Housing, Theory and Society

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“So, Don’t You Want Us Here No More?” Slow

Violence, Frustrated Hope, and Racialized Struggle
on London’s Council Estates

Loretta Lees & Phil Hubbard

To cite this article: Loretta Lees & Phil Hubbard (2021): “So, Don’t You Want Us Here No More?”
Slow Violence, Frustrated Hope, and Racialized Struggle on London’s Council Estates, Housing,
Theory and Society, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2021.1959392

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2021.1959392

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 25 Aug 2021.

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HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2021.1959392

ARTICLE

“So, Don’t You Want Us Here No More?” Slow Violence,

Frustrated Hope, and Racialized Struggle on London’s Council
Estates
Loretta Leesa and Phil Hubbard b

a
School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester; bDepartment of Geography,
King’s College London, Aldwych, London

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Since 1997, over 50,000 homes have been demolished to allow for Received 3 August 2020
the “renewal” of council estates in London. This has involved the Accepted 14 July 2021
“decanting” of short and long-term tenants, as well as those lease­ KEYWORDS
holders who bought their homes under “right to buy” legislation. Council estates;
Often described as “social cleansing”, the racialized dimensions of displacement; gentrification;
these displacements remain under-explored despite asizable litera­ racialization; housing
ture documenting the connections between race, place and state- movements
subsidized housing in Britain. Drawing on interviews with Black,
Asian, and Minority Ethnic estate residents– including many active
in housing movements– this paper shows that this displacement is
understood in relation to histories of racial discrimination, the
destruction of ethno-cultural infrastructures, and long-stand­
ing racialized inequalities. These themes resonate with apolitics of
resistance grounded in aracialized class consciousness that seeks to
intervene more broadly in the politics of capital and the state.

Introduction
Much of the existing literature on housing and race in British cities focuses on the
territorial stigma resulting from the racialization of space. Terms such as the “inner city”
have long been a metonym for non-white spaces – understood through myths of crime
and deviance as the “bad ghetto” – with this stigmatization leading to specific commu­
nities being under-served by welfare systems and over-policed by law and immigration-
enforcement institutions (Jackson 1987; Keith 1995; Wacquant 2009; Rhodes and Brown
2019). But complicating the racialized stigma of the so-called “inner city” are literatures
which highlight the “good ghetto” as a locus for social networking and community
organizing that builds resilience among Britain’s non-white urban communities (Keith
2005; Briggs 2010; Mavrommatis 2010; Reynolds 2013).
Though generally stigmatized as working-class landscapes (Leaney 2020), inner city
council estates, most especially in London, have been racialized as both deprived and
BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic – a British government classification also used by
the Institute of Race Relations in the UK, see Perera 2019). Although state-subsidized

CONTACT Phil Hubbard philip.hubbard@kcl.ac.uk Department of Geography, King’s College London, Aldwych,
London, WC2B 4BG
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
2 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

council housing was not initially open to BAME groups, they gained increased access from
the 1970s onwards (see Jacobs 1999) but discriminatory allocation policies directed BAME
tenants into much of the worst council housing. After at least five decades of sustained
settlement, Britain’s BAME population is still disproportionately concentrated in the
poorest inner-city locations and in the least desirable council housing due to the con­
centration of poverty, institutional discrimination, racism, and to some degree, the
positive role of segregation in terms of reinforcing safety and shared cultural values
(Harrison, Phillips, and ODPM 2003). Notably, in 2017–18 black-headed households were
seven times more likely than white-headed households to live in high-rise accommoda­
tion, and Asian-headed three times more likely (Ministry of Housing, Communities and
Local Government 2018).
Whilst not comparable to the scale and deprivation of black communities in US inner
cities, many of the same negative stereotypes abound, with British inner city council
estates often depicted as “no-go” areas, characterized as “hard to police” and trapped in
a “cycle of poverty”:

‘Although Britain does not have American-style ghettos . . . The persistence of clustering in
deprived areas points to structural inequalities manifest in long-term social and economic
deprivation and underpinned by systematic discrimination and hostility towards the black
and Asian population, in housing and in other spheres’ (Harrison, Phillips, and ODPM 2003:
37).

London remains the most ethnically diverse region in the UK: in the 2011 census 40.2% of
Londoners identified as BAME and 26.9% of London’s BAME population lived in social
housing compared to 21.3% of the white British population; indeed, areas characterized
by significant non-white populations appear to be becoming even more non-white over
time (Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest 2015). The consequence is that the demolition and
“renewal” of council estates in London are disproportionately impacting BAME popula­
tions, who face displacement and potential exclusion from London’s over-inflated hous­
ing markets at a time when the financialisation of housing is making private rental
properties increasingly unaffordable and social housing is in short supply.
In this paper we discuss the racialization of these displacements, and the idea that
“social cleansing” equates to “ethnic cleansing”, by exploring how the intersectionality of
class and race poses important questions about institutional racism and the continuing
disregard for certain sections of society (see Danewid 2020). Critically, we consider the
significance of race and ethnicity in London council estate renewal by drawing on the
voices of the BAME working class who are on the front line of this new and pernicious
“gentrification frontier” (note: the interviewees identified their own ethnicity, we have
used their identification rather than the government category BAME which some people
reject). We do this noting the general lack of consideration of BAME experiences in
accounts of the regeneration of British housing estates (cf. Leaney 2020). Herein, we
draw on their testimony to argue that the racialization of London council estates – which
associates them with crime and social deprivation – has been used to legitimize estate
renewals which ultimately displace BAME communities (Lees 2014; James 2018; Perera
2019). We argue this has made opposition to estate renewal difficult, with a politics of
resistance articulated through a racialized consciousness of injustice proving ineffectual
because of the persistent associations made between the deleterious state of inner-city
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 3

