has implications which are simulta-
neously optimistic (because it does not accept the idea that diverse ethnicity need
necessarily lead to political division), and pessimistic (because it argues that divisions
and conflicts are intrinsic to the social democratic programme since socially-provided
resources are necessarily scarce and — without social consensus — social democracy
has no way of deciding who should get access to them). If different policies had been
180 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995

followed, or if minority communities had arrived at a different time (although they

would have faced both individual and institutional racism and discrimination in
access to housing), ethnicity might not have become the basis for a political re-
alignment. But unresolved tensions within the working class would nonetheless have
been likely to cause the post-war social democratic settlement to break apart, even if
the broken fragments would have settled in different patterns. Political fragmentation
in Southwark at the end of the twentieth century was a symptom, not the cause, of
a general crisis in public provision.140
Micro-histories such as this are one way of seeing broader trends. Large-scale social
shifts such as the transformation of London from an industrial to a post-industrial
global city, the great increase in managerial jobs and the decline in semi and unskilled
work, and the change in the nature of housing markets due to widespread com-
modification and gentrification, have different impacts in different places; like tidal
movements sometimes coming up against rocks but sometimes eroding sandy beach-
es. Watching the process can tell us both about the force of the tides, and the strength
of the rocks; in Southwark’s case, rocks made of social housing that managed, for a
very long time, to withstand the forces of market-driven change which sought to wear
them down.
But these tidal defences came at a cost, in terms of social and economic rigidity,
and in terms of the viability of the political process and of the communities that made
up the borough. The effect of very large-scale state provision of housing was both to
slow the adaptation of the borough to change (so that for a long time it did not take
full advantage of its location next to one of the world’s most prosperous financial
districts, in an attempt to preserve industrial jobs), to lock many residents into a
Kafka-esque machine of delay, demolition and despair, and to centralise many battles
over the use of space. In particular, because decisions about housing allocation had
to be handled centrally, and could not be responsive to individuals’ wishes, there was
a quasi-inevitable development of black markets and unofficial routes into housing,
which eroded trust in, and respect for, the political process which was guiding the
housing programme.
The final insight that this article gives is a more purely historical one. The tragedy
that encompassed Labour’s post-war generation — and the collapse of many of their
solutions — grew directly out of the strengths on which they depended on order to
bring about social change. Their complex set of values favoured collective action in
several ways. It empowered senior councillors and committee members, and created
an effective mechanism for making and enforcing decisions. It provided ideological
guidance for prioritising claims for access to public housing and academic secondary
education, and the political power to enforce these priorities on outsiders. It inspired
a determination to provide the ‘best’, scientifically designed, houses for the working
class; this made them expensive (and thus preferentially available to the ‘respectable’),
without an appearance of unfairness. Precisely by virtue of its imprecision and its lack
of over-arching theory, it allowed differences of interest and conflicts of values to be
glossed over or ignored; this allowed action to take place, without encumbrance
from theoretical discussions. Finally, it generated a noble, and largely unselfish,
determination to improve the lot of their fellow men and women; an optimism about
the likely consequences of their actions; and a blindness to the possibility of failure.
 HAROLD CARTER 181

But the power of senior councillors insulated them from pressures which might
have led them to change course; rewarding the values and behaviour of others like
themselves turned out to be inconsistent with their determination to clear the slums,
since a significant minority of slum-dwellers had different values. The leaders’ values
were based on a very restricted view of human nature, and of which individuals
should be counted as a part of the ‘community’; they were unable to cope with social
diversity, or individual aspiration. Their core assumptions, of rationality and of the
unity of working class interests, provided little capacity to settle these issues; they
were thus unable to respond to the emergence of conflicts of interest within the local
working class, to the growing empowerment of those outside their own circle, and to
pressures which stressed human rights (and human need) as the basis for access to
socially owned assets.
Historians have long ignored local Labour history, in the pursuit of more glamor-
ous (and more readily accessible) material in party archives, and in endless revisiting
of the party’s intellectual history. It is time to stop looking so hard at what Labour
said at Westminster and in Tribune — it was, after all, out of power nationally most
of the time, and when in power did little that related to the outcome of those disputes
— and to start looking at what it actually did, in the cities up and down the UK
where it held undisputed sway for fifty years or more. These stories cannot readily
be discovered at anything other than a micro-level. From that task, a new and more
challenging history of British social democracy may start to emerge. It has become
commonplace to date the decay of the Old Labour settlement in Britain to the
mid-1970s, and to see it as the product of de-industrialisation, given the coup-de-grace
by the oil crisis and inflation of that time — a party pushed aside by the bulldozer
of social change. But in Southwark, at least, the Old Labour project had run out
of steam well before then; rather, Labour’s fall was a consequence of its ideology
and its political choices — a Greek tragedy in which its hubris, which allowed it to
reshape the borough, led directly to nemesis, in which its triumphs turned to dust.

