Chapter Nine
Out-Of-Sync Estates

BEN CAMPKIN

Introduction

Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2016 newspaper article, headlined ‘I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain’, typifies the – at best – muddled and reductive and – at worst – manipulative ways that historical and other forms of evidence are evoked in political rhetoric on housing.¹ Such rhetoric by definition prioritises persuasion over accuracy, but in this chapter I take the content and presentation of Cameron’s words seriously, scrutinising his terms using the methods of demystification offered by historical scholarship. The article, given the alternative titles (and meanings) ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ and ‘Estate regeneration’ in the government’s own press releases, bemoans Modernist social housing and planning as a failure of the state.² But the position it articulates is itself formulated on the basis of an unreconstructed, universalising, and unsustainable conceptualisation of modernity and urbanity, emphasising the momentum of historical change, and a socially and environmentally regressive conviction that the past can simply be swept away. To explore this tension I pay attention to the language used, looking at contemporary terminology in relation to its 1970s and even earlier, nineteenth-century precedents, and to the way that research is invoked in present-day housing discourse.

Theorist of global urbanism Jennifer Robinson has pointed to problems with the way that in urban studies cities have been conceptualised through prioritising ‘the new’, and a specific Western construct of modernity.³ This pursuit, she argues, has privileged certain cities over others, and has universalised the experiences of those cities. The result has been to create detrimental forms of understanding that need to be challenged through new approaches to theorising the urban. On the distortions that the prioritisation of the new inflicts on our understanding of urban history Robinson argues:

Since such conceptualisations of the new have filtered through to policy and urban management, with its incessant focus on innovation and novelty, and given the uneven effects of such a pursuit around the globe, this prompts the question of how politicians and others can develop and publicly articulate more ethical alternative models, responding to Robinson’s call to conceptualise cities ‘beyond the new’. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s formulation of ‘the now’, Robinson argues that we can move forwards by recognising the present as a moment in which multiple pasts coexist and collide, rather than through a linear, positivist, teleological model of history⁵ – the model, that is, that Cameron expresses.

Put another way, ‘the now’ allows us to recognise reductive ways that history is written from an elite perspective (dislocating, displacing, forgetting, denying), and to challenge this through attending to the qualities of the past that make it at once in and out-of-sync with the present. In relation to the extant built fabric, as an outcome structured by historical decisions and conditions – a repository of history and ideology, continuing to function in the present – these qualities are made even more complex. Furthermore, the discourses of the present, and on housing in this case, purport to be new even while they are, more often than not, underpinned by older arguments, evidence and terminologies which return and recirculate with similar or new intent. The question then becomes one of whether we can realise potential from recognising history’s fundamentally out-of-sync dimensions in developing socially progressive historical methods.

To develop this argument further, in my analysis of Cameron’s rhetoric I will focus on one metaphor he uses and that was attached to the article in the government press release and in its wider dissemination in the mainstream press: the ‘sink estate’ (or, in its more cautiously qualified, political form, the ‘so-called “sink estate”’).⁶ Understanding this term helps to position current political and media discourse within a longer history of representations of housing and poverty in Britain.

The origins of the ‘sink estate’ categorisation are to be found in left writing on housing, focused on social change, in New Society in the 1970s. Yet between then and now it shifts from sociological descriptor, linked to the close and ethnographic analysis of the empirical realities of specific estates and the lives of their residents, to an imprecise ideologically driven usage as a caricature of dysfunctionality or failure.⁷ The notion of ‘sink’ reflects and reproduces the anxieties of politicians and other commentators about the latent threat of estates and their residents. The fear, that is, that they are, or could become, out of sync, disrupting the status quo. I will examine the context in which this term emerged in environmental studies and social science terminology of the 1970s, and its historical precedent in nineteenth-century commentaries on ‘the residuum’, concluding by pointing to a more creative understanding of ‘sink’ emerging in science and technology studies today.

