It is Guy Fawkes Night. A young woman walks home from work in South London, on the phone with her mum, accompanied by the incessant noise of firecrackers. Subsequently, the area gets desolate, the camera cuts to a wall covered with graffiti of gang member names. She hangs up the phone as she spots a gang with their faces covered, visibly unsettled. The gang surrounds her, and the apparent leader starts mugging her, pulling up a knife when she mildly resists. They shove and rattle her, trying to create a sense of control over the situation. Suddenly, the mugging is interrupted by an object that falls onto a nearby car, creating a diversion. The leader lets her escape, more interested in the damaged car. As he investigates, some form of animal bounces at him, knocking him off. Eager to stop his friends’ mockery, he chases and kills the supposed animal. After the viewer sees many meteorites falling from the sky and the film title, the shot pans down the fictional council housing, where the shaken heroine runs into a neighbor at an underpass, who offers to take her into her flat. “Fucking monsters!”, they both agree as they refer to the youth that run the block like it’s theirs.
These initial scenes of the 2011 film Attack the Block, essentially an alien-invasion comedy, convey the well-known/assumed characteristics of a council estate social environment. Fear, crime, isolation and despite all these, a sense of community all manifest throughout the film. Most films choose council housing estates as locations to convey the general brokenness of characters, and the effect these residences have on them. When a viewer sees the estate flat, they assume certain aspects of the characters’ background, living conditions, states of mind, etc. In this sense, using housing estates as locations remain a very pivotal aspect of filmmaking. This essay will overview the discourse about council housing, examining prominent texts on the subject. It will then further analyse the fictional representations of council estates considering the theories discussed, and how these arguments manifest in representation, through a few selected films that take place in Heygate Estate and Mardyke Estate, located in Greater London, and examine how these architectural spaces are represented, why they are used, in film.
Council estates were essentially a solution to the immediate need for housing in London after the massive destruction caused by WWII bombings. With the wave of modernism hitting the architectural realm, a new way of design with utopian overtones was applied to most council housing estates. The intention was pure and hopeful, but the result did not turn out to be just so. The stigma attached to post-war council housing is notorious, with problems related to the social structure, the architecture, and the treatment from authorities towards the residents, emerging throughout the decades. As Cuming puts it, these estates are on the periphery of cities, generally unappealing and regarded as overbearing, grey structures; associated with unwanted social unrest (2013, p. 336). Issues of safety and eliminating crime are widely debated, with the social structure of council estates, its position in society and its treatment by authorities being current topics. Selected key texts shed light to the general discussion over urban planning, architectural design, and sociological attributes of council estates.
Jane Jacobs’ work on cities and urban planning policies is famously influential in the housing debate. One key point in her argument is maintaining the safety of public spaces in an area. She suggests that although the police are indispensable for maintaining safety, the main force that keeps the streets peaceful is the people residing in the area “by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves” (1961, pp. 31-32). By creating a self-surveilled residential area, the sense of community is strengthened, and unfamiliar behaviour can be spotted easily. Jacobs further goes on to list the requirements of safe streets: Private and public space should be distinct from each other, “natural proprietors” must be overseeing the streets as well as structures qualified to establish the well-being of people, and the streets should be occupied by users constantly, to act as monitors and as focus points for residents to observe (1961, p. 35). She also defends “the need for small blocks” for variety and frequent use of all passages (1961, pp. 178-186).
