A notice on Twitter, advertising a radio appearance, drew my attention to a paper published last year on the stigma of council housing by Tom Slater. The paper is here; there’s an earlier version, for those who can’t get past the paywall, here. Slater claims to be paying attention to
“a term that was invented by journalists, subsequently amplified and canonised by think tanks and then converted into doxa by politicians: the sink estate. “
That’s not right.
The stigma of council housing is long-standing. It dates back at least to the people rehoused from slum clearance in the 1930s (disreputable areas had been identified before that, but they weren’t council estates). Many council developments were designed deliberately to be held at a distance from respectable housing: that is the subject of The Cutteslowe Walls, published in 1958 (the walls were built in 1934). To take another example, the primary school I went to in Newcastle had different entrances for kids from the council estate and private estate. Tucker’s 1966 book , Honourable estates, outlined the problems.
Within that system, however, some council tenancies were always seen as worse than others. Harry Simpson, a former director of housing in the 1960s, commented that “ghettoes developed because councils, when allocating accommodation, graded families according to their deserts instead of their needs”. In the 1970s, the leading text on housing management, Macey and Baker, advised agencies to rate the type of accommodation a person should receive by their personal suitability, including cleanliness and tidiness; that was how things were done when I started letting houses in Hartlepool, where prospective tenants were rated on such things and got a house that matched their rating. (I was carpeted at the time for writing an internal memo which said that this was leading to a concentration of people with problems in undesirable areas; later I included a comment on grading in my first report for Shelter in 1983.) Macey and Baker did, at least, reject the idea of segregating ‘problem families’ deliberately. I have the 1973 edition:
“All these problem families exhibit one common factor, namely, their inability to cope …. in some few instances, one or both of the parents may be physically well and of average intelligence, but of a type which the ordinary man in the street would classify as ‘bone idle’. … (but) it is difficult to believe that such a background of coercion, coupled with the fact that the families are thrown into association with other sub-standard families, is likely to be a good atmosphere in which to raise any family’s standard …”
Bad areas were variously known as ‘difficult to let’, ‘ghettos’, or (in a 1975 Scottish report) ‘depressed schemes’. ‘Ghetto’ estates were seen “as a form of punishment, a device for disciplining and the social control of tenants”. So the term “sink estates” was not a new, or a particularly influential, invention; it was just another way of referring to a widely observed set of problems.