estates and their occupation by stigmatized working class, BAME groups. In what follows
we discuss the displacement pressures experienced by residents on six council estates
across London under threat from, or undergoing, renewal, and catalogue a process of
thwarted hopes, broken promises and outright lies which have, over time, ground down
effective resistance to displacement.
By drawing on the concept of racial capitalism (see Bhattacharyya 2018: ix–x), we
suggest the gentrification-induced displacements being experienced by BAME residents
on London council estates connect with earlier dispossessions and racialized disadvan­
tage. Here, we apply the idea of “slow violence” (as originally developed by Nixon 2011 to
refer to the slow build-up of environmental toxicity in spaces of black occupation) to refer
to the gradual displacement of BAME residents that occurs through processes of cultural
exclusion and indirect discrimination as well as direct eviction (see also Fried 1966;
Fullilove 2004; Kern 2016; Pain 2019). Associated with BAME experiences of gentrification,
we argue that this often-slow process of displacement needs to be considered in the
context of a racialized struggle that is long-established and punctuated by frustrated
hope.

Ethnicity, Migration and Housing in London

An informal colour bar preventing racialized minorities from accessing particular forms
of housing has long been present in Britain, and especially London. This resulted in
African- and Indian-run residential premises providing safe and secure accommodation,
such as WASU (West African Students Union) House in Camden (north London), as early
as the 1930s (Matera 2015). While these became important cultural and political hubs
for artists, students and intellectuals as well as working-class migrants from British
colonies, they were also the target of racial violence, from both state and non-state
actors (Perry 2016). This racialized precarity became pronounced as legislation restrict­
ing migration into Britain was introduced in the 1940s, further entrenching the category
of migrant as a racialized outsider (Virdee 2014). Resistance to racism was also manifest
in squatting movements led by South-Asian communities fleeing racial violence in
boroughs such as Tower Hamlets (east London) in the 1970s (Glynn 2017), and squats
providing homes and offices for radical black activists in areas such as Lambeth (south
London) (Fisher 2012).
Informal exclusion from specific housing markets – often with tacit support from the
local state – combined with migration policies, street racism, and shifting housing provi­
sion, led to Britain’s BAME populations experiencing continual discrimination in the
housing market. Indeed, the racialized inequalities of housing in Britain have become so
entrenched over time that they are now thoroughly normalized. Surveys have found that
up to a quarter of BAME people feel discriminated against when looking for housing
(Lukes, de Noronha, and Finney 2019). It is through these processes of racial capitalism,
manifested through discrimination in both the private and state rented sectors and in
wider societal racisms, that Britain’s BAME communities are situated in working-class
areas of the city. This is despite the fact that the term “working class” in Britain has rarely
been recognized as racially inclusive to date (Shaheen 2020).
BAME groups began to gain increased access to homes on “working class” council
estates from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, for a time the bulk of London’s BAME population
4 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

became concentrated in state-subsidized housing (Kaye 2013). For many from these
populations, these homes became relatively secure and affordable places to live, with
supportive social networks and communities built up over time. As such, the threat of
displacement ushered in by the programmes of estate renewal that began in London in
the late 1990s was to destroy the protections afforded by the “good ghetto”. The New
Labour administration, who came to power in 1997, depicted inner city council estates as
sinks of social and economic malaise, and their policy of demolishing council estates to
provide new, mixed communities that would increase the amount of housing for
Londoners, built by private developers, has continued under subsequent Conservative-
led governments (see Lees and White 2020). Private capital has been encouraged to
exploit the “rent gaps” evident in inner city council estate locations by providing a mix of
supposedly affordable housing alongside lucrative “market-rate” housing development.
Since 1997, at least 160 major demolitions (i.e. involving more than 100 units) have
occurred on council estates in London, with around 55,000 households displaced on
a short- or longer-term basis (see https://www.estatewatch.london).
This state-led gentrification of council estates in London forms part of a wider pattern
of state-led gentrification across the UK (see Paton and Cooper 2016), but it has been
especially visceral and pronounced in London due to its high land and property values.
Emergent investment opportunities have incentivized capital and state actors to evict
working-class residents from London council estates using a variety of economic and legal
mechanisms (Lees and Ferreri 2016). The underpinning policy of mixed communities
often speaks of retaining ethnic diversity, “multiculturalism” and “cosmopolitanism”, but
the evidence shows that the end result is more often displacement and what Bridge,
Butler, and Lees (2011) term “gentrification by stealth”. Gentrification has long been linked
to the accumulation of capital and dispossession (Smith 1996), and as work on racial
capitalism tells us, capital “can only accumulate by producing and moving through
relations of severe inequality among human groups” (Melamed 2015: 77).