Notes
1
For a recent quantification and discussion of
London changes, see: C. Hamnett, ‘Gentrification
and the Middle-Class Remaking of Inner London,
1961–2001’, Urban Studies, 40 (2003), 2401–26. For
2
voting behaviour, the different political implica-
tions of different forms of gentrification, and the
discussion of class dealignment, see: T. Butler and
G. Robson, London Calling: The Middle Classes
and the Re-Making of Inner London (Oxford,
3
2003); D. Dorling, ‘Class Alignment’, Renewal:
Journal of Labour Politics, 14 (2006), 8–19;
H.D. Clarke, Political Choice in Britain (Oxford,
2004); R.J. Johnston, C.J. Pattie, D.F.L. Dorling,
4
I. MacAllister, H. Tunstall and D.J. Rossiter,
‘Housing Tenure, Local Context, Scale and Voting
5
in England and Wales’, Electoral Studies, 20 (2001),
195–216; H.T. Himmelweit, P. Humphreys and M.
Jaeger, How Voters Decide: A Model of Vote
Choice Based on a Special Longitudinal Study
Extending over Fifteen Years and the British
Election Surveys of 1970–1983 (Milton Keynes,
1985).
For a (contrasting) local study of the politics of
gentrification in a nearby borough, see M. Clark,
‘Race, Space and Class: Competition for Housing
in Wandsworth’ (M.Sc. dissertation, University of
Oxford, 2007).
The difference between the means of the propor-
tions of the non-African black population in
Labour-controlled and Liberal controlled wards
was highly statistically significant (sig. = 0.000).
Data available from author at: haroldcarter@mac.
com
See Table 3. Owner occupied housing accounted
for only 2–3 per cent of all households in the old
boroughs of Bermondsey and Southwark by 1981.
182 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995
6 Renewal: Journal of Labour Politics, 14 (2006),
L. Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (2007)
passim.
7
Similarly, there was no association between the
presence of African immigrants in local authority
wards and voting behaviour principally because
of the timing of their arrival; by the time this
second wave of immigration occurred, housing
allocation policies were genuinely ethnically neu-
tral, so new arrivals were widely dispersed through-
out the borough, rather than being geographically
concentrated.
8
This author is currently engaged in research on
similar problems in largely mon-ethnic communi-
ties in northern England, including Sheffield and
Sunderland.
9 Peach, ‘London and New York’, 338; R. Johnston,
T. Cantle, Community Cohesion: A Report of the
Independent Review Team (2001), 9.
10
G. Dench, K. Gavron and M. Young, The New
East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (2006),
225–27.
11
J.M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and
the City (1996).
12
D. Goodhart, ‘Is Britain Becoming Too Diverse
to Sustain the Mutual Obligations Behind the
Good Society and the Welfare State?’ Prospect 95
(Jan 2004); B. Crick, K. Banting, W. Kymlica,
J. Denham, D. Donnison, A. Etzioni, N. Glazer, N.
Harris, K. Malik, A. Mondal, K. Nazeer, B. Parekh,
B. Rowthorn, S. Saggar, S. Sassen and S. Spencer,
‘Too Diverse: Replies to David Goodhart’s Essay’,
Prospect 96 (Feb 2004).
13
D. Phillips, ‘Parallel Lives? Challenging Discourses
of British Muslim Self-segregation’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(1) (2006),
25–40.
14
C. Peach, ‘London and New York: Contrasts
in British and American Models of Segregation’,
International Journal of Population Geography,
5 (1999), 319–61; C. Peach, ‘Does Britain Have
Ghettos?’ Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 21 (1996), 212–35.
15
L. Simpson, ‘Statistics of Racial Segregation:
Measures, Evidence and Policy’, Urban Studies, 41
(2004), 661–81; L. Simpson, ‘Ghettos of the Mind:
The Empirical Behaviour of Indices of Segregation
and Diversity’, Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), Part 2, 170
(2007), 405–24.