Rhetoric as Intervention

In his work on Victorian public discourse, the social historian Geoffrey Crossick notes that language ‘is no mere reflection of external reality, but an intervention within it’.⁸ For this reason, it is worth architectural historians paying attention to the ebbs and flows, high-rises and sinks, of political rhetoric on housing, even when it may seem all too empty and predictable, or a mere symptom of (rather than an active constituent in) the formation of ideology. Appearing transient, politicians’ exchanges of words on housing equate in some ways to the market abstractions that powerfully shape transactions in the built environment. Like markets, these cyclical statements have concrete impacts in the world; they are framed and positioned by elites, but they also take on their own agency, once uttered. There is a direct link, of course, in that more than at any time in history, rhetorical statements can immediately and strongly influence housing markets. Today’s housing discourse is often presented in the most neutral of tones, and/or ‘direct’ language, backed up by reassuring quantitative evidence – just as markets are presented as objective truth, or as ‘natural’, while being anything but. Where financial markets and political rhetoric on housing intersect they also have in common a play between a surface register of simplicity, and underlying layers of labyrinthine, obfuscating complexity, only accessible to those with the resources of technical expertise.

In British cultural studies, Raymond Williams asserted the value of histories of the most commonplace, naturalised, and apparently neutral of words.⁹ In architectural history, Adrian Forty has adapted Williams’ approach to the vocabulary of modern architecture, also drawing on Roland Barthes’ semiotic and post-structuralist analyses of everyday codes, language and popular culture.¹⁰ Forty, along with scholars in urban studies, has critiqued the ways that in Modernist discourse scientific models and metaphors are detached from their historical and geographic origins, requiring us to trace nuanced trajectories of meaning, and pathways of displacement and substitution. Often, these scholars have noted, scientific terms – including those of urban studies and sociology – are co-opted and used in unintended ways to enforce the dominant logics of urbanisation and/or parochial ‘circuits of knowledge’.¹¹ This requires us to conceptualise the urban, as Robinson argues, through attention to the locatedness of concepts in specific places and times.¹²

Cameron’s dystopic images of bleak high-rises are so well established as clichés of the media, cultural and political imaginary of UK housing estates as to seem unremarkable.¹³ There are strong similarities between these statements and Tony Blair’s first prime ministerial speech at the Aylesbury Estate in 1997, where he called for a new approach to urban regeneration that would address entrenched poverty, and mournfully remarked that ‘all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete’.¹⁴ If in New Labour’s lexicon there was a revival of nineteenth-century notions of the underclass, in Cameron’s rhetoric there is a return to sociobiological terms, such as ‘sink’, associated with 1970s sociology and ‘environmental determinism’ in architecture and town planning.¹⁵

In his article, Cameron’s emphasis in defining his specific place and time is as one of flux, a ‘turnaround decade for Britain’, a maelstrom of change, following ‘state failure over decades’, ‘decades of neglect’:

These few sentences highlight the emblematic use of degraded and forgotten estates in British political and media discourse. Seen through environmental determinist arguments, these ‘failed’ estates are a generic problem to be solved, rather than a diversity of places with specific histories and communities. We can also note internal contradiction in calling for history to inform current policy even as the entire town planning system, and its democratic functions, are dismissed as ‘pointless’ .

It may be true that there is a lack of political will to address housing need and the housing affordability crisis, but given the rate that social rented housing has diminished under successive administrations there has not been a lack of will to ‘get things done’. Instead, it is exactly that will – the neoliberal ideology of pragmatism – that has driven the sale of a wide range of public assets, and has led iteratively to the reduction of the powers of the democratic planning system which Cameron regards with disdain as a barrier to progress.¹⁷ The confident expression of this disdain, by a government prepared to be seen as bulldozers who can ‘tear down anything that gets in our way’, does, however, mark a shift away from the cautious tone of social responsibility featured in New Labour’s rhetoric. This demolition persona fits into a logic of ‘spatial cleansing’ that is a characteristic feature of neoliberal urbanism in a variety of contexts, where the fantasy of being able to erase the past and start from scratch is a defining feature.¹⁸

Perhaps because of this reckless, aggressive tone, and the specific political moment – the controversial Housing and Planning Act 2016 was passing through Parliament at the time the article was published – these comments provoked much wider commentary and debate.¹⁹ The responses in the national press ranged from critiques of the Prime Minister’s underdeveloped estate regeneration strategy, his choice of words, the relatively small budget announced – which in any case turned out to be a loan that would need to be repaid – and the lack of guarantees to vouch for residents to be able to stay in their neighbourhoods, all the way to arguments that those rejecting the government’s position were simply nostalgic leftists who in effect wanted those entrenched in poverty to stay that way.²⁰ The weight of commentary has been critical, however.