Race, Place, and the Right to Remain

Place, like race, is relational (Massey 2005), and can be used to maintain racialized power
relations that often involve ‘defensive and reactionary responses – certain forms of
nationalism, sentimentalized recovering of sanitized “heritage”, and outright antagonism
to newcomers and ‘outsiders” (Massey 1991: 24). Importantly, “[r]acism is not confined to
the views of a few bigoted individuals . . . [but] is deeply-rooted in British society’s unequal
power structure and is perpetuated from day to day by the intended and unintended
consequences of institutional policies and practices” (Jackson 1987: 3). For the purposes
of this paper, the racialization of place is analysed through the identification of the
aforementioned structural nature of racism, primarily reproduced through institutional
bias. The importance of narrative analysis in understanding how racism operates, and the
problematizing of racialization manifesting itself in a black/white binary is key (Price
2009). The racialization of space has less to do with the ethnic identities of those who
live in an area, and more to do with the stigmatization of a place, often articulated
through themes, such as criminalization, migration and culture (Hall et al. 1978).
Some racialized places, such as Railton Road (Brixton, south London), or All Saints Road
(Ladbroke Grove, west London), became so closely associated with police violence that
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 5

militaristic terms such as “Front Line” were used to describe them (Keith 1993). But in the
twenty first century, the “hard” power of police repression has often been accompanied
by the “softer” power of gentrification-led displacement (Mavrommatis 2010; Perera
2019). Such displacement pressures – which include social and cultural processes of
alienation in addition to economic pressures (Marcuse 1986) – are particularly concerning
for BAME households, ethno-cultural or religious networks and institutions, and anti-racist
socio-political formations. For example, Reynolds (2013: 48) discusses how black youths in
deprived London neighbourhoods articulated the necessity to “stay put in order to get
on”. These young people felt better able to navigate discrimination in employment or the
criminal justice system by utilizing familial and local community networks and resources
in the so-called “good ghetto”. Even those black young people who went on to higher
education talked about attending local universities which were less prestigious than
others they could have gone to, but which had large numbers of working-class black
students in attendance.
This emphasis on the “right to remain” chimes with wider discourses of anti-
gentrification sentiment that emphasize the investments in place made by those popula­
tions displaced by incomers, and the lack of compensation involved. Working-class
perspectives on gentrification, especially in the UK, have emerged from calls for gentri­
fication scholars to focus on the experiences of the working classes and not just the
habitus of middle class gentrifiers (Slater, Curran, and Lees 2004). Subsequent analyses
though have been somewhat colour-blind, and rarely focus on racialization per se, none­
theless they do raise important questions relating to stigma, social networks and a sense
of belonging (Slater 2010; Paton 2014; Watt 2018). While the power of capital provides the
material power for gentrification, race remains a central mode of governance (via racial
capitalism) through which these class struggles are fought. In other words, through an
understanding that “race is the modality through which class is lived” (Hall et al. 1978:
394), we can better understand how the materiality of gentrification-led displacement
pressure is experienced through racialization.
To date, the bulk of research on the relations of race, ethnicity and gentrification has
been undertaken in the US (Lees 2016). There the common trope has long been of white,
wealthy gentrifiers displacing low-income blacks in inner city neighbourhoods, leading to
charges of “racial cleansing” (Goetz 2011). As in the UK, a racialized class politics rooted in
the historical political economy of race has long underpinned US public housing policy
(Fullilove 2004). Hirsch (1983), for example, has argued that public housing constituted
a federal programme to remove the poor, especially African Americans, from land wanted
by developers. Arena (2012: 143–144) consequently described the US federal Department
of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI programme (“Housing Opportunities for
People Everywhere)” of public housing demolition and renewal (which British policies of
estate renewal copied) as “racial cleansing” – “a qualitative move in handling Black
impediments to corporate-defined economic regeneration efforts”. In more recent work,
Hyra (2017: 89) discusses how black neighbourhoods like Shaw/U Street in Washington
DC have attracted white gentrifiers “living The Wire”, a form of urban slumming where in-
movers aim to experience the authentic “black ghetto”. The long-term outcome, as Hyra
puts it, is a move from the “dark” to the “gilded” ghetto.
6 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

In so far as they have studied displacement, gentrification studies in the UK have

generally been concerned with, and written about, the displacement of the working
classes. Yet as Shaheen (2020: 3) argues:

It was never the case that the British working class was only white. The British Empire meant
that a global working class was put to work. From the indentured labourers working in sugar
cane fields in Fiji, to those working in the mills in Wigan, and all of those enslaved across the
Empire – all contributed to the wealth of the landed gentry and indeed all were oppressed by
a system of power that privileged a handful at the top. This erasure of history is in part why
the term ‘working class’ has failed to be racially inclusive to date. It’s not just that the term
needs to be reinvented to include race because of the growing minority ethnic population in
the UK: it is rather that since its inception, the ‘working-class’ narrative has too often been
blind to the efforts and injustice faced by those who were not white. We need to correct for
centuries of oversight.