16
D. Dorling and P. Rees, ‘A Nation Still Dividing:
The British Census and Social Polarisation 1971–
2001’, Environment and Planning A, 35 (2003),
1287–1313, 1309; D. Dorling, ‘Class Alignment’,
8–19.
17
C. Hamnett, ‘Gentrification and the Middle-Class
Remaking of Inner London, 1961–2001’, Urban
Studies, 40 (2003), 2401–26, 2416.
18
S. Burgess, D. Wilson and R. Lupton, ‘Parallel
Lives? Ethnic Segregation in Schools and Neigh-
bourhoods’, Urban Studies, 42 (2005), 1027–56.
19
T. Butler and G. Robson, ‘Negotiating Their Way
In: The Middle Classes, Gentrification and the
Deployment of Capital in a Globalising Metro-
polis’, Urban Studies, 40 (2003), 1791–809, 1806;
T. Butler and G. Robson, ‘Plotting the Middle
Classes: Gentrification and Circuits of Education in
London’, Housing Studies, 18 (2003), 5–28.
20
J. Forrest and M. Poulsen, ‘Are There Ethnic
Enclaves/Ghettos in English Cities?’ Urban Studies,
39 (2002), 591–698; R. Johnston, J. Forrest and M.
Poulsen, ‘The Ethnic Geography of Ethnicities: The
“American Model” and Residential Concentration
in London’, Ethnicities, 2 (2002), 221.
21
R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community (New York,
2000); O. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies:
Analysis and Antitrust Implications: A Study in the
Economics of Internal Organization (New York,
1975); C. Offe. ‘How Can We Trust Our Fellow
Citizens?’ and J.C. Scott. ‘Geographies of Trust,
Geographies of Hierarchy’, in M.E. Warren (ed.),
Democracy and Trust (Cambridge, 1999); R.
Axelrod, The Evolution of Co-Operation (Har-
mondsworth, 1984); E. Ostrom, ‘A Behavioral
Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Col-
lective Action’, American Political Science Review,
92 (1998), 1–22.
22
S. Goss, Local Labour and Local Government: A
Study of Changing Interests, Politics and Policy in
Southwark from 1919 to 1982 (Edinburgh, 1988),
114–15, 163–78.
23
Southwark Local Studies Library (LSL) 301.543,
Bermondsey Borough Council, A report on the
work of the Council in connection with the
Improvement of Housing in Bermondsey, 1949.
24
M. Collins, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the
White Working Class (2004), 38–39, 103.
25
G. Robson, Class, Criminality and Embodied
Consciousness: Charlie Richardson and a South
East London Habitus (1997), 23.
26
LSL 301.543, Bermondsey Borough Council, A
report on the work of the Council (1949).
27
These values were deeply embedded in Labour’s
culture from its early days onwards — see, for

example J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People:
Party, Language and Popular Politics in England,
1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998) (especially Chapter
6); S. Fielding, P. Thompson and N. Tiratsoo,
‘England Arise!’: The Labour Party and Popular
Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995).
28
Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell, Housing
Committee minutes, cited by Goss, Local Labour
and local government, 57; Bermondsey Borough
Council, A report on the work of the Council in
connection with the Improvement of Housing in
Bermondsey 1949, 18.
29
C. Ungerson, Moving Home: A Study of the
Redevelopment Process in Two London Boroughs
(1971), 15.
30
S. Fielding, ‘Activists Against “Affluence”: Labour
Party Culture During the “Golden Age”, Circa
1950–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 40, 2 (2001),
247.
31
D. Weinbren, ‘Building Communities, Construct-
ing Identities: The Rise of the Labour Party in
London’, London Journal, 23, 1 (1998) 47: Goss,
Local Labour, 54.
32
LSL329.Lab, West Bermondsey Labour Party,
Annual Report 1947–48; LSL329.Lab, Bermondsey
Labour Party, Annual Report 1953; LSL329.Lab,
Bermondsey Labour Magazine, Nov 1953; Goss,
Local Labour, 42.
33
Goss, Local Labour, 45.
34
Weinbren, ‘Building Communities’, 41–5.
35
London Development Plan (1957) cited in K. Young
and P.L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics
and Urban Change 1837–1981 (1982), 225.
36
LSL301.543, Metropolitan Borough of Southwark,
Housing: Borough of Southwark (1947).
37
P. Malpass and A. Murie, Housing Policy and
Practice, Public Policy and Politics (1982), 61.