Evidence-Based Policy or Research-Substantiated Rhetoric?

What evidence is presented to substantiate Cameron’s statement? It is backed up through reference to two main sources. Firstly, an analysis of the London riots of 2011 by Space Syntax Limited is cited – based on the techniques of spatial analysis introduced by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson at the Bartlett in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently commercialised and widely deployed to evaluate spatial characteristics and their social consequences as part of development processes.²¹ In highlighting this one mapping of the relationship between post-war housing estates and the riots, it is represented as scientifically conclusive as to the cause, and, by implication, the solution. But Space Syntax’s quantitative and morphological study takes its place in a wide field of scholarly analysis.²²

It is easy to see how and why Space Syntax’s findings, detached from their context and reduced to a sound bite, might be both reassuring and useful to the Conservative government. Space Syntax has conducted a range of research on London housing estates over a long period, but this research takes its place with a lively arena of academic and professional debate. An exchange in the journal Cities between Jeremy Till, as a critic of the Space Syntax research on the London riots, and Bill Hillier, as the original and lead proponent of Space Syntax, shows how the architectural debates around council housing and the riots form part of a long-running debate about the relationship between space, form and social behaviour in architecture and urban studies.²³

The basis of Till’s critique is that the Space Syntax analysis of the riots presents a ‘causal link between space and behaviour, in this particular case the spatiality of post-war housing estates and the act of rioting; [and that] this is a causality that apparently overrides the social and political backdrop.’²⁴ He rather sees the riots as a ‘magnification of the everyday’, or, an eruption of existing, underlying, urban conditions, where ‘the form of the riots is conjoined with the form of the space’ but not determined by it.²⁵ In response, using conventional environmentally deterministic analogies with medicine and disease, Hillier rebuts the claim that Space Syntax is spatially deterministic ‘in a “cause and effect” sense’, and goes on to suggest that the position is in fact closer to Till’s. He gives examples from the history of Space Syntax’s attempts to show how ‘spatial design can radically change the way, and the degree to which, we become aware of other people through everyday activity in public space’, bringing to light ‘spatial mechanisms’ and the ways that images of stigmatisation (the ‘sink estate’) have actual effects.²⁶ Yet no matter where one sits in this debate, in its political articulation all subtlety fades into the reductive and stigmatising claim: ‘as spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates. Almost three quarters of those convicted lived within them. That’s not a coincidence.’²⁷ Of course it would not be politically advantageous for Cameron to highlight the nuances of academic and professional analyses of the riots; and it is easy to see why a quantitative and cartographic interpretation is attractive and lends itself to a rhetoric in which post-war estates cause riots, as opposed to any attempt to engage with the complexities of qualitative evidence, or philosophical and ethical arguments.

The second piece of research which Cameron uses to bolster his position on estates is a report arguing for a ‘Complete Streets’ approach to the regeneration of local authority housing estates. The report was funded by – and designed in conversation with – the Cabinet Office, and produced by the residential research unit of real estate company Savills Plc, with Space Syntax again being funded by the government.²⁸ The Savills research was released the day after Cameron’s article was published, and his reference to its imminent publication suggests coordination with the government’s agenda. No brief for this research is in the public domain but it is important to note (which Cameron omits to mention) that Savills is a commercial entity with vested interests in urban development. The company has internationally renowned research capabilities formed through 28 years of research on residential real estate, working for a range of private, public and third sector clients.²⁹ The research conducted by Savills includes both proactive studies on contemporary issues, and studies driven by the needs and interests of their clients and associates in the property sector, such as national government, local authorities and housing associations.³⁰