But simply adopting a US-centric model of the white middle class gentrification of BAME
working class neighbourhoods is problematic because the historical political economy of
race is different in the UK; ethnic relations intersect differently with immigration in British
cities. Mavrommatis’s (2010) “archaeology” of race in Britain talks about three distinct
moments: first, a moment of racial pathology in the 1970s and early 1980s, where
racialized settlement in British inner cities was pathologized as a social problem. Racial
minorities in British cities were seen to have caused their own deprivation, black youth
became the enemy within, and ethnic balancing and dispersal was seen as the policy
solution. Fear of the inner city “black ghetto” – like in the racially segregated US in the
1960s and 1970s – made its way into British notions of the inner city at this time,
encouraging the call for social housing ghettos to be (literally) blown-up (Lees and
White 2020). Indeed in 1977 the then-leader of the Greater London Council, Sir Reg
Goodwin, warned that London might follow cities in the US “into a descending spiral of
social and economic decline accompanied by civil disorder on a scale we have not
previously encountered” (Romyn 2019). Second, there was a moment of reflection after
the 1981 urban “race” riots when the now heavily-critiqued multicultural agenda came
into force, and race was theorized in terms of cultural difference. The term “race” was
substituted by “ethnicity”, and government began to argue that ethnic minorities were
not responsible for the deterioration of British inner cities. And, third, a celebratory
moment followed in the early 2000s where race was celebrated as difference and attempts
were made to capitalize on it in urban regeneration processes. This of course came off the
back of the middle-class gentrifiers celebrating and wanting to live in areas of ethnic
diversity, in “cosmopolitan”, “multicultural” neighbourhoods e.g. Hackney in inner London
in the 1990s (May 1996). Now, we are in a fourth moment, post-Grenfell, where the
structural injustices of race and class have obfuscated the multicultural utopia that
never was (Danewid 2020).
In what follows we investigate the experiences of BAME residents on London council
estates who have experienced/are experiencing displacement. We do so through the lens
of racial capitalism, for it connects the violent dispossession over time of the subaltern
classes from the slave trade to modern day displacements and is explicit about the
wounding that this causes. We focus on the BAME residents we interviewed because
they expressed racialized experiences of gentrification that they linked to histories of
migration and particular experiences of racism, in a way that our white working class (who
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 7

tended to be older, long-term residents of British, mostly English, heritage) interviewees

did not. We accept that the British white working class itself is racialized (see Bonnett
2002) but that is not the focus of this paper. While both our BAME and white interviewees
shared a common experience of indifference and neglect from local councils in the face of
gentrification and social cleansing, BAME populations in particular talked about the slow-
violence of their managed decline and expressed dismay at councils who were seen not to
care about their community (echoing to some degree the research by Snoussi and
Mompelat 2019). Yet BAME interviewees also expressed a particular frustrated hope and
discussed their struggle with displacement as racialized – as ethnic cleansing. The “good”
and the “bad” ghetto were articulated through their hopes, sense of community and
solidarity, and their fears of prejudice and wounding.

The Racialization of Gentrification-induced Displacement on London Council

Estates
There have been few studies examining how race and racialization, or indeed racial
capitalism itself, has played out in British regeneration schemes, including council estate
renewal. The research we draw on is from a wider project exploring the impact of renewal
on those residents being “decanted” from their homes to allow for demolition and
redevelopment of their council estate. We undertook 124 in-depth, semi-structured,
interviews (although 134 interviewees contributed as some interviews had more than
one interviewee present). These were with individuals/households on six estates across
London: the Aylesbury Estate (Southwark), Carpenters Estate (Newham), Love Lane
(Haringey), Gascoigne (Barking & Dagenham), Ocean Estate (Tower Hamlets) and Pepys
Estate (Lewisham). Focusing on questions of health and well-being, these included
residents on different tenures, and at different stages of life, and from different ethnic
backgrounds. On most of these estates, almost all our interviewees identified as being
from a BAME background, though on some there was a significant white (British) popula­
tion too. In several estates, we were told white residents were among the first to move
away when news of the redevelopment of the estate was first announced, suggesting
higher levels of social and spatial mobility or desire to move. Nonetheless, the working
class we interviewed on these council estates was a multi-ethnic working class experien­
cing both class and race inequalities. In similar vein to Snoussi and Mompelat (2019) we
found that despite a set of shared conditions, “class” was referred to in ambiguous,
ambivalent ways. Older, white males were the most confident in asserting their working-
class identity in interviews: other interviewees were fairly indifferent towards the label,
and some BAME interviewees saw it as only applying to white British people. In the
following, we anonymously quote only from BAME residents, using their self-ascribed
ethnicity as an identifier; as we noted before some – but not all – did not like, or use, the
BAME label.