Oscar Newman, the creator of defensible space theory, agrees with Jacobs. He argues that self-monitoring by residents is essential for a safer living space, and they must be persistent and responsible (1972, p. 15). He defines defensible space as “...a living residential environment which can be employed by inhabitants for the enhancement of their lives, while providing security for their families, neighbours, and friends” (Newman, 1972, p. 3). Visual surveillance is key, but vantage points should evolve by design, by the architect’s approach to the space and the users (Newman, 1972, p. 4). He states that design affects the social issues significantly, with lacking design leading to more criminal activity, backing it up with data (1972, p. 7). The orientation of buildings creating sensible angles for observation, forms of the structure that enhance the recognition of vulnerability of the inhabitants, and the chosen location of the estates all play a role in creating a healthy residential area (Newman, 1972, pp. 7-9). “The lack of defined boundaries, poor design, and the interaction of these factors with locations ill-suited to public housing” are the reasons that lead to the decline of estates in Newman’s opinion (Campkin, 2013, p. 88). Many members of academia have argued that the architecture contributes to the negative outcome. Alice Coleman clearly stated: “It is the Utopian design that has been imposed upon post-war Britain that appears to be the chief factor in many aspects of social decline in new or redeveloped areas” (Coleman, A., 1985, p. 180, cited in Montgomery, 2011 pp. 446-447). While Montgomery quotes Coleman’s statement, he actually opposes her and Newman’s thoughts on the impact of architecture on social development: “It is utterly conventional to associate the design of the developments themselves (rather than, for example, the social consequences of high concentrations of poverty) with mugging, burglary, drug dealing, sexual assault, vermin, malodorous lifts and vandalism” (Montgomery, 2011, p. 447). Newman makes valid observations, but the entirety of his theory is not plausible in reality.
Ben Campkin takes the Aylesbury Estate as an example, and portrays the discourse around public housing through it; criticising the UK government’s attitude towards council housing, and Newman’s approach to the estate as well (2013, pp. 77-104). He lays out Newman’s stance on the matter, then presents opposing ideas from various thinkers. For example, Bill Hillier critiques the approach by rejecting the correlation between tower blocks and crime rates, instead the social construct that comes first is the culprit (Campkin, 2013, pp. 90-91). Campkin agrees that Newman’s theory is short-sighted and does not handle other factors sufficiently, such as housing policies, drawbacks of the social group, media’s effect, estates’ administrations, etc. (2013, p. 92). Indeed, the design may play a role in the decline of an estate, but the social construct, location of the estate, maintenance and surveillance of the complex are more of consequence. Campkin also compares Aylesbury and Heygate Estates, with a befitting comment about Southwark Council’s actions:
“In the Aylesbury's case, many of the problems can be attributed to original cutbacks and compromises, complex costing models, inexperience in the use of system building, over-ambitious scale, poor communication between the architects and housing offices, and a lack of sustained investment and maintenance. The Heygate, by contrast, is of a higher quality and more coherent as a scheme. At a time of acute shortage of affordable housing, with changes to housing benefit that will force those on low incomes towards the periphery of the city, we have to question Southwark's motives in condemning the Heygate to demolition, and then leaving it near-empty for many years” (2013, p. 103).
In Urban Outcasts (2008), Loic Wacquant presents several cases of unrest in peripheral neighbourhoods of various cities, to reach this argument: “Most of the disorders, big and small, that have shaken up the French working-class banlieues, the British inner city, and the ghettos and adjacent barrios of North America have involved chiefly the youths of impoverished, segregated and often dilapidated urban neighbourhoods caught in a spiral of decline; they appear to have been fuelled by growing ethnoracial tensions in and around those areas” (2008, pp. 19-20). His work analyses the turmoil in estates caused by uprising youth, stemming from feelings of discrimination and the wish to act against poverty with the powerful act of police clashes and intentionally disturbing day-to-day lives (Wacquant, 2008, p. 22). The youth only wants better jobs, quality education, sensible housing, and an impartial approach from authorities (Wacquant, 2008, p. 23). The councils make matters worse by handling the situation poorly. Instead of finding innovative solutions to urban decline, they respond by regeneration proposals which are essentially gentrificating the areas; leading to just moving the ‘problem society’ away. Widespread unemployment, downgrading crowds to deteriorating districts, and aggravated stigmatisation of council estates (Wacquant, 2008, p. 25) indicate that this situation is not going to be resolved in the near future. However, council estates are fruitful sources used frequently in fiction, for their visual prominence and the associated stigma they bring to the film.
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This paper was originally titled “Representation of Council Estates in Fictional Films: The Heygate Estate and The Mardyke Estate as Locations” written for the module Representation of Cities.
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