The particular study referred to by Cameron is a hypothetical investigation that sets out to identify ‘the potential benefits of the Complete Streets approach’ – that is, a street-based, mid-rise approach which densifies development on local authority-owned land – by comparing it to existing ‘block-based’ approaches.³¹ The purpose, as industry-led research, was to think through the ‘policy and business responses’ and quantify the values that could be realised relative to existing approaches.³² Savills’ approach to value is to see real estate and land values as intrinsically tied to the quality of neighbourhood environments, which includes a conception of social value. This work assumes that government regeneration strategy should proceed from ‘optimal real estate solutions’ and releasing longer-term asset values from public stock; that local authorities are sitting on latent assets; and that developers are neglecting the longer-term economic benefits of good quality consultation which genuinely engages housing estate residents.³³ The beneficiaries of these values, and any indication of mechanisms for distribution of benefits, are outside of the scope.

The main position stated in this report is that the approach to estate regeneration needs to change and that a move to a ‘complete streets’ model will lead to ‘the creation of several hundred thousand new homes on brownfield sites – as well as enhancing the lives of existing residents; building London community and commercial capacity in line with residential growth and regenerating surrounding areas’.³⁴ Densification of development on land is needed, the authors argue, on estates that feature ‘poorly managed green open space’ which can ‘de-value surroundings’.³⁵ The report’s preoccupation with ‘attractive neighbourhoods’ corresponds with a government emphasis on ‘new private homes, built attractively’ to cross-subsidise estate regeneration.³⁶ The authors prioritise the importance of streets and their ability – in contrast with block-based schemes associated with recent regeneration – to produce coherent urban fabric. This is reinforced by invoking the endurance and success of existing ‘traditional’ London streets and the wealthy areas characterised by them:

The authors take pains to emphasise they are not positing ‘simple reproduction of historic street patterns and buildings’ but rather arguing for new streets informed by traditional urbanism serving contemporary needs. Traditional urbanism is not defined, however, and seemingly discounts traditions of Modernist urbanism.³⁸

The Savills’ report is based on a three-month research programme which was mainly quantitative in its methods, involving the identification of local authority housing estate land, and the measurement of its present utilisation, and its potential capacity to densify. It is partly based on an analysis of six estates, the locations and identities of which have been disguised, with a summary of the housing and additional value that could be elicited through Complete Streets, in comparison with the dominant model of block-based property-led regeneration which the report refers to as ‘Contemporary Regeneration’. It is underpinned by extensive financial calculations, and based on spatial analysis by Space Syntax Limited, and detailed considerations of selected scenarios for the six sites.

The case studies were chosen by Savills and were anonymised and disguised because the company was keen to avoid controversy or alarm if residents misread what Savills understood to be hypothetical research as actual proposals.³⁹ However, the identities of these estates have been partly exposed by activists who managed to determine block identities using cross-referencing with maps and images available in the public domain.⁴⁰

Leaving aside the content of the proposals for the Complete Streets approach, the way in which this research has been commissioned and used to substantiate Cameron’s article is symptomatic of a problematic relationship between evidence, policy and political rhetoric which is currently a matter of wider concern in scientific and public debate.⁴¹ The origins of the research – the important information that it was specifically produced for the Cabinet Office by Savills, without a public tendering process, is not mentioned; nor is the fact that the government influenced the research design and presentation. Sleight of hand is also evident when we consider that the Savills report – like the Space Syntax research – only focuses on London, and yet Cameron’s comments extrapolate from it to describe estates in the UK more generally.

There are a number of issues which make it difficult for the public to determine the rigour of the research and therefore its findings. The methodology section gives a basic overview of the methods used but does not give a rationale for the decisions that were made about why the methods were chosen, how the case studies were selected, why they were deemed representative of London estates as a whole, what sources were consulted to understand them, which examples of ‘Contemporary Regeneration’ were explored, or how or why certain assumptions were made – such as excluding demolition, decanting and Compulsory Purchase Order from the financial projections. Nor is it clear why other alternative models – such as developing on Green Belt land – were not explored, or were ruled out. Has Contemporary Regeneration been evaluated in terms of outcomes for residents?⁴² The public do not have access to the Savills archive so they only have the report and its appendices to understand the evidence and the basis from which it has been interpreted.