Displacement Pressures
Overall, there was significant overlap in the experience of awaiting demolition and
redevelopment expressed by all those living on the estates we studied. Here, it is worth
noting that we interviewed a mixture of leaseholders (who had purchased their homes
8 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

under right to buy legislation) and tenants who rented on a shorter (insecure) or longer
(secure) term basis. The former were offered compensation for their loss of home, though
typically the amounts offered were insufficient to buy a similar home anywhere else in
London (see Hubbard and Lees 2018). Those renting were offered a similar home else­
where, though this could be out of borough, even out of London, and often required
sending children to new schools, having more difficult commutes to work (even losing
their job), loss of cultural facilities and break up of social networks. All our respondents
articulated this potential loss of sense of place, bemusement at the indifference and
neglect of any duty of care of their councils, and emphasized the fracturing of family and
community support networks. More positively, some saw their impending displacement
to new homes elsewhere as an opportunity to gain improved housing conditions, but few
felt that geographical displacement and the fracturing of community was a price worth
paying for such material gains.
Though some experiences were common across all interviewees, BAME interviewees
expressed extra layers of complexity in their feelings and expressions of displacement,
ones associated with their ethnic identity and immigration histories. A number of resi­
dents who were first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, West Africa or
the Indian subcontinent drew parallels between their council estate displacement and the
pressures leading to their migration to the UK, as one respondent explained:

‘We had a lot of problems in Sri Lanka, in the fighting, but why we ran away from our country
to here, because the fight between Sinhalese and Tamils . . . and the Sri Lankan government,
they had power, a lot of power . . . We came here in 1990 . . . So, I thought when I went to
these things, I thought we could have stayed, we could have death, in my country, in the
bombs. This is [more] hassle than that! That is my country. So I could have stayed there. This is
very insulting for us . . . ’ (Sri Lankan, 60-69 age group)

Others, born in the UK, felt bad for their parents who had been displaced from their country
of origin, emigrated to the UK, and worked hard to set up a home and better themselves:

‘It will be a big loss and, I know, from a personal perspective, I feel really, really bad for my
parents because they came as immigrants, as economic migrants in search of a better life, and
they have worked tirelessly, multiple jobs on the go, studying, bettering themselves, and
raising a family of five which is quite hard – which isn’t easy’ (Black/African, 20-29 age group).

In effect these immigrants were doubly displaced, first, from their country of origin and
now from a council estate they had made their home in, and from which they had worked
very hard to achieve betterment for their families.
For many, the impending loss of their home came to symbolize the collapse of their
social and economic dreams – the frustration of their hopes, in effect. This was worst for
those about to retire, some of whom now even contemplated returning to their country
of origin, disillusioned by how they were being treated:

‘And I think that the loss of this property would symbolise kind of, the loss of that dream, the
ideals that they have kind of lived their lives by. The fact that if you work hard and keep your
head down you can carve out a little space for yourself to enjoy and to hand on to your kids
and, it seems to be true for those in the financial sector who are bailed out the tune of billions
but it doesn’t seem to be true for small, working-class, hard-working, aspiring – I don’t know
whatever the government is calling them these days – families. Who are just trying to make
ends meet, and so I think, I think it is highly likely that my parents will sort of retire in a cloud
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 9

of disappointment, and go back to Ghana, and hopefully never think about this, the UK, ever
again, which is tragic’ (Black/African, 20-29 age group).

Even second-generation migrants, born in Britain, began to question their sense of

national belonging:

‘I saw how hard it is to survive in a city like London, in a country like Britain. Yeah, yeah, I feel
less British I guess’ (Black/British, 30-39 age group).

There was a sense of disbelief at what was happening, that not just their home but their
family was being destroyed, and that they were being treated as less than human,
dehumanized:

‘I have just seen first-hand the complete eradication of our family and that is something you
don’t really understand until it has happened to you, and it has meant that all of these ideals
and the aspirations that my parents had for themselves, and for me, seemed kind of valueless.
This is because I have seen how, like, rapidly they can be taken away from you, and in such
a slapdash, careless, and dehumanising way’ (Black/African, 20-29 age group).

They felt unwanted, even if they were born in the UK:

‘It feels that we are not wanted. You know, not because I was born in this country, it makes me
feel like I’m not wanted my own country as well. It feels like, it is true. You know, that is how it
feels like. So, don’t you want us here no more? Do we disturb you? Do they want new people to
be here? I don’t know’ [emphasis added] (Latin American/British, 30-39 age group).

The multi-ethnic working-class council estate communities in which the interviewees

lived were seen as non-racist environments by those who lived there, to some degree
protecting residents from the racisms outside. Here, a second-generation Afro-Caribbean
resident talked about the importance of living in such a community:

‘Well after everything that has happened, and the bombings and that, and Islamic stuff and
with Muslims and the Eastern Europeans, and everybody, they are looking at people differ­
ently. Do you know what I mean? And I don’t want to live like that. Because, I know, from what
my parents have told me, how hard they had it when they came here, and how they
struggled, with racism, getting jobs, getting a place to live, do you know what I mean? And
I am looking at this and I am thinking this is what they are doing to Eastern Europeans. What
we – what our parents – went through, they are doing the same thing to these people who
just want to live a decent life and to support their families back home. Do you know what
I mean? . . . And I, I don’t want to live with people who haven’t got that tolerance and that
understanding. Round here, it is not like that’ (African/Caribbean, 60-69 age group).

Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest (2015) discuss the tendency for BAME groups in Britain to
be increasingly spatially concentrated within areas that are dominantly non-white, and as
the above shows many of those living on London’s council estates did not feel disadvan­
taged by this – quite the opposite, many articulated the advantages of living in the same
community as people displaying diverse cultures, heritage and language. Indeed, for
many this bolstered their desire to remain in situ, and not be displaced by the demolition
and renewal of their estate.
10 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

Resistance to Displacement
Some scholars have argued that gentrification has reaffirmed the need for BAME com­
munities to defend their neighbourhoods (Perera 2019), countering the tendency of “new
urban pioneers” to “scrub the city clean of its working-class geography and history” (Smith
1996: 25). The experiences of marginalization experienced by many of the leaseholders on
the estates we studied did in fact translate into organized resistance, spanning high-level
legal campaigns funded through crowd sourcing (see Lees and Ferreri 2016; Hubbard and
Lees 2018) through to more grassroots struggles (see Watt 2016). These struggles have
been prolonged, but sometimes fractured given the gradual decanting of tenants and
displacement of leaseholders making it hard to maintain effective opposition:

‘It is a legal war of attrition, and it can be drawn out over many years . . . and these people who
are, for the most part, just trying to survive, cannot compete. So yes, there is a tactical way to
kill the fight in people’ (Black/African, 20-29 age group).

This splintering of opposition was consequential on the gradual decanting and removal of
residents, and the part-abandonment of estates. The James Riley Point tower block on the
Carpenter’s estate in Newham, East London, is a case in point. This was first earmarked for
demolition in 2004, with plans reconfirmed in 2015 and tenants in the block moved out
ostensibly because of ant infestation at that time. The search for a new development
partner was, however, abandoned in November 2018, with a major reconsideration of the
plans for the estate mooted. In the meantime, the remaining leaseholders in James Riley
Point had to contend with flooding issues as water poured down through their roof and
workmen struggled to access flats vacated by previous tenants. While those tenants who
argued that living with the ant infestation was intolerable were moved out, those who
had bought their flats under the “right to buy” scheme had to remain in situ, waiting for
news about what they might be offered for their flats.
This sense of living in a “state of abeyance” encouraged not just the council to
disinvest, but also residents to gradually give up investing in their home and
neighbourhood:

‘Yeah, so, you know, if you want to do something in the home, home improvements, for
improvements, that is on hold. Because you don’t want to be spending money, and then next
month we have to move out, it is, so that’s on hold. It is like, it is just hanging up in the air, not
knowing what is going to happen, and it has been like that since 2006ʹ (Indian, 60-69 age
group).

The potential psychological and physical consequences of living in this state of abeyance
appeared multiple, with the tortuous and exhausting processes of establishing how
displacement will impact on one’s home-space leading to feelings of shame, stress,
anxiety and otherness:

‘It is like you live in a hotel, it is not even a hotel. Do you understand? And, it is very frustrating
because, it is like I feel personally like a piece of shit. I feel like they can do whatever they want
with me. And sometimes, I said this a lot, I don’t want to think, because I am not from here,
I get treated like that’ (African/Spanish, 30-39 age group).

Kern (2016) adopts Nixon’s term “slow violence” to describe the gradual displacement of
people from gentrifying neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada, noting the exclusionary
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 11

tendencies that are set in motion long before the moment of eviction. In the case of
London’s council estates, plans for regeneration are mooted years before any formal
decanting or demolition begins, meaning that displacement actually starts much earlier
than any formal decision or ballot about estate redevelopment. This can mean that
leaseholders and others who are more socially mobile may be looking to move from
the estate long before they are required to leave: tenants might also seek re-housing
through a variety of means, not wanting to be wait until they are formally decanted (e.g.
on mental health grounds).

The ‘slow violence’ of renewal on our six estates created ‘chronic urban trauma’ (Pain 2019)
that was connected to structural racism and discrimination in complex, often invisible, ways.
The displacements experienced – of individual households, estate communities, and ulti­
mately destruction of ‘sense of place’ - were gradual, routinized, and even normalised forms
of violence (McKittrick 2011) that interviewees connected to their earlier experiences of
racism and discrimination, and past experiences of dispossession from other homes and
countries. Gentrification scholars need to pay much more attention to these forms of
gentrified racial violence, what enables it, and the experiences and concerns of those who
are suffering from it.

What appears particularly important is that displacement from London’s council estates
has not been a one-off event but a series of attritional micro-events that unfold over time,
generating different emotions and mental states for those affected: anxiety, hope, con­
fusion, fear, dislocation, loss, anticipation, dread, and so on. In some estates, it can be
years from the point of the announcement of the redevelopment before tenants and
leaseholders know what will happen to them. In the meantime, leaseholders may leave,
the neighbourhood begin to desertify and services begin to fail. In such cases, the life of
residents is effectively suspended: there is no longer any incentive to improve their home
or neighbourhood, nor is it clear how they should plan for the future. They are in a limbo,
effectively trapped in the present, and displaced before the event, to a degree unable to
function (cf. Fullilove 2004).
This limbo was seen as a major barrier to be overcome in terms of resistance to
displacement, with the recognition that it was important to build coalitions to challenge
the council and developers given the fact that some in the BAME population felt power­
less in the face of displacement pressure. This necessitated alliances between different
housing movements and pressure groups that often articulated an opposition to displa­
cement rooted in class rather than racial consciousness. But this led to issues. For example,
the successful Focus E15 Campaign – “Social Housing not Social Cleansing” (see https://
focuse15.org/) was seen, especially at the beginning, as appropriating the campaigning
ground from CARP (Carpenters Against Regeneration Plans), a locally based campaign
group formed in late 2011 who mainly came from BAME backgrounds. Some on the
Carpenters Estate felt that the Focus E15 was a group of mainly white, working-class lone
mothers who succeeded in publicizing the “social cleansing” in a way that BAME
Carpenters Estate residents had been unable to:2

