London's Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the 'Concrete Jungle'

by Michael Romyn

Overview

This book looks beyond the Aylesbury’s public face by examining its rise and fall from the perspective of those who knew it, based largely on the oral testimony and memoir of residents and former residents, youth and community workers, borough Councillors, officials, police officers and architects. What emerges is not a simple story of definitive failures, but one of texture and complexity, struggle and accord, family and friends, and of rapidly changing circumstances. The study spans the years 1967 to 2010 – from the estate’s ambitious inception until the first of its blocks were pulled down. It is a period rarely dealt with by historians of council housing, who have typically confined themselves to the years before or after the 1979 watershed. As such, it demonstrates how shifts in housing policy, and broader political, economic and social developments, came to bear on a working-class community – for good and, more especially, for ill.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030514792
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	09/20/2020
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Oral History
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Romyn received an AHRC-funded PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. He has published essays in Planning Perspectives and The London Journal.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2.'The End of Slums' and the Rise of a 'Housing Disaster', 1945 – 1970.- 3. Community, in all its Complexity, 1970 – 1979.- 4. Plotting a Map to Marginality, 1979 – 1997.- 5. New Deal? Aylesbury Regenerated, 1997 – 2010.- 6. Conclusions.