“So, Don’t You Want Us Here No More?” Slow Violence, Frustrated Hope, and Racialized Struggle on London’s Council Estates

ABSTRACT

Since 1997, over 50,000 homes have been demolished to allow for the “renewal” of council estates in London. This has involved the “decanting” of short and long-term tenants, as well as those leaseholders who bought their homes under “right to buy” legislation. Often described as “social cleansing”, the racialized dimensions of these displacements remain under-explored despite asizable literature documenting the connections between race, place and state-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-standing 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Council estates
• displacement
• gentrification
• racialization
• housing movements

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 communities 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 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 concentration 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 accommodation, 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 populations, who face displacement and potential exclusion from London’s over-inflated housing 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 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 disadvantage. 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 restricting 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 provision, 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 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 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 populations displaced by incomers, and the lack of compensation involved. Working-class perspectives on gentrification, especially in the UK, have emerged from calls for gentrification 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, nonetheless 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.

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 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) population 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 experiencing 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 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 elsewhere, 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 residents 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 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 differently. 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 disadvantaged 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.

Resistance to Displacement

Some scholars have argued that gentrification has reaffirmed the need for BAME communities 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 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 ultimately 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, confusion, 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 powerless in the face of displacement pressure. This necessitated alliances between different housing movements and pressure groups that often articulated an opposition to displacement 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).

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 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 emphasized, 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 gentrification of London today – council estates – is then timely, as it reveals persistent connections between racial displacements, the destruction of ethno-cultural infrastructure, 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 redeveloped 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 individuals 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 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 constitutes 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).

Additional information

Funding

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