Historical Evidence in the Case for ‘Complete Streets’

The Savills research is justly critical of the short-termism of recent regeneration models. Through invoking ‘traditional urbanism’ it also, as we have seen, uses historical arguments of a kind to substantiate the proposed model of development. However, the approach to history focuses on the evolution of morphology rather than social or economic conditions, with a nebulously defined ‘traditional urbanism’ as the benchmark of successful urban design. Captioned images of streets from ancient civilisations are given in a method of visual citation and cross-referencing not unlike those favoured by Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, or later echoed by the Canadian architect Oscar Newman in Defensible Space.⁴³

Unsurprisingly, given the scope of the report, the authors avoid a detailed assessment of architectural Modernism or its outcomes. Instead, in attempting to outline a new model for regeneration that can be generically applied, Modernism is reduced to a problem: the lack of fit between the low densities of the 1960s and today’s need for a more intensive (profitable) use of space. They deploy a rationalist approach to planning which on some levels is a legacy of Modernism, so that urban planning is primarily seen as a question of efficiency. But outcomes are measured in terms of the appreciation of built assets for landowners, rather than the Modernist interest in efficiency in the name of welfare and the public good.

This research, which privileges quantitative and morphological data, is detached from the social history of these estates, and the evidence that qualitative methods might afford. The researchers’ interaction with specific estates is primarily mediated, from a distance. That is understandable as a short desk-based and hypothetical exercise. But the research does make general claims about features of post-war estates as a whole which it would only be possible to evidence fully with reference to detailed knowledge of specific circumstances. For example:

Such statements refer to contested aspects of Modernist built environments and raise questions about what criteria are in use to evaluate standards as well as about the representative range of samples the researchers have considered. Even though the balance of the Savills report is not towards estate demolition options, it does not rule demolition out, and it is easy to see how its claims make for easy manipulation into a political rhetoric which, in headline and tone, is weighted towards demolition as a broad-brush approach, even alongside a gesture to regeneration.⁴⁵

There is one qualitative dimension to the Savills research: a survey, conducted with a small sample of what appears to be a very narrow demographic of industry experts. The lack of diversity and the notable exclusion of residents’ voices are in tension with the significant weighting given to this evidence, and also with the findings of the interviews themselves which place emphasis – as Savills relay, but which Cameron neglects – on the need for genuine engagement with residents to ensure the success of regeneration, and to counter distrust accumulated through negative experiences of regeneration processes:

and later:

To omit these very strong emphases in presenting the research findings underlines the government’s selective use of evidence, and creates a tension between its own position and the stated aim of Complete Streets as a model that strives to achieve ‘social value’ alongside financial viability. How could any regeneration policy succeed when it neglects the specific and complex histories of estates and resident-led narratives of those histories, or reduces understanding of the multiple and complex legacies of Modernism to journalistic clichés? Although the Estate Regeneration Advisory Panel subsequently convened by Lord Heseltine at the government’s request supports ‘locally led’ regeneration and calls for communities to come forward with ‘innovative ideas to achieve desirable neighbourhoods that local people can be proud of’, in Completing London’s Streets residents’ voices are absent except in the commentaries of a narrow range of industry experts.⁴⁸ Lord Heseltine’s panel lacks community representatives and sets up a problematic hierarchy between ‘experts’ and the ‘local stakeholders’ with whom they will work.

‘Sink Estate’: A Brief History

When Cameron evokes the ‘sink estate’ as part of a portrayal of failed welfare state Modernism, what are the connotations? In their study of Modernist hygiene aesthetics, and specifically of the sink in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929), architectural historians, Nadir Lahiji and Daniel Friedman provide a useful definition of ‘sink’:

It is clear how such a wide-ranging concept, like the notion of ‘regeneration’, might have appeal to politicians, policy-makers, journalists and academics. As with regeneration, however, in the case of ‘sink’, the specific trajectories through which the concept has entered and shaped urban debate have been obscured. Although ‘sink’ has become associated with journalistic portrayals of estates, and mainstream political rhetoric in which social housing is deployed as a motif to encapsulate a need for large-scale social change, its origins are in sociological research and architectural criticism of the 1970s.