‘And then there were split opinions so one of the residents formed another, you know,
committee, to get all of the residents involved in it, and then that started, you know, getting
the message [across] . . . And this Focus E15 group, which has been supporting us . . . they
came here and occupied for the week, to emphasise the [displacement] . . . you know’ (Indian,
60-69 age group).
12 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

The fact that a group of mainly white protestors, at that time, was able to effectively
highlight the displacement of a largely non-white population was an irony not lost on
some of our interviewees.
More widely, and during our research, the detrimental impacts of estate renewal on
BAME communities was highlighted in the Secretary of State’s ruling that underlined the
precedent-setting win at the First Aylesbury Estate Public Inquiry (see Hubbard and Lees
2018). His decision stressed the importance of the Public Sector Equality Duty in England
and Wales given the assertion that BAME residents would be “disproportionately affected”
by the compulsory purchase (CPO) and demolition of flats on the Aylesbury estate. Here, it
was ruled this demolition would have a negative impact on BAME residents’ ability to
retain their cultural ties to the area. Issues such as the “dislocation from family life” and the
potential of displacement to harm the education of affected children were also identified
in the decision letter, indicating a much wider approach to assessing the impacts of a CPO
than had been the case previously. In the Secretary of State’s summation, he noted:

‘The lack of clear evidence regarding the ethnic and/or age make-up of those who now
remain resident at the Estate and who are therefore actually affected by any decision to reject
or confirm the Order’.

And argued that given that:

‘67% of the population living on the Estate were of BME origin, it would be highly likely that
there would be a potential disproportionate impact of the CPO on the elderly and children
from these groups’.

Local residents suggested that this emphasized the racialized injustices often overlooked
in renewal processes:

‘This really blew up when they published that report that was actually publicised widely,
and . . . admitted that most people that live here would not be able to afford [to live] here. And
specifically, they said that it would affect BME groups. And they would be less likely to be able
to live in the new developments, okay? So therefore they have not done an equality impact
assessment, they have not done a risk assessment . . . All they see are the pound signs’ (Black/
British, 60-69 age group).

This emphasis on public equalities duties and anti-discrimination law as a basis for
preserving communities constructed over time was especially important as a counter to
widely held stereotypes of inner city estates as crime-ridden and failing communities,
which struck a chord with our interviewees.
On the latter, Perera (2019) discusses the correlation between attempts to gentrify so-
called “sink estates” and the criminalization of young black men who are seen as an
obstacle to such “regeneration”. This was apparent at the 2018 (revised) Aylesbury Estate
public inquiry (see Lees and Hubbard 2020) when Southwark Council tried to argue that
the estate had a very high crime rate and that regeneration would dismantle this (on the
conflation of race and crime, see Hall et al. 1978). Stigmatizing the Aylesbury estate “as
hell’s waiting room” was a long-running strategy used by the council to bolster its
arguments that the estate needed to be demolished and renewed (Lees 2014). They
continued this strategy of denigration in the public inquiry when Southwark Planning
Officer, Catherine Bates stated “There is a very high fear of crime” (inquiry notes), with
their expert witness Leary-Owhin (2018: 18) presenting a “blood-red” map of 2015 crime
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 13

and deprivation scores for the Aylesbury – the latter rebutted by the objectors who
ultimately showed that the Aylesbury had no higher a crime rate than many other areas
of London.
In Haringey’s Love Lane (Tottenham), even more than on the Aylesbury estate, the
perceived connections between crime and race run deep given the significance of the
1985 Broadwater Farm riots in the history of the capital’s race relations. The mooted
demolition of Love Lane, alongside Broadwater Farm, is seen by Tottenham’s BAME
community as a collective punishment by the council and police for them rioting
a second time (in 2011), and by one resident, due to central government’s racist
ideologies:
‘I am not accusing anyone in Haringey Council of having any particular prejudice but I think
what has happened is central government has influenced them, and central government has
a prejudice against Broadwater Farm and they indoctrinate Councillors . . . I mean, whatever
you think about the Councillors here, none of them are racists, really. You know, they might
bring in policies that, you know, don’t do anything much for black people but it is not
because, I don’t, I have never seen any evidence of it, but certainly in central government
there was’ (Black/British, 50-59 age group).

Another emphasized: “Because we live in an institutionally racist country and you have
got to remember that . . . the first excuse that anyone would give is: he’s black” (Black/
British, 50–59 age group).
Hence, across our case studies, resistance, whilst often (but not always) muted, was
expressed through the politics of migration and nationalism. As one respondent empha­
sized, estates appeared to be subject to mass displacement precisely because their
residents were not white British:
‘ . . . I thought because, first of all, we are Africans, we don’t know much about the system.
And, they think that most of the people living in this estate, or this borough, are minorities.
They are not working. They are, excuse me, they are stupid. Yeah, they know that. And, you
are just an individual, you are not a force, there is nothing that you can do. So they just think
that these people are stupid Africans’ (Black/African, 50-59 age group).

