The returned

Abstract

Amid a globalised crisis in secure housing provision, this article zooms in on the specific experiences of older working-class people coping with public housing demolition and forced neighbourhood transition in London. London’s new-build mixed tenure housing developments provide varying proportions of social rental housing, some of it made available to tenants of the council estate it replaced. This article examines the experiences of older people who have taken up the ‘opportunity’ of ‘return’ and explores the multi-faceted work they are forced to undertake as they move into unfamiliar and capricious social, physical and political landscapes superimposed on the collapsed infrastructure of their old estate. The article brings themes of ‘un-homing’, ageing in place and everyday ‘repair’ work into encounter and calls for greater qualitative understanding of the ‘return’ experience as a dimension of forced relocation by housing restructuring and tenurial mixing projects.

Keywords:

• public housing
• un-homing
• displacement
• ageing
• council estates
• London

Acknowledgements

This article was sharpened significantly by various conversations with Paul Watt and from the reviewers’ helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ^‘Right to Buy’ was the flagship Thatcherite housing policy that enabled sitting tenants to ‘buy’ their council homes at a heavy discount and become ‘leaseholders’.

2 Albeit I am somewhat aware here of being a white male scholar drawing on an epistemological ‘outside’ (see Oswin 2018) to analyse a comparatively privileged urban environment in the Global North.

3 HAs are ostensibly non-profit housing providers which have grown to become major housing developers. Peabody is a London-based HA manages tens of thousands of homes across south-east England.

4 ‘Social rent’ is the most affordable form of rent for social housing tenants available in England. ‘London Affordable Rent’ is less affordable but is set considerably below ‘market’ rate. Shared ownership properties are classed as affordable ‘intermediate’ leaseholder homes in England. The household ‘owns’ a portion of the lease via a mortgage and also pays rent and service charges to a landlord (see Hollander 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Wallace

Andrew Wallace is a University Academic Fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]