The use of ‘sink’ to describe an estate or an economically deprived area is therefore a relatively recent etymological development. The term was used as an adjective to describe deteriorating conditions before ‘sink estate’ became a noun.⁵⁰ In 1976, New Society defined the term ‘sink estate’ as ‘the roughest and shabbiest on the books, disproportionately tenanted by families with problems, and despised both by those who live there and the town at large’.⁵¹ The term is used in New Society again in 1978 but in a substantive essay reflecting on the arguments about the ‘Making of modern slum estates’. In this article, journalist, social commentator and regular feature writer for New Society Gavin Weightman comments on the rapid decline of certain post-war estates, and again uses ‘sink’ to denote the least popular housing, rejected even by those on the housing waiting list:

‘Sink estate’, in this account, is equated with ‘ruin’ and ‘slum’, which are also used, as Weightman elegiacally, but also analytically, evokes the semi-deserted wasteground of a council estate returning to nature at just 20 years old.

The essay is notable for its balance, being critical of both left radical and conservative architectural determinist ‘quick and easy explanations’ for degradation.⁵³ As a process of decline, according to Weightman, sink is caused in part by highly particular local issues, including the availability of better housing, which decreases demand for certain relatively new estates. He engages with the nuances of debates about architectural determinism as others engaged with decline. Weightman contends that in spite of how bad it looks, it is wrong to see places like Noble Street as ‘simply a design failure’, and notes instances where decline has been successfully reversed, giving the example of local students and other single professionals renting flats on otherwise hard-to-let estates.⁵⁴ He goes on to dismiss the determinist association of high-rise and sink, critiquing Oscar Newman’s ‘defensible space’ approach through reference to a review of the literature on ‘problem council estates’ carried out by the Building Research Station for the Department of the Environment.⁵⁵ Weightman ends his article with a warning:

Demolition has not, in 2016, become a popular solution with residents, but it is both revealing and disturbing to read this sentence now, when estate regeneration strategy so often favours demolition, even when the evidence for it is contested.⁵⁷

This and a second article by Weightman raise a general problem for journalists (and academic commentators) writing about urban decline. While Weightman strives to provide thorough and balanced social and architectural criticism, and to critique the vague ‘impressions’ through which estate reputations are informed – or misinformed – through racialised or other constructs, at the same time he revels in descriptions of degraded environments (‘a grey fortress in a scrubby landscape’ at Hulme Crescents).⁵⁸ But in this writing there is a self-reflexive attention to the power of language to contribute to decline, and a clear emphasis on demystifying the negative language and aesthetic value judgments being deployed, as when he notes that ‘it’s hard to separate out image and reality in Moss Side and Hulme’ in the apocryphal stories of decay, infestation and so on.⁵⁹ There is also an explicit case being made for more rigorous sociological research to understand complex environments. For Weightman, knowledge about estates has to come about by giving voice to residents themselves, here through an informal ethnographic approach, in keeping with New Society’s wider interests in privileging under-represented voices.⁶⁰ He draws attention to the fact that Hulme Crescents is strategically deployed as a symbol of decline simultaneously in left and right propaganda, in texts that ‘shriek’.⁶¹ In keeping with the magazine as a whole, Weightman’s approach is not to be news-led but rather to pause critically and evaluate the specific situation in its complexity.⁶²

That New Society was an important conduit for the dissemination of strong empirical research on housing is also clear from articles such as Michael Young’s ‘Never go out after dark’ (1981) in which he reported findings from an Institute of Community Studies survey of 929 people surveyed about housing in Hackney. Young reports on the findings of these interviews, which highlight the nuanced ways that the management and design of housing interact with demographic factors to influence perceptions of danger or safety. Once again, it is emphasised that this is clearly not a simple matter of design, and once again the article suggests productive ways of addressing the challenges identified by residents, such as through the reintroduction of in situ caretakers who had by the early 1980s been withdrawn as part of the Conservative government’s spending cuts.⁶³ New Society’s commitment to in-depth, accessible coverage of housing issues is also demonstrated by one-off pamphlets such as A Guide to the Housing Finance Act (1972), published with the main magazine and cheaply available for independent distribution.⁶⁴

