Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment. . - Reviews - House and Home - book review

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2002 by Colin Ward

By Alison Ravetz. London: Routledge. 2001. [pounds sterling]22.50

Professor Ravetz is Britain's most distinguished housing historian. In the '90s she wrote with Richard Turkington The Place of Home, one of the few housing histories to take note of the changed use of space in the home brought about by heating systems and domestic appliances. Her new book, traces the more successful of council housing estates back to Howard's Garden Cities and the work of Unwin and the Arts and Crafts architects and the least successful to the impact of the Modern Movement and the pressure on local authorities by a Conservative government to adopt system-built high-rise solutions.

She stresses that the last people to be consulted were tenants, subject to an increasingly remote managerial bureaucracy, and describes how since 1980 the aim of governments of both complexions has been to squeeze housing out of council control. Apart from the 'right to buy' there is huge pressure to push whole estates into the hands of housing associations or private landlords, neither of which has even the formal electoral control of councillors.

She is withering about the way the concept of genuine tenant control has been crushed into rhetoric about 'partnership' in which the poor, in residualized 'sink' estates are 'required to manage their own poverty when everybody else failed to do so'.