UC Berkeley

Public (council) housing law and policy in Britain have been intimately bound up with the rise and fall of its empire and changing political economy. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, council housing law and policy have been profoundly influenced by racialized and gendered ideals derived from Britain’s imperial experience. Created to produce a ‘fit imperial race’ in the late nineteenth century, council houses were to promote the social reproduction of white Britons and to prevent racial degeneration. As Britain struggled to hold its empire in the interwar years, policy-makers returned to public housing as a means to rebuild that ‘imperial race’, but residents, newly-enfranchised and fresh from the battlefield, used the new languages of social democracy to insist on their right to a private life. As Britain confronted the loss of its empire in the years after the Second World War, the great expansion of council housing was designed for those meant to restore Britain’s power and prestige, the English working man and his family, offering them, for the first time, full equality within the British nation. Migrants from former colonies, single mothers, and others who did not conform were excluded. As these groups organized and pressed for a more inclusive vision of what council housing could be and do, popular support eroded and privatization began. After mass privatization commenced in 1980, those council tenants who could afford to buy their homes gained entry into a financialized ‘property-owning democracy’; those who could not were consigned to a marginalized sub-class, quite literally described, as their Victorian forebears had been before them, as an ‘underclass’. The 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower, which killed seventy-two people and left over two hundred homeless, the majority of whom were council tenants of colour, was the result of this history.