38
Goss, Local Labour, 57.
39
ibid., 71; V. Randall, ‘Housing Policy-Making
in London Boroughs: The Role of Paid Officers’,
London Journal 7, 2 (1981), 165; Goss contradicts
Randall on the detail of these events. Randall’s
contemporary account is preferable.
40
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 289.
41
see also: A. Coleman, ‘The Death of the Inner City:
Cause and Cure’, London Journal 6, 1 (1980), 3–
22.
42
Before 1965, census data are reported for each
borough individually. After 1965, individual local-
authority ward boundaries within the merged
‘Southwark’ broadly followed the original divisions
between the boroughs. These estimates (and those
HAROLD CARTER 183
in successive tables) rely on tracing the old borough
boundaries on successive digitised borough maps,
and recompiling the data to the old boroughs by
combining local authority wards. Where wards
cross boundaries they have been allocated to the old
borough which appeared from the maps to contain
the great majority of their dwellings.
43
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 289.
44
Goss, Local Labour, 54.
45
LSL329.Lab, Bermondsey Labour Party, Annual
Report 1961.
46
ibid.
47
LSL329.Lab, West Bermondsey Labour Party,
Annual Report 1947–48; LSL329.Lab, Bermondsey
Labour Magazine, Nov 1953; LSL329.Lab,
Bermondsey Labour Party, Annual Report 1961.
48
Similar declines occurred elsewhere — see Fielding,
‘Activists Against “Affluence”’, 251–2, and 261–6.
49
C. Hamnett, ‘Social Change and Social Segrega-
tion’, Urban Studies, 13 (1976), 1–271; C. Hamnett,
‘Gentrification and the Middle-Class Remaking of
Inner London, 1961–2001’, Urban Studies, 40
(2003), 2401–26.
50
LSL.PC301.54; C. Woolmer ‘Down Your Way’
(?1981).
51
Collins, The Likes of Us, 161.
52
Randall, ‘Housing Policy-Making’, multiple pages.
53
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 118;
Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing, 118–20.
54
A. Ravetz, Remaking Cities: Contradictions of the
Recent Urban Environment (1980), 44.
55
White, London in the Twentieth Century, 41.
56
C. Ungerson, Moving Home: A Study of the
Redevelopment Process in Two London Boroughs,
Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No.
44 (1971) 34.
57
LSL301.543, ‘Local Authority Official Survey: The
Housing Problem in Southwark 1950’; Surveys, 1,
1950, 95–111.
58
1961 Census, Table 08, Table 23.
59
LSL301.543; Mcintosh, Council housing, 20;
Randall, ‘Housing Policy-Making’, 170.
60
LSL301.543; N. Ramsden, ‘Southwark — The
Battle Against Decay’, The Old Lady: staff maga-
zine of the Bank of England, 18 Jun 1979, 261–66.
61
Ungerson, Moving Home, 39; Goss, Local Labour,
88–90; Randall, ‘Housing Policy-Making’, 166.
62
LSL331.8, Southwark: Press release 04575, 29 Jul
1975.
63
1961 Census, Table 15, calculations.
64
P. Prescott-Clarke, Living in Southwark (1976),
135.
184 RACE, CLASS AND SOCIAL HOUSING IN SOUTHWARK, 1945–1995
65
ibid. p. 42. and Tables 4.59, 4.60.
66
LSL301.54, Southwark Civic News No 19, Apr
1992; Ungerson, Moving Home, 12–15.
67
LSL Video, Walkways in the Sky (1985).
68
LSLPC301, Building, 8 Aug 1977; LSL PC301,
Woolmer ‘Down Your Way’.
69
LSL329.Lab, Labour Party, Southwark Local
Government Committee: Manifesto, Borough
Council Elections 1986.
70
LSL301.543, Mcintosh, Council housing, 12.
71
LSL301.54, South East London Mercury, 2 Apr
1981; LSL301.543, Mcintosh, Council housing, 2.
72
Prescott-Clarke, Living in Southwark, 11, 148, and
Figure 118.
73
LSL301.541, T.R.J. Martin and T.R.M. Wilson,
Housing and Community in Bermondsey,
Bermondsey Parish Church (mimeo) (Feb 1974).
74
LSL301.54, Sunday People, 3 Sep 1982.
75
LSL301.54, London Borough of Southwark, South-
wark Housing: Facts and Figures — March 1984.
76
LSL301.54, South London Press, 12 Nov 1991.