Our BAME respondents felt the justification for displacing them and other residents
involved a racialization of space which blamed them for the conditions of the estate,
and if not wholly responsible for their situation of displacement, then at least partly to
blame for not having escaped this situation previously. This is an example of the symbolic
violence wielded by those who displace, and an obvious obfuscation of the factors that
allowed the estate to decline, which has actually been a managed or allowed decline of
a racialized space that has led ultimately to the prognosis that demolition and rebuilding
is the only way forward. In the face of this slow violence, effective opposition has been
very difficult.

Conclusion
The story of British gentrification, especially in London where the term was first coined,
has run parallel with immigration, racial tensions, and migrant displacement. Even though
Ruth Glass (1964) herself discusses these issues, there has been very little subsequent
research on the relationship between them. Our research on the frontline in the
14 L. LEES AND P. HUBBARD

gentrification of London today – council estates – is then timely, as it reveals persistent

connections between racial displacements, the destruction of ethno-cultural infrastruc­
ture, and long-standing histories of discrimination in British housing markets. Since BAME
communities are disproportionately represented on London’s inner city council estates,
they are especially impacted by the push for estate renewal, with the displacements
potentially impacting them more because of long-standing histories of racism and
structural disadvantage. Indeed, our data about the impacts of displacement on BAME
groups, who have made their home on London’s council estates, might then be one tool
that helps forge a more effective resistance to this process. Without this, the widespread
nature of myths of criminalized, poverty-stricken and dysfunctional “sink estates” appear
difficult for racialized populations to counter, especially in instances where the redeve­
loped estates are proposed to be “mixed communities” where BAME residents will
theoretically benefit from living alongside wealthier, more often white, incomers.
It is clear there needs to be renewed focus on the intersection of race, class, and social
justice in studies of contemporary gentrification in London – and in UK housing studies
more widely – given recent ideological and political shifts in the discoursing of migration
and race:

‘Another reason for us to ‘connect the dots’ is that not only Brexit but also Windrush and
Grenfell gave us much-needed hints of the need to reflect on the deep and growing gulf
between the mainstream political debate and the lived reality of those affected on the front-
line of public policy’ (Snoussi and Mompelat 2019: 9-10).

All of those we interviewed who were being displaced from London’s council estates
expressed real anxieties about the gentrification of their homes and communities. But for
BAME interviewees in particular, there was a sense of double displacement: that is,
a disruption to them (and/or their family’s) striving to make a success of their migration
to the UK, compounded by a loss of what they had hoped would be a permanent, secure
home. They were experiencing “frustrated hope” – migration to Britain for a better life to
find limited access to decent housing, getting access to council housing (creating a “good
ghetto”, a sense/space of belonging, that protected them and enabled their aspirations)
but then being displaced by its redevelopment/gentrification. The disappointment felt
was palpable in the interviews. They were all proud of their estate communities and
feared the loss of close relationships and supportive networks. As such, all articulated the
challenges they were confronting as individuals, and rarely talked about social class
beyond the invocation of the broad notion of social cleansing. Indeed, for BAME groups
their ethnicity often foregrounded their class identity. Interactions with local councils
were experienced as class-based and discriminatory but in the BAME case there was
a clear sense of ethnic discrimination. The fact our research was carried it in the wake of
the 2017 Windrush scandal was significant here: 2 the unjust deportation of some of the
Caribbean migrants who arrived in the UK in the 1950s has come to symbolize the shift
towards a more restrictive and punitive take on immigration and a “hostile environment”
for BAME people in general (Wardle and Obermuller, 2019). But our research suggests that
the slow violence of estate renewal and gentrification was acutely felt by BAME indivi­
duals who knew they would struggle to rebuild multi-ethnic and supportive communities
elsewhere once removed from their homes. The idea that the UK is not as bad as the US
(or other countries) when it comes to racism in the state allocation, management and
 HOUSING, THEORY AND SOCIETY 15

renewal of housing is then a fallacy that the ongoing renewal of council estates in London
cruelly exposes. Racial capitalism simply plays out differently in the British context. We
need a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes processes of gentrification in the
UK, investigating the racialized violence of capitalism. For as Fried (1966: 361) said: “any
severe loss may represent a disruption in one’s relationship to the past, to the present,
and to the future”. To date British gentrification studies has been, for the most part,
colour-blind, obscuring its impact on non-white racialized populations. This paper con­
stitutes a first step towards that important goal.

Acknowledgments
The research on which this paper was based – ‘Gentrification, Displacement, and the Impacts of
Council Estate Renewal in C21st London’ was funded by the ESRC (Grant: ES/N0115053/1). We
especially wish to thank Adam Elliott Cooper, the Research Associate on this project, for his
contributions to this project.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the ESRC [ES/N015053/1], https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%
2FN015053%2F1.

ORCID
Phil Hubbard http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7504-5471

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