The term ‘sink estate’ also appeared in academic discourse in the context of sociology and specifically ‘radical deviancy’ theory of the 1970s, and in attempts by sociologists to understand violence in working-class youth cultures through the use of participatory approaches focused on instigating social change.⁶⁵ In London, it also featured in New Society’s coverage of the aftermath of the Broadwater Farm riot on the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, in 1985. Writing in 1987, Steve Platt rejected the idea that this was ‘the crime-ridden sink estate of popular mythology’, drawing attention to the problematically negative and imprecise operation of the sink estate imaginary. He highlighted, in response, the lack of vandalism and graffiti, drug abuse and petty crime and instead emphasised the range of community-led initiatives. Again using ethnographic methods he comments that black and white, young and old residents and the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign all repeatedly reinforced the point that they understood the riot as an ‘uprising’, a reaction to years of racist policing, as well as a response to Cynthia Jarrett’s death while her home was being searched by police. For Till, in the debate with Hillier referred to above, Broadwater Farm following the riots is a key site in which a range of authors developed determinist arguments that degraded estates ‘result’ in riots.⁶⁶ This event marked a turning point, further polarising debates about post-war Modernist estates.

Another early use of the term, in 1981, features in an article on ‘The New Right and Architectural Aesthetics’, in History Workshop Journal. This report of a professional forum of architects and historians demonstrates that even those who were contesting conservative approaches to architectural aesthetics – lately put forward by Roger Scruton in The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), and David Watkin in Morality and Architecture (1977) – and intent on countering such texts with ‘proper left analysis’, saw no problem in using the term.⁶⁷ However, the usage here emphasised sink as reversible, with a need to give ‘new substance to the issue of a practical aesthetics of architecture by suggesting that it should address itself to such questions as how to rehabilitate a sink estate so people would actually want to come and live in it’.⁶⁸ The phrase ‘sink estate’ had not yet stagnated into a classification that was stigmatising, conflating residual material conditions with people to an extent that exceeded its analytical value for describing processes of decline.

The article reports on an ‘Art and Society History Workshop’ held at the Bartlett School of Architecture in May 1981, its purpose ‘to engage in a critique of a new right tendency in recent architectural writing’, which ‘combines a denunciation of Modernism with a call for the return to a classicising aesthetic in which the social dimension can be completely ignored’.⁶⁹ Aligning himself with this position, in response Potts critiques the ‘commonsense notion of value that can only seem to be natural because it is one of the shared values of the upper middle class minority’.⁷⁰ The proponents of this critique called for more rigour in the use of history in housing and architectural discourse, critiquing the ‘pseudo-history’, ‘anti-history’ and ‘lack of historical understanding’ that feature in the writings of Modernism’s supporters and its detractors (the new architectural moralists). They also commented on the way in which, in debates about Modernism, class-based value judgments are imposed through an insistence on certain architectural aesthetics. These all seem very relevant critiques for discourse about post-war estates in the present day, and in particular the way that ‘traditional urbanism’ and ‘attractive’ housing are invoked as if these categories were universally understood and agreed to be desirable.

Sink and Residuum: Moral Discourses on the out of Sync

There are echoes, then, of these early 1980s conversations in the discourses of the present day. In current debate, out-of-sync evidence (such as that from earlier phases of environmental determinism) is recycled or used out of context, while the more rigorous and mixed-methods approach to ethnographic and architectural historical research exemplified in New Society seems to be lacking in the kinds of research that are privileged by the media as it feeds on clichés.⁷¹ In many ways the arguments and rhetoric seem diminished in their ability to understand and present knowledge about estates which have, in the intervening period, accrued further complexity as historical objects still very much in use and transition. That the emblematic estates that are the object of attention now are consistent with the cases discussed in the 1970s and 1980s instils a further sense of repetition.