77
White, London in the Twentieth Century, 145;
Goss, Local Labour, 25, 47; Collins, The Likes of
Us, 186–87; C.T. Husbands, ‘East End Racism
1900–1980’, London Journal, 8, 1 (1982), 3–26;
R. Mellish quoted by Goss, Local Labour, 96.
78
1951 Census England and Wales: County Report:
London, (1953), Table 19.
79
C. Peach, ‘South Asian and Caribbean Ethnic
Minority Housing Choice in Britain’, Urban
Studies, 35 (1998), 1657–80, 1659.
80
Ungerson, Moving Home, 15; J.W. Henderson
and V.A. Karn, Race, Class and State Housing:
Inequality and the Allocation of Public Housing
in Britain, Studies in Urban and Regional Policy
(Aldershot, 1987).
81
And had their homes reprieved, by the revolt
against demolition that grew in strength in the
1970s.
82
A. Coleman, ‘Planned Housing as a Social Trap’,
London Journal, 12, 2 (1986), 172–81.
83
LSL711.3, Itinerary for a visit by Vice President
Humphrey (typescript), 1967; Dunleavy, The
Politics of Mass Housing, 98; LSL711.5, Aylesbury
Development in Use 1973, Southwark Borough
Development Department (May 1973).
84
Goss, Local Labour, 101.
85
LSL301.543 Ramsden, ‘Southwark — The Battle
Against Decay’, 18 Jun 1979, 261–66.
86
A. Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality
in Planned Housing (1985), 39, 92.
87
Times, 13 Jul 1987.
88
Times, 8 Feb 1987.
89
LSL301.54, Southwark Borough Council, Housing:
The Southwark Strategy 1994–1997 (Apr, 1993).
90
Times, 21 Aug 1990.
91
Daily Mirror, 21 Oct 1997.
92
LSL301.54, LBC News — Transcript of interview
with Housing Chairman, 21 Oct 1985; Financial
Times, 10 Mar 1984; Guardian, 9 Dec 1985.
93
J. Gibbs, M. Evans and S. Rodway, Report of the
Inquiry into Nye Bevan Lodge (1987).
94
Times, 9 Jan 1987.
95
LSL.352.008#80.
96
Labour Party archive, Manchester: National
Agent’s Department Southwark Council box: cor-
respondence, 1991–1993; Guardian, 3 May 1985, 19
Jun 1985; Times, 20 Oct 1987; Daily Mail, 8 Aug
1986; Times, 23 Jul 1987; Guardian, 2 Aug 1987, 1
Sep 1987; Times, 20 Aug 1988; Evening Standard,
19 Jan 1994, 26 Jan 1998; Press Association
newswire, 15 Apr 1991; South London Press, 2 Feb
1990, 10 May 1991, 3 Jul 1992, 10 Jul 1992, 24 Jul
1992, 11 Sep 1992, 27 Nov 1992; Southwark News,
11 Feb 1993, 29 Jun 1995.
97
Personal communication.
98
LSL352.008, South London Press 27 Apr 1989;
LSL301.54, London Borough of Southwark Whose
Home? Housing Strategy Issues, The Next Five
Years (1988); Guardian 24 Nov 1989; LSL301.54,
Southwark Sparrow, 22 Jan 1993, 5 Mar 1993;
LSL301.54, Southwark Housing News, Apr 1990;
H. Atkinson and S. Wilks-Heeg, Local Government
from Thatcher to Blair: The Politics of Creative
Autonomy (Cambridge, 2000), 172; LSL 302.54,
Southwark News, 10 Oct 1996.
99
Sunday Times, 30 Jan 2000.
100
McCarthy, ‘The Evolution of Planning Appro-
aches’, 149.
101
P. Damesick, ‘The Inner City Economy’, London
Journal, 6, 1 (1980), 32.
102
Financial Times, 4 Jun 1982, 8 Apr 1983.
103
Financial Times, 29 Apr 1983.
104
Financial Times, 24 Nov 1983: letter from Chief
Executive of L.D.D.C.
105
Financial Times, 11 Jan 1984.
106
LSL Video #1 — interview with Cllr. Tony
Ritchie.
107
Financial Times, 1 Oct 1986.
108
Guardian, 17 Oct 1987.
109
London Borough of Southwark, Unitary Develop-
ment Plan — 1995; LSL711.3, Southwark Council
Planning News: Bermondsey and Rotherhithe (Oct
1988); Independent, 2 Feb 1997; New Statesman, 6
Mar 1998.