The idea of sink, via the notion of residuality, highlights a much longer historical trajectory through which contemporary housing discourse must be understood. It links back to the nineteenth-century concept of ‘the residuum’ described by the social historian Gareth Stedman Jones:

This account reminds us of the origins of regeneration and degeneration as components of a moral discourse in which the weak bodies and characters of the poorest in society are merged with states of urban decline. Stedman Jones emphasises that the problem of the residuum was of a latent threat to the social order, a ‘disquieting alien presence’ who inhabited ‘cities within cities’ – the same crowd who were understood by writers such as Engels to strike fear into the hearts of the powers that be, because of their potential to take coordinated action.⁷³ Furthermore, the theory of ‘degeneration’, generally supported by the middle classes in the 1880s and 1890s, understood the threat of decline (moral and physical, such as stunted growth) as hereditary and worsening with every urban generation.⁷⁴ Building on Stedman Jones, Geoffrey Crossick notes how the political economy of the nineteenth-century capitalist city coexisted with the social hierarchies established in the eighteenth century; yet he is critical of Stedman Jones’ analysis for a tendency to submerge ambiguities of meaning into a fixed structure, whereas ‘the new ideas and perceptions expressed in unchanging language need stressing just as much as do the older ideas expressed through new language’.⁷⁵ He also notes that Victorian vocabularies for class were closely linked to housing typologies, and that these linguistic-spatial classifications ‘powerfully shaped perceptions’ of distinct social groups, including the instance of the residuum established in commentaries of the 1880s.⁷⁶ The residuum, like ‘sink’, which is used to refer to both estates and communities, was used by a range of commentators, including those who set out to address social problems rather than reinforce existing hierarchies and divisions. This term was of equivalent legibility to sink, equated with ‘the low’, in terms of the spatial stratification of class. And it was equally malleable, able to be politically manipulated through its imprecisions.

Sinks: Out-Of-Sync Potential

The ‘sink estate’, as it has appeared in recent discourse, is on many levels a problematic metaphor. As Forty has commented, ‘metaphors are experiments with the possible likeness of unlike things’.⁷⁷ In the case of ‘sink’, the original analytic nuance of the notion has been lost. As with anxieties about the residuum, with the urban disorder of 2011 as the backdrop, the latent threat of the sink estate, in Cameron’s article, ‘is just how cut-off, self-governing and divorced from the mainstream these communities can become’.⁷⁸ This perceived threat, at a time when the apparatus of governance is shifting to private companies, points to a sense of sink as potential, more akin to Engels’ analysis of the possible revolutionary action of the crowd.

In this context, environmental theorist Jennifer Gabrys’ metabolic conceptualisation of sink is pertinent. Gabrys examines sinks as they feature in the physical sciences to refer to ‘spaces and processes that capture and channel wastes’.⁷⁹ She emphasises these spaces – from our bodies to sewers and wastegrounds – as ecologically vital for the processing and transformation of wastes. In this rendering sink refers to iterative and creative processes of reconfiguration, and contests the overly neat concept of environmental equilibrium, or an urban world understandable through the inheritances of Modernist notions of order and disorder, and manageable through erasing the past and prioritising the new. These spaces and processes are ‘less about balance and more about continual change and exchange’, ‘indeterminate hybrids of waste, technology, ecology, humans and non-humans’.⁸⁰ They are, in short, out of sync.

In spite of the term’s circulation and its negative connotations, we might suggest – drawing on the recent conceptualisation of environmental sinks in science and technology studies – that ‘sink’ can be repurposed, or purposefully misread, towards a conception of positive social and environmental potentiality, where to be out of sync with the present, but meaningfully in touch with a constellation of historical reference points, can be a desirable, critically productive and regenerative method of sustaining communities, resisting politically motivated eviction and demolition processes, and flattened, linear or reductive historical narratives.⁸¹ ‘Sink’ in this sense captures ‘the now’ this essay began with, in that it points to productive methods of assembling historical material within contemporary contexts, drawing attention to and disrupting the short-termist, cyclical qualities of policy-making that neglects or denies history and uses evidence opportunistically.