 HAROLD CARTER 185

110 125
London Borough of Southwark, Unitary Develop- Financial Times, 15 Dec 1999.
126
ment Plan — 1995; LSL301.54, Southwark Borough Birmingham Evening Mail, 13 Dec 1999; Times, 9
Council, Housing: The Southwark Strategy May 2001; Telegraph, 3 Apr 2003; Guardian, 30
1994–1997 (Apr 1993). Apr 2003, 22 Nov 2003.
111 127
For a broader discussion, specifically of gentrifica- Times, 5 Oct 2002.
128
tion issues in the riverside boroughs, see M. David- Independent, 20 Oct 2000.
129
son and L. Lees, ‘New-build “Gentrification” and ibid.
130
London’s Riverside Renaissance’, Environment and A policy which continued after Labour eventually
Planning, A 37(7) (2005), 1165–90. lost overall control of the Council in 1998, and
112
‘Jam Tomorrow! Some history and notes on the after the Liberal Democrats took power in 2002.
131
regeneration and gentrification of North South- LSL711.3, Southwark Borough Council, Press
wark + Bermondsey’ (http://www.56a.org.uk/jam. Release, 17 Dec 1998; LSL711.3, Estates Gazette, 6
html) provides a powerful (and hostile) account of Mar 1999; LSL711.3, Estates Gazette, 13 Mar 1999;
Evening Standard, 6 Apr 1999; Building Design, 26
the market-led redevelopment of North South-
Mar 1999.
wark. See also: S. Brownill, Developing London’s
132
Financial Times 29 Sep 2000, 5 Mar 1999; LSL,
Docklands (1990).
113 711.3, Estates Gazette, 14 Sep 1999; Sunday
LSL.352.008#74; Guardian, 3 May 1985, 19 Jun
Business, 5 Sep 1999; Evening Standard, 11 May
1985; Times, 20 Oct 1987; Mail, 8 Aug 1986;
2001; Telegraph, 21 May 2000; Independent, 19
Times, 23 Jul 1987; Guardian, 2 Aug 1987, 1 Sep
Jun 2000; Times, 27 Jun 2000.
1987. 133
114
Independent, 17 Jun 2000; New Statesman, 13 Dec
LSL301.54, South London Press, 10 Jan 1989;
1996.
LSL352.008, Southwark Sparrow, 5 Jun 1992; 134
LSL711.3, Southwark News, 17 Jul 2001.
Telegraph, Financial Times, 6 Jun 1992; LSL301.54, 135
LSL301.54, Southwark News, 3 Feb 2000, 10 Aug
Southwark Borough Council, Housing: The
2001; LSL, 301.54 Inside Housing, 21 Jan 2000.
Southwark Strategy 1994–1997 (Apr 1993). 136
Building, 6 Jul 2001, 13 Jul 2001.
115
Evening Standard, 24 Nov 1999. 137
Building, 29 Jun 2001; Guardian, 28 Nov 2001, 2
116
Telegraph, 27 Sep 1990. Jan 2002; New Statesman, 17 Jul 2000; Evening
117
Telegraph, 14 May 1991. Standard, 23 Jan 2002; Southwark Borough Coun-
118
Independent, 18 Nov 1990. cil, Press Release, 21 Dec 2001 — www.southwark.
119
Independent, 4 Aug 1990; Guardian, 12 Oct 1994; gov.uk
Independent, 9 Sep 1994. 138
LSL301.54, Inside Housing, 4 Feb 2000.
120
Independent, 18 Sep 1996; LSL301.54, Docklands 139
P. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the
Forum, Race and Housing in London’s Docklands Modernisers Saved the Labour Party (1999), 3–12,
(1993). 22.
121 140
See: L. Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History A crisis made worse — at the end of the century
(2007). — by the pressure on house-prices amplified by
122
Financial Times, 22 Jul 1988. gentrification in parts of the borough, removing all
123
Guardian, 22 Nov 2003. but social housing from the financial reach of the
124
Guardian, 7 May 1996. families of most existing residents.

Note on contributor
Harold Carter has worked as a management consultant for a variety of firms,
advising major international companies on strategic marketing issues, and advising
government agencies on local economic development issues. From 1987 to 1995, he
was Consulting Lecturer in Corporate Strategy for the Open University business
school, and wrote major elements of its Strategic Management MBA course. He is
now a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford.