The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—Maya Angelou
The city of Leeds is offering bowls of fruit and complimentary sweets. For North Kent, it’s branded mints. ‘Constellation’ – a partnership between Cheshire and Staffordshire – has baked biscuits, thousands of them, and piled them up into hulking, crumbly pyramids. Listburn and Castlereagh, the Northern Irish district south of Belfast, is handing out bottles of locally distilled potato vodka, famed for its subtle notes of vanilla and long, clean finish. The exhibition booth where I’m given the vodka is mocked up like a giant chessboard, with the words ‘Make the Move’ emblazoned on its walls. ‘Last year, we had a jigsaw theme,’ explained Allan Ewart, the region’s alderman and development committee chair. He was standing on a white square and I on a black one; a colossal queen piece, at least twelve feet tall, loomed over us as we talked. ‘This year it’s chess,’ he shrugged. ‘It makes us stand out.’
At MIPIM UK – one of the country’s largest property fairs, designed for ‘international real-estate professionals whose passion is to understand the UK market, and exploit its potential’ – everyone is jostling to stand out. Stoke-on-Trent has a stand clad entirely in ceramic tiles, lending it the air of an outsized bathroom-store display window. Norwich and Suffolk have joined forces to build a vast curved advertising hoarding proclaiming ‘The East’, below which a series of thin plasma TV screens and fat pleather sofas have been installed. No metre of floor space, sheet of paper or courtesy tote bag has been left unbranded in the breathless chase by Britain’s places to get noticed: Basingstoke bumps up against Plymouth; Stevenage wrestles with Surrey; Lancaster, Knowsley and Hull do battle with Bicester Garden Town. At the end of my first day at MIPIM, in need of a rest, I left the main exhibition space and walked upstairs to find a cocktail reception under way on the mezzanine. People in suits were milling around in small groups picking at gravlax, while a DJ played forgettable EDM and a table was laid with gloopy bowls of macaroni, pulled brisket and shallots. A man in a pink bowler hat ushered me to a seat and placed a bottle of Staropramen next to my food. Below it was a large flyer, printed in strong black type against a bright yellow background. ‘Invest in Wigan’, it implored me.
MIPIM stands for ‘Le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier’ (‘the international market of real-estate professionals’), and as Richard Leese – the council leader who reshaped Manchester to the tune of global capital, transforming the lives of young people like Layla and Kyle in the process – told me, ‘The important word within MIPIM’s acronym is marché. This is a marketplace, and the reason that we and other cities are here is that we are selling our wares.’ The prospective buyers of those wares, who are real-estate investors from across the planet, are led quietly from stall to stall, maquette to maquette, amid a cacophony of local economic growth figures, low-tax guarantees, and aspirational slogans that sound like they’ve been generated by a corporate-catchphrase alliteration bot: ‘Accelerated growth accelerating opportunity’, ‘Reimagine, Renew, Regenerate’, ‘Connect, Collaborate, Compete’. I watched a delegation of Chinese financiers gather around a large-scale model of north-west London’s Old Oak development project – which at 1,600 acres and a value of £26 billion is currently the biggest in Britain – and stare on impassively as project leaders from the mayor of London’s office danced around the glass case and pointed out highlights with laser pens. There was a pause to allow some noticeably less enthusiastic translations to reach the investors’ earpieces. Then one of the group took a photo, and they all moved on, without a word. The tableau appeared so hopelessly lopsided that it bordered on the comical. Here were representatives of democratically elected bodies bowing, scraping and jesting in an attempt to win the favour of silent real-estate emperors and their entourages, and being rewarded with little more than the flash of a selfie stick in return.
If the Old Oak ambassadors wanted to up their game they could have attended one of MIPIM’s many panel discussions, which featured titles like ‘Liberating Land’, ‘Investors Summit: Risk and Reward’ and ‘Attracting Investors to UK Places’. One event was headlined ‘Delivering Investor-Ready Regeneration Projects in the UK’. ‘How easy is it to do business in your place?’ Deborah McLaughlin, head of property consultancy GL Hearn – part of the outsourcing conglomerate Capita, which was sponsoring the discussion – asked the audience. ‘Have you got a planning department that is pro-growth? Have you got people who understand the language of investors?’ She raised her eyebrows sceptically, and unveiled a PowerPoint slide with the words ‘Think Like An Investor’ written in large font at the top. People sitting around me, largely delegates from local authorities, began frantically scribbling notes. Sir Edward Lister, chairman of Homes England – a government-sponsored housing body – nodded in agreement from the stage. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, in the tone of a disappointed parent, ‘that it’s really hard to get investable propositions out of some places. They just haven’t got it.’ He reminded us that red tape and regulation are a turn-off for investors, and warned that councils needed to be more adaptable to the needs of developers; after all, other cities and other countries were forever out there, competing for money and attention. ‘What I don’t think people realise is the reputation you get for being “can-do”, and how easily it’s destroyed by somebody who is just really difficult and providing poor service,’ he insisted. Ricardo Mai, development director for property giant Landsec, wrapped up the session. ‘At the end of the day, if you want delivery, investors are looking for speed and pace, and certainty,’ he concluded. ‘So I think there’s an issue of balance in there.’ Landsec are the company behind central London’s notorious ‘Walkie-Talkie’ skyscraper, which won planning permission despite being outside of the capital’s designated area for tall buildings and was heavily criticised for failing to meet its community obligations. One newspaper described it as ‘a stark reminder of forces that rule the City’.1 After completion, Landsec swiftly sold the development on to a Hong Kong-based holding company, generating a record 167% return on their investment. Last year the company’s profits rose to £42 million.2
Outside the Olympia exhibition centre, across the railway tracks and north up Russell Road, autumn leaves have slushed the pavements in a riot of red and bronze. It’s quiet here, in the back channels between the exhibition centre and the massive Westfield shopping mall at Shepherd’s Bush; distant enough from the auto-thunder on nearby Holland Road to hear snatches of conversation drifting out of windows in Arabic, English, Spanish and Romanian. Once-grand houses have been subdivided into flats and then partitioned even further, stippling opulent facades with motley doorbells. On the other side of the roundabout, a group of kids blazes up at a bus stop and an elderly man shuffles slowly into Jazz’s barbershop while bellowing into a mobile phone. It’s by the little parade of shops opposite St Ann’s Villas, just before the Yara Students building – a new complex owned by a management firm that ‘focuses on investing in the UK property market for Middle Eastern clients’, and which offers rented studio accommodation for up to £19,000 a year – where the signs begin.3 They are stuck on to lamp posts outside Nile Butchers and taped across pillars by the launderette. ‘Have you suffered breathing problems following the fire?’ they read. ‘Call the NHS hotline now.’ Still, there’s nothing noticeable in the sky until you reach Sirdar Road, a bit further along, from where a black smudge becomes visible in the sky behind the trees. As you get closer, the tower begins to assume edge and form: it peeks out over rooftops and backfills chimneys and satellite dishes; it stains the space behind the climbing frame in the playground of Avondale Park school. There are more signs now, crowding fences and electricity boxes – not in official type, like the NHS ones, but in faded ink and handwritten scrawls. ‘This is an atrocity’ says one. ‘This should not have happened’ states another. At the foot of Treadgold Street, a series of identical notes have been laminated to protect against the rain. ‘Please no photos,’ they ask. ‘This is the site of our loss’.
*
Britain’s housing crisis has many roots and manifestations; its tendrils curl far and wide, around every space that anyone calls home. But there is a common stem that runs through all of it, and that stem is most visible here, along the byways and thoroughfares that link Olympia with the Lancaster West estate. The novelty chess pieces and overstuffed canapés of MIPIM feel a long way from the horrors of the Grenfell fire, but they are separated by only four months and barely a mile. Both are monuments to a particular vision of who housing is for and what it should look like: a vision of homes as commodities above all else, rather than as a necessity, or as a social good, or as places in which people’s relationships to one another might be the function of shared experiences, of memory, ritual and affection instead of money and markets alone.
The first time I met Rasha Ibrahim, it was the day after she had been shown the remains of her sister and nieces in the morgue. We sat in the lobby of a west London hotel, the silences between us filled by the sounds of the frothing of the coffee machine, someone making a phone call to a taxi company, and her four-year-old son’s beeping computer game. ‘He has a problem with his nerves,’ Rasha told me. ‘It got worse when he saw Rania on the television. He went into a kind of fit, screaming and beating and breaking a lot of stuff. He hasn’t been the same since.’ It had taken ninety-nine days from the blaze on 14 June 2017 to the moment at which the authorities were able to formally identify what was left of the bodies of Rania Ibrahim, who died aged thirty-one, and her daughters Fethia and Hania, who were five and three respectively. ‘They put her skeleton on the bed – not one piece, but different pieces,’ said Rasha, urgently, making sure I understood. ‘They put the different pieces together so that it looked like a skeleton, but some pieces were missing and the other parts were very burned. It was the same for the children.’
Rania and Rasha grew up in Aswan, the southernmost city of Egypt. It’s where the Nile tumbles over its final cataract – a stretch of twists, turns, islets and boulders – before running straight across the desert, out towards the delta and the sea. ‘We lived in one of the old houses,’ remembers Rasha. There were seven siblings in all, but Rania was the one who made everybody laugh. She and Rasha worked in a pharmacy and Rania combined that with a law degree at university, but the truth was that she didn’t like the course; she preferred reading her own choice of books, and larking around with her family. One of their older sisters, Sayyeda, had moved to London, and when Sayyeda was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 Rania flew out to help provide care and support. While visiting the UK, she met a young man called Hassan who worked at the al-Manar mosque in Westbourne Park, in the shadow of the Westway flyover. Rania stayed, and in 2011 she and Hassan married. In the wedding photos, you can see them sitting on glitzy thrones with an elaborate fruit-topped cake before them, he in a dark suit and her with a bright pink hijab and floral dress, each of them upright and tall. Later, there is a shot of the two of them alone, unstraightened, her head against his chest and her hand clutching at his shirt, both proud and vulnerable, both smiling. ‘She was joyous,’ says Rasha. ‘We looked like adults, but when we saw each other we just fell back into childhood. The last time she came back to Egypt we just opened the fridge and started throwing eggs at each other. We were laughing and making a mess. It’s how we lived life.’
In 2015, soon after their second daughter was born, Rania and Hassan were moved into Grenfell Tower by Kensington and Chelsea council. The views were incredible up there on the twenty-third floor, and Hassan toiled to make the flat feel like the home they had dreamed of, doing up the walls, ceiling and floor. The kids discovered the world on that floor, and revelled in it: at the Grenfell Inquiry, Hassan shared pictures of them bashing at bowls of cereal with plastic spoons, lathering themselves with shaving cream, and grinning through clouds of laundry powder that they’d tipped out of the box. ‘Hania always followed her sister,’ recalled Hassan. ‘If Fethia wears a pink shirt, Hania wants to wear one. If Fethia drinks water, Hania wants to drink water. If Fethia wants to sleep, Hania wants to sleep. If Fethia says, “I love you Mama,” Hania says, “I love you Mama.”’4 Like many of the Grenfell residents, Rania was scared about what might happen in a fire; enough to complain to the council about aspects of the tower’s maintenance, and enough to demand information from Hassan about what to do if a conflagration ever broke out. Hassan spoke with the neighbours, and relayed back the official instructions: stay in your flat, and don’t try to leave. ‘I come back to my wife and I tell her, “Listen love, I’m going to leave the flat very nice for you and for my two kids, don’t worry.” She say, “Do you know, anywhere you go, where you stay, I’m going to be with you,”’ said Hassan. ‘I think that’s the only mistake I do, when we came to Grenfell Tower.’
And so their lives unfurled: inside the new home, down through the tower block where they developed a tight-knit group of friends, out across the Lancaster West estate and beyond, where they would walk and sunbathe and picnic when the weather was fine. ‘We don’t have any plan,’ said Hassan. ‘Just we walk out, and we go as our feet will take us, and we enjoy the time.’ Hassan told the inquiry that he could never have imagined harm would befall his young family here, in this place, for a reason so obvious that he repeated it three times: ‘We are in London, in London, in London.’ Rasha spoke with similar incredulity. ‘How come this is London?’ she asked me, and I didn’t know what to say. To both of them, there was a disconnect between the baseline security that London promised, and the cataclysm it engendered, one that defied straightforward comprehension. Rania was forced to see the city differently. At the end of the video she live-streamed to Facebook on the night of the fire – after she opens her front door and welcomes lost neighbours into her flat out of the smoky void, after she tries to calm her panicked children, after she looks all the way down at the blue-lit pandemonium on the ground, feels the heat of the flames closing in from the flat below, and recites the Muslim declaration of faith – she finally turns her camera to the slanted skyline of the capital, dark and glittering through the haze. ‘We are in London,’ she says, simply. ‘Where else?’
Who caused the deaths of Rania, Fethia and Hania, along with sixty-nine others in Grenfell that night? ‘I want the people in charge to punish whoever was responsible,’ Rasha told me. ‘My message for the judge is please, from the inside of your heart, work for justice,’ Hassan said at the inquiry. ‘If it will take a hundred years, we want justice,’ added Rania’s and Hassan’s family friend Munira, who also lived in the tower. ‘Justice for everyone, please. Justice.’ But justice is not a fixed quality; who and what it touches depends not just on where you point the lens of culpability, but how far you choose to widen it. We know now that Kensington and Chelsea council ignored warnings about fire safety from its residents at Grenfell, with whom it had developed a fractious relationship via an arms-length management organisation, and we know that when it was presented with different options for refurbishing Grenfell that the management organisation chose the cheapest one, resulting in the use of insulation and cladding components that were the main reason for the fire’s devastating spread.5 We know, too, that for many years standards of safety testing for building materials and fire risks had been falling, in part because many aspects of the regulatory regime had been privatised, fuelling competition between inspection units – a trend going back to the days of New Labour and intensifying with David Cameron’s subsequent ‘bonfire of red tape’.6 But should we also consider the fact that fire services in London had been cut back in the years leading up to Grenfell, and that when then-mayor Boris Johnson was challenged on this by critics, he responded by telling them to ‘get stuffed’?7 Is it relevant that legal-aid provisions have been slashed away at by successive governments, making it harder for residents with safety concerns to ensure councils are answerable for their failings in the courts?8 Did the construction industry’s well-documented practice up until the late 2000s of blacklisting trade unionists, particularly ones who had a record of raising health and safety concerns on site, contribute to a culture of unsafe building practices, and did a cross-party effort to diminish trade union power over several decades contribute to the blacklisting?9 The problem with accountability for the Grenfell fire is that in the intensity of its violence and the bluntness of its imagery it has come, rightly, to symbolise a collective failure in the way we organise ourselves as a country. And once you begin picking apart the tangle of a failure that broad, its filaments appear almost endless.
But there is one theme that ties together many of those filaments and leads back down the road to MIPIM: the story of what has happened to social housing in Britain over recent decades, which is itself part of that wider question about what homes themselves are for. In the late 1970s, at the start of the last great shift in this country’s political tectonic plates, 42% of the population lived in council homes; today, that proportion has fallen to just 8%.10 Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy saw 2 million socially built and collectively owned housing units move into the private market – in the capital, as in Ancoats and Tilbury and everywhere else – and nearly half of them are now in the hands of landlords who let them out at rates which have grown far quicker than wages. In some London boroughs, rents have risen 42% since the financial crisis, and nationally one in seven tenants now hands over at least half their monthly income in order to keep a roof over their head. The provision of housing benefit, which offers state support for renters on low incomes and was designed in part to offset the decline of social housing, has simply resulted in a mass transfer of wealth from the public purse to the bank accounts of private landlords; it’s been estimated that were every benefit claimant in London to be housed in council rather than private accommodation, local authorities would save almost £1 billion a year.11 Meanwhile the social housing that does still exist pays for itself many times over and makes a profit for local authorities – Grenfell Tower generated more than £3.5 million in rent for Kensington and Chelsea council in the six years leading up to the fire, for example, while just over £500,000 was spent on standard maintenance and repairs during the same period12 – but a web of central-government restrictions makes it exceptionally difficult for councils to build any more.
Although the basic economics are stacked so heavily in favour of social housing over the private rented sector, it is council housing, and council estates, that have repeatedly been associated with housing crises and stigmatised by leading politicians. Tony Blair made his first set-piece speech as prime minister at the Aylesbury estate in south London, rightly pointing out that many of its inhabitants had been sidelined from the country’s growing prosperity; it is hard to see, though, how New Labour’s subsequent ‘regeneration programmes’, which drastically reduced the number of homes available for social rent on the estates concerned, would ensure that prosperity was shared more equally. During his premiership, David Cameron promised to put estate redesign – and demolition – at the heart of his ‘all-out assault on poverty and disadvantage’.13 Although many communities were concerned about physical aspects of their estates, including enclosed stairwells that helped enable crime and the poor maintenance of common areas, Cameron went much further – characterising council housing as the preserve of ‘gangs, ghettos and antisocial behaviour’, and arguing it was no coincidence that three-quarters of those convicted for their part in the 2011 riots lived on estates. In many cases, he concluded, the best way forward would ‘simply mean knocking them down and starting again’.
In the context of a prevailing political narrative that casts social housing as a problem, and bulldozers as a big part of the solution, it is little wonder that across the capital estate after estate has been knocked down over the past twenty years and replaced primarily by private housing units, many of which end up being purchased with buy-to-let mortgages and placed in the hands of global investors. The fate of the Heygate estate, just north of Aylesbury in Elephant and Castle, is typical: originally built to accommodate 3,000 social housing tenants, it was auctioned off by Southwark council in 2002 for £50 million – although the local authority then spent £44 million of that windfall pushing through its development plan.14 Residents were promised that of 2,530 new homes to be constructed on the site, 500 would be retained as social housing units, but by the time the successful bidder Lendlease – an Australian real-estate giant – unveiled its final blueprint, that number had been scaled back to just eighty-two. In 2017 it emerged that every one of the new private housing units sold so far had been bought by offshore capital. The old residential community at Heygate was broken up, with families offered alternative accommodation in different neighbourhoods all over London and beyond; some ended up as far west as Slough, and as far east as Thurrock – near Tilbury – and Sevenoaks in Kent.15 ‘I have been forced to give up my home to accommodate the building of homes for overseas investors,’ observed Terry Redpath, a former Southwark housing officer and one of those evicted from the estate.16 There are Terry Redpaths, and Heygates, all over London: the list of estates either already demolished or currently earmarked for full or partial demolition under a council ‘regeneration’ programme runs to eighty in all, from Aylesbury itself, where bulldozing began in 2009, all the way down the alphabet to Woodberry Down in Hackney and Wornington Green in Kensington, just over half a mile north-east of Grenfell. ‘London’s ruling elites are demolishing council estates like an occupying power toppling monuments from the old regime,’ wrote sociologist David Madden in 2017. ‘Except these monuments are also people’s homes.’17
When social housing stops being seen as a place where real people live, and instead becomes either an issue to be tackled or a cash cow to be liquidated, the lingua franca of MIPIM UK – where councils come to ‘sell their wares’ – begins to make a lot more sense. Both Olympia, host of the conference, and Grenfell fall under the jurisdiction of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Its chief executive Barry Quirk – the man who was forced into an open-air negotiation on the picket line by striking cleaners and United Voices of the World – was seconded to the borough when its previous CEO resigned in the wake of the Grenfell fire. In his view, during the run-up to the fire the council was behaving like ‘a property developer masquerading as a local authority’.18 His remarks were met with outrage, but to anyone who has spent time at MIPIM, they would have come as no surprise. ‘Think Like An Investor’, the words written at the top of Deborah McLaughlin’s PowerPoint presentation to local-authority representatives during the MIPIM panel discussion I attended, might as well have been the mantra of the entire conference. ‘We hear a lot from cities about what they’re up to,’ observed Andrew Parker, chief executive of the Centre for Cities think tank and chair of that event. ‘The question is whether it’s relevant to the investment and to the development community. What do cities need to do to be more attractive to investors and developers?’ John Miu, chief operating officer at ABP – a Chinese developer that is leading a mammoth real-estate project at east London’s Royal Docks district – told me that in a world where buyers can pick between countries, cities and regions, what matters is how places mould themselves to the needs of foreign investors. ‘Local governments and councils really need to have a more long-term view of the area, of their cities,’ he said, ‘of what they want to be.’ In my conversation with Manchester’s Richard Leese, he made several references not to England, Britain or the United Kingdom, but rather to ‘UK PLC’.
The year before the Grenfell fire, Kensington and Chelsea council made more money out of the sale of just two social housing units than it spent on its fatal cut-price cladding for the tower; a chain of decision-making that is logical enough, perhaps, if you are thinking more like an investor, and less like the steward of a community. As Edward Daffarn, a Grenfell resident who wrote a blog predicting a calamitous fire in the tower, pointed out in its aftermath, the tale of what happened to this troubled corner of Kensington involved more than just building-regulation failures. It was about choices made by the local authority, like so many local authorities since the advent of austerity, to close or threaten a whole host of collective assets, including the local library, an adult education college, and a riding stables for children that is situated underneath the Westway. In Kensington and Chelsea’s case, these choices included offering rebates to residents in the borough who were paying the top rate of council tax, all the while sitting on a budget surplus and reserves of more than a quarter of a billion pounds.19 ‘These things are linked,’ Daffarn explained.20 ‘The things that were precious and mattered to this community were not respected and weren’t protected.’ The council insists that it understands the anger of Grenfell’s community and has learned from its mistakes. But a few months after Rania, Fethia and Hania died, as part of its annual survey of local priorities, it asked residents to rate the importance of the Grenfell fire on a scale of one to ten, alongside other issues such as recycling, rubbish collection and congestion.21 ‘I don’t want to give any personal opinion on this tragedy, it was clearly a tragedy, et cetera,’ replied Ronan Vaspart, the director of MIPIM, when I asked him whether what happened at Grenfell just a few weeks earlier had changed the mood at this year’s conference. ‘We do see that the UK is still a really attractive place, and people are here to prove it.’ It was a fortnight on from the Ibrahim family funeral, which took place at the al-Manar mosque only a few blocks away from where we sat; one adult-sized coffin and two smaller ones, each carried under the flyover by a throng of men in the driving rain. Vaspart told me that, as far as he could tell, there was nothing amiss with investor enthusiasm. ‘All the feedback I got as of today is quite positive,’ he reassured me. ‘The meeting rooms are crowded … People come here to attend the conferences, to learn more, to network and to do business.’ London, I thought to myself. Where else?
And yet what Grenfell exposed, as much as the economic forces behind the marginalisation of social housing, was the readiness of communities – when pushed too far – to fight back. The evidence of that snapping point and the force of its reverberation was there in the immediate aftermath of the fire, when there were few representatives of local or national government to be found on the ground and it was volunteers who took on the task of responding to the needs of victims, all through those hours and days when broken windows in the tower were still discharging columns of ash, and the air in North Kensington lurched with fumes, stench and soot. ‘People were hustling and bustling, the road was alive,’ recalls Swarzy Macaly, a twenty-four-year-old from Ilford, on the other side of the capital, who travelled over to Grenfell as soon as she saw news of the fire and found herself leading efforts to organise and distribute donations to the newly homeless. ‘They just came out of nowhere, from Birmingham, from Coventry, from all over London – it was that organic, that natural. There were pockets of everyone.’ It was the Grenfell community, with help from arrivals like Swarzy, who directed traffic in that early period, who established a bedraggled grass-roots media to share information about what was going on, who walked the streets holding up posters they’d been handed of missing strangers. After helping to sort hundreds of boxes of supplies without any assistance from the council, Swarzy spotted a group of people who seemed to be officials, ‘very glossy, very clipboard-ish’, she said, ‘not like me, raggedy, sweaty, and whatever’. She went over and asked for some details about how the donations were being processed, but was ignored. ‘Not this girl, she’s not with us,’ she remembers one of the group saying, as another official turned up to hand out security wristbands. ‘And I just thought, “I’m not wearing the same colour skin as you, I probably don’t earn as much as you, and I’m not suited and booted like you.” And I felt so deflated. I thought, “Why did I think I should have a say in anything?” So I just told them I wasn’t there for a wristband, and left.’ The streets themselves had a different vibe: Swarzy’s phone contacts from that period are full of names like ‘Andy with blue cap’ or ‘Faiza with red T-shirt’, the mark of friendships forged swiftly in the heat of necessity. Overwhelmingly, those at the heart of solidarity actions reflected the make-up of Grenfell’s community itself: first-, second- or third-generation migrants from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East. Just as Rania’s had been, their reference points were global. ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,’ Theresa May had claimed in her Conservative Party conference speech the year before the fire. At Grenfell, while the state seemed nowhere, citizens of the world asserted their shared and vital ownership over somewhere that mattered so much to them. For Swarzy, being part of that story was painful, but exhilarating. ‘I feel very privileged to be born at this time in history,’ she told me. ‘Young people went home thinking, “Oh my gosh, what was that? When can we do it again?”’
The fightback was visible, too, in the protests which erupted outside Kensington and Chelsea town hall later that week, as police formed protective rings around the entrance to the council chambers and a surging crowd bellowed, ‘No justice, no peace.’ Talking with demonstrators that day, it felt as if for many of them a dam had broken; the fire was the catalyst for anger, but it was an anger that grew out of connecting the dots which surrounded it. The trajectory of housing in London was addressed – ‘They build luxury flats for the rich, and ovens for the poor,’ said one speaker on the megaphone – but so too was inequality, attacks on migrants, race, class, policing, education, and the skewed loyalties and limitations of the mainstream media. ‘What do you want to happen?’ a journalist from Sky News had asked Ishmahil Blagrove, a local resident and co-ordinator of the Justice4Grenfell movement, the day after the blaze. ‘What do I want to happen?’ Blagrove replied, spinning round towards the camera. ‘I want there to be a revolution in this country. I say fuck the media, fuck the mainstream.’ Those around him broke into cheers. ‘People actually believed your bullshit for a while,’ continued Blagrove, pointing at the reporter. ‘But [now] people are immune. They’re wearing bulletproof vests … they’re immune to that shit now.’ In the weeks that followed, council estates right across London – many of which were already home to vibrant anti-eviction movements – simultaneously hung ‘Justice for Grenfell’ banners from their tallest buildings. ‘Justice will be yours, and because of that justice will be ours,’ declared a joint statement from those involved, although the action received no coverage in the mainstream press.22
Like the catastrophic landing of Hurricane Katrina in the United States, for many in London Grenfell’s devastation illuminated the rot of something larger. The state’s inability to meet one fundamental demand – the desire we all share to feel safe and secure in a home that we can afford to live in – spawned many others, too many for the existing system to handle. Years later, toxins from the fire are still scattered around the Lancaster West estate and its environs, but so too are the seeds of something rebellious, something different.23 ‘Like a war-zone planted here in the city,’ wrote the poet Ben Okri in response to Grenfell. ‘A sword of fate hangs over the deafness of power / See the tower, and let a new world-changing thought flower.’
*
On a sunny September morning in 2018, two miles south-east of Grenfell, a group of young people in white shirts and red bow ties gathered on a lawn next to the Sherfield Building at Kensington’s Imperial College, and began to play tiny violins. Inside, private landlords had gathered for a conference entitled ‘Future Renting’ – billed by the organisers, the Residential Landlords Association, as a response to the ‘hostile environment’ imposed on landlords by government regulation. ‘With a tidal wave of legislation change on the horizon there are more tough times ahead for the PRS [private rented sector] landlord,’ warned the association in a press release. ‘The conference welcomes anyone with an interest in private rented housing, from landlords with just one property, to those with larger portfolios, letting-agency owners, local-authority councillors and officers, journalists, and housing charities.’ Despite the day’s keynote event being a panel discussion on ‘Tenants As Consumers – The Future’, tenants themselves weren’t deemed to be among those with an interest in private rented housing, and didn’t make the invite list. No matter. They wrote out a giant cardboard cheque for £22 billion – the amount private tenants would be paying to landlords in London over the coming year – and noisily turned up anyway. ‘We need a lobbying-and-legal arm, and a direct-action-in-the-streets arm,’ Anabel Bennett, a member of the London Renters Union – the organisation that arranged the protest – told me. She held up two fists as she spoke. ‘But this one,’ she said, raising her right arm further, ‘the streets one, that’s the strongest. It has to be. Because the law is not on our side. There are so few laws protecting private tenants that if you’re going through a case with someone and trying to solve an issue for them, you very quickly exhaust all the legal avenues. So collective action isn’t just a tactic, it’s a necessity.’
Anabel is in her mid-twenties. If she had been born three or four decades earlier and reached this age during the mid-1980s, back when Margaret Thatcher was proclaiming her dream of Britain as a property-owning democracy, chances are she would have bought her own place by now or at least be on the cusp of doing so. At that time, it took the average young couple in outer London three years to save up a housing deposit, and more than half of twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-olds owned their own home. Today it takes the average young couple nineteen years to save up a housing deposit, and just 16% of twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-olds own their own home.24 As late as 2002, the ratio of house prices to wages in London was 6.9 to 1; now it’s more than double that, and across England home ownership is at a thirty-year low.25 With the concurrent loss of social housing, Anabel, like millions of millennials, has been left with no choice but to rent privately. Having already spent most of her childhood dependent on the grace and whims of landlords – ‘From the age of eight onwards, my family moved home pretty much every year because we were kicked out for some reason or another, or because the rent was raised so much that it became unaffordable,’ she told me – she now lives in the knowledge that, on current trends, there is a good chance that the rest of her adulthood will look very similar. The number of privately renting households with children has tripled in just over a decade, from 600,000 in the mid-2000s to 1.8 million in 2016.26 Half of Anabel’s generational cohort will be paying private landlords well into their forties; one in three will still be renting privately when they are pensioners.27 Like every private tenant in London, Anabel can trade rental horror stories for as long as you’ve got to spare. There was the place in Manor House that she got evicted from with no explanation; or the one in Kentish Town where the landlord announced that he was raising the rent by £100 per person, per month, just like that; or her most recent ‘shitpit’ property in Finsbury Park that featured no common space, no central heating, no protected deposits, and damp creeping up the walls. ‘My current rental place is the fourteenth I’ve lived in, over a period of eighteen years,’ she reflected. ‘It affects you, more than you realise I think, not just because moving is always such an exhausting process, but because there is never anywhere you can simply just call, and feel, and be at home.’
In 1988, Section 21 of Britain’s Housing Act came into force. It decreed that once the initial period of a tenant’s contract had elapsed, landlords could evict them at any time with two months’ notice and offer no reason whatsoever for doing so. That institutionalised precariousness on the part of the tenant not only encouraged property owners to repeatedly hike up rents, it also made tenants wary of questioning poor or unsafe living conditions. Nearly half of all private tenants who make a formal complaint about their housing are subjected to ‘revenge evictions’, and although local councils should theoretically help in these situations, in practice 95% of tenants are afforded no protection at all.28 And so renters have been left to watch black mould bloom and swap tales of it on social media – via the popular #ventyourrent hashtag on Twitter, for example, where users post grim pictures of their homes and reveal the excuses landlords have given them for the poor living conditions (one was told that the reason for fungus growing on the walls was that the tenant was ‘breathing at night’; another landlord blamed the presence of rats on ‘tenants keeping food’). Since 2015, VICE Magazine has run a ‘London Rental Opportunity of the Week’ column on its website featuring real property listings for small, normally one-bedroom, tenancies: highlights include a shed in Sudbury Hill (£750 a month), a cupboard in Old Street (£1,785 a month), a ‘three-storey petite studio’ in Hammersmith that seemingly consists of nothing but interconnected well shafts (£800 a month), and several apartments with toilets placed inside kitchens, toilets placed inside showers, showers placed inside kitchens, and beds placed under stairs.29
With each passing year, the average size of Britain’s housing units shrinks, and new-builds in the UK are now the smallest in Europe; official figures suggest that more than 2 million people live in privately rented homes that actively damage their health.30 In desperation at rising rental costs, many have turned to alternative sources of accommodation that are shady at best, and abusive at worst. The ‘live-in guardians’ model, where those in need of housing are offered reduced rents on commercial sites in return for acting as 24/7 security guards, has come under fire for denying occupants even the paltry legal rights to which tenants are normally entitled; so too has the concept of ‘lettings clubs’ where occupants are technically ‘members’ rather than renters, and can be fined as much as £90 by managers for leaving a plate unwashed.31 The housing organisation Shelter has reported a quiet rise of subsidised room rentals being offered in exchange for sexual favours to the landlord. ‘Some people are desperate for housing,’ observed Kate Webb, Shelter’s head of policy. ‘Others have the power to exploit that.’ And yet despite their shared vulnerabilities and struggles, private renters are generally atomised from one another; they don’t conceive of themselves as a collective economic entity, or political actor. ‘Most people in London don’t know their neighbours, never mind other private tenants in their area,’ points out Anabel. So how do you begin to build a movement which enables them to assert power together? Over the past few years, several young organisations have been trying to find out. Acorn, a tenants union founded in Bristol in 2015, now has branches in Manchester, Brighton, Newcastle and four other cities around the country; Living Rent, a similar operation in Scotland, is active in Edinburgh and – as mentioned in the previous chapter – Glasgow too. But in London, where housing costs are highest and asymmetries between landlords and renters most extreme, the challenge of bringing the latter together has often felt insurmountable, at least until recently.
In the back room of a community centre near Bethnal Green, in March 2018, I watched Heather Kennedy – co-founder of a housing activist network called Digs in East London, and now a volunteer organiser with the London Renters Union (LRU) – ask a room full of private tenants where power lay within the housing system. ‘Legislators!’, ‘Property developers!’, ‘Homeowners!’ shouted various people in reply. Heather nodded. ‘And what kind of power are we trying to build?’ she continued. This time the answers were more hesitant. ‘People power,’ said one young woman. ‘Relational power?’ suggested her friend. Heather stuck a large piece of paper on the wall and wrote ‘One-to-ones’ at the top of it. ‘One-to-ones are not interviews, or a chance to rant, or a date, or a counselling session,’ she explained. ‘They are a place to agitate someone, to find shared motivations and stories, to discover things you can do together.’ We paired off with the person next to us and began practising these targeted conversations, guided by bullet points on the wall. ‘What stories do people tell about what brought them here today? What questions will open up people’s passions?’ asked Heather, walking among the chairs that had been laid out on the carpet. It was a squeeze; the LRU had only formed a few months earlier, and this open meeting had drawn several dozen people, a bigger crowd than anyone expected. We were encouraged to ask each other what made us angry about our housing situation, how any housing problems we mentioned made us feel, and how we thought things might change. ‘Listen, and discover people’s skills,’ Heather urged us. ‘Don’t try and do anything for someone that they’re able to do themselves. Remember: we’re a movement, not a service union.’
One-to-ones are at the core of the LRU’s political model, because organisers like Heather, Anabel and Amina Gichinga – a singer, music teacher and community activist – believe that the only way to overcome the fragmentation of private renters is to build strong, geographically concentrated solidarity networks from the bottom up, rather than constructing a loose and diffuse association from the top down. One of their inspirations is the ‘Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca’ (‘Platform for People Affected by Mortgages’) movement in Spain that developed in response to the financial crisis in the late 2000s and the mass repossession by banks of people’s homes. Structured around hundreds of autonomous local assemblies, PAH’s manifesto explicitly distances itself from consumer associations and charities. ‘We are a citizens’ movement to defend and conquer our rights,’ it declares.32 ‘The PAH is a space of encounter, mutual aid and trust in which anyone can help and be helped.’ Replicating that dynamic in London means ensuring that the LRU looks like the communities it is building within, communities that – as Amina pointed out – are typically less white, less middle class and less immersed in the existing world of left-wing London activism than those attending this particular meeting in Bethnal Green. ‘Strong, local networks already exist in Newham,’ she said, referring to the east London borough where the LRU had just opened its inaugural branch. ‘There are migrants’ networks, movements against school academisation, movements to support the Roma people. These are groups we want to reach out to, connect with and learn from. It’s not always clear on the surface, but this stuff is bubbling, and I want you to know that.’
One-to-ones aren’t instantly gratifying and effortless in the way that signing a petition or joining a Facebook group can be. They involve sitting down with someone from your local area – Heather recommended a minimum of forty-five minutes – and giving yourself the chance both to discover current communal connections and devise fresh ones. Anabel, whose first experience in this sort of activism came when she helped to organise rent strikes against her student-accommodation provider while at university, recently travelled to Barcelona on behalf of the LRU to make contact with PAH campaigners. ‘In Spain, a sense of community is much more central to people’s lives than here, and the assemblies work because they can be so local, right down to the neighbourhood level,’ she told me. ‘People already know each other, they are already connected. We’re trying to work out how to translate that here, to a city where the neoliberal economic model has hit people hardest, and where we don’t have that much of an existing community base. That’s why migrant networks are so important – because there are links already there that can be built on – and why it’s so important to understand that people take on many identities. A tenant is not just a tenant: they are a worker, a mother, a carer, whatever, and right now the housing crisis is almost certainly affecting every element of their life. That’s a challenge for us, but it’s also a huge opportunity.’
I asked Anabel what aspects of the LRU’s work she gets most excited about. In response, she didn’t mention the big protest outside the Residential Landlords Association conference in Kensington. Nor did she flag up some of the other high-profile LRU campaigning events which have followed, such as the showdown with a letting agent in Romford accused of conning a vulnerable tenant and LRU member out of thousands of pounds, which prompted fellow LRU members to stage colourful protests outside the firm’s offices, as well as to swamp them with calls about the issue as part of a highly disruptive, long-distance ‘phone picket’. Instead, Anabel talked about the LRU members in Newham who have come together to help redecorate each other’s flats, or to pack up boxes and lift furniture when one of their group is forced to move. ‘Even when you join the union, you won’t feel ready to truly get involved, to really take risks, until you’ve built up trust in people,’ she said. ‘You won’t have that trust until you walk into a room and see a group of people around you, whether they are a working-class Muslim family or a young white renter from a middle-class background who looks like a gentrifier, and think “these are people who will support me”’. She brought up the case of one LRU member in west London who was facing eviction under Section 21 legislation, and turned to the union for help. The co-ordinators only had a few hours’ notice of what was happening before the bailiffs arrived, and the member’s home was a long way from the city centre, but they put a call out for solidarity on WhatsApp; the following morning, twenty people showed up at the crack of dawn to form defensive lines at the front and back doors. Unable to access the property, the bailiffs eventually gave up, and during the two weeks’ grace that followed the member was able to find alternative housing in Newham instead of falling into homelessness. ‘And now, he’s super-involved in the union,’ grinned Anabel. ‘He comes to every meeting, gets stuck into every action, helps out others in the LRU with member support. That’s what mutual aid looks like, and that’s how we will grow this union. That’s how we must fight for fairer housing in London.’
From Newham, the LRU has expanded into Leytonstone; from Leytonstone into Hackney; from Hackney over to Lewisham. Street by street, shopping parade by shopping parade, the union is knocking on doors and setting up stalls, slowly infiltrating a metropolis that, from above, can sometimes resemble an exquisitely wrought treasure chest: studded with shiny towers and sparkling shrubbery, but driven by little more than money and the interactions between those bending over backwards to hand it over, and those who receive it. ‘The combination of global capital, government policies designed to kill off social housing and failures in housing benefit are reconfiguring the city,’ writes housing academic Anna Minton.33 ‘The politics of space is replacing the traditional politics of class. The old hierarchy of upper, middle and working class, which ranked groups in society as workers and bosses, no longer holds up in the face of a property-based economy where the income from rent far exceeds economic growth and wages. There is more wealth coming into London than ever before, but these riches are not shared, with unaffordable property prices and rents making life worse for the majority.’ Like that of central Manchester, London’s housing market is no longer a market at all in the traditional sense; it now beats to the rhythm not of local supply and demand, but of international financial flows, and those who can’t keep pace are finding themselves hollowed out from within. The café where Anabel and I first met, Pueblito Paisa – part of the eclectic indoor market known as the ‘Latin Village’ in Tottenham, north-east London – is set to be demolished soon as part of a council-supported redevelopment project led by Grainger PLC, the UK’s largest professional landlord; mock-ups of the retail units that will replace the market feature branches of Costa Coffee and Pizza Express.34 When I first started reporting on United Voices of the World, it was headquartered alongside a gaggle of small international solidarity organisations and obscure religious ministries up in Hannibal House, the tower that rises above the Elephant and Castle shopping centre; all of them have now been evicted as part of the Lendlease regeneration scheme. London is still one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, filled with cultural subspaces. But across the capital, quirky pubs, gay saunas, decades-old music venues, theatres and dog tracks – the crannies that cater to communities whose strength must be measured in something other than financial clout – are being gradually buried, often under identikit towers of new-build concrete: global bank accounts with walls and windows, stacked high atop one another to the sky.
Unaffordable housing and cultural stasis are symbiotic: more people are now leaving London than moving to it, with net outward migration up by 80% since the early years of the financial crisis.35 The sociologist Saskia Sassen calls this process ‘de-urbanisation’, describing it as the haemorrhaging not just of residents themselves, but of the connective tissue that forms around them: the frontier zones, as Sassen puts it, ‘where actors from different worlds can have an encounter for which there are no established rules of engagement, and where the powerless and the powerful can actually meet’.36 Hyper-investment in London property and the private-developer-led regeneration model on display at MIPIM has resulted in not just buildings themselves but even the streets, parks and plazas in between them falling into corporate hands. There are now more than fifty large open spaces in the capital that appear to be public but are actually privately owned and run, and where landholders are permitted to employ their own security guards and police behaviour as they see fit. One of them houses London’s seat of government: City Hall sits on an estate owned ultimately by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait, which forbids journalists and photographers from operating on their site without prior corporate permission.37 Just as they are most likely to be excluded from new housing opportunities, it is London’s most marginalised populations that tend to bump up hardest against these invisible fault lines: the rough sleepers moved on by a private security firm to preserve the aesthetic quality of a new set of ‘public’ squares in King’s Cross, for example, or the housing complex in Lambeth where initially the playground was open only to the children of property owners, forcing those of the social housing tenants on the same site to go elsewhere.38 ‘We’ve gone from being ruled by Barclays bank to being controlled by Berkeley Homes,’ Peter Rees, the City of London’s former chief planner, proclaimed in 2014.39 It is this London, at this time, that makes the LRU’s alternative vision and form of organising feel so radical. It is this London, with all its epic and infinitesimal iniquities, that might just mean they win.
*
Kensington, home to MIPIM and to Grenfell, as well as to the LRU’s first major public protest, is a barometer of the challenge facing those who seek a different kind of London: a gauge of the sheer scale of what they’re up against, but one that offers some optimistic indicators too. Walking the streets here can be a disorientating experience. Of course, all of the capital’s neighbourhoods are socially variegated; this is the city where wealth and poverty get lost most rapidly in one another, forming enclaves within enclaves as precise as they are dense. Yet even by London’s standards, Kensington’s shifts can give you whiplash. Blocks of social housing give way to genteel rows of cherry blossoms and white Regency villas worth millions; at the bottom of Kensington Palace Gardens, the most expensive street in Europe, stands a TK Maxx, where end-of-line products are sold at heavy discounts.40 Just south of Kensington Palace Gardens is Heythrop College, an educational institution which will soon be knocked down to make way for a new private-housing complex consisting of a luxury spa, wine-tasting room, dog-grooming parlour, and apartments with a market value of between £3 million and £6 million each. Out of 142 properties built on the site in total, five will be classed as affordable. Yet travel a few stops north of Heythrop on the 452 bus and you’ll come to St Marks, a housing co-operative that provides a not-for-profit alternative to the short-term ‘live-in guardians’ system. Right next to the Lancaster West estate, staring up at the smooth skin of the Westfield shopping centre, lies the remnants of the People’s Republic of Frestonia: a squatters’ community that declared independence from Great Britain in 1977 in protest against the planned demolition of their homes. Frestonia appointed its own foreign minister, and began issuing stamps; at one point during their struggle, several occupants changed their surnames to ‘Bramley’ – named after nearby Bramley Road – in an attempt to be legally recognised as a family unit, and thus rehoused together. Bailiffs and bulldozers have always threatened Londoners, and Londoners have always dreamt up unexpected ways of pushing back.
And then there is the Walterton and Elgin estate, the story of which is really the story of post-war housing in London – only, in this case, one that offers an alternative ending. Properties here, just north of the Paddington branch of the Grand Junction Canal on the other side of Kensington’s border with Westminster, were built in the late nineteenth century. By the 1950s they were run-down and being bought out by unscrupulous private landlords, including the infamous Peter Rachman whose name became so synonymous with the mistreatment of tenants that it entered the Oxford English Dictionary. In the years that followed, all manner of misfits and bohemians made their homes around Walterton Road, including rock band the 101’ers (named after the door number of the house they squatted in) whose frontman Joe Strummer went on to form the Clash. In the 1980s, ownership of the estate passed to the local authority, which – presaging the London still to come – announced that it planned to ‘create a new community’ on the site, replete with a high-end hotel. ‘I remember the phone call,’ Jonathan Rosenberg, who was living on the estate at the time, told me. ‘There was no consultation, no warning. They told us that our homes were being sold off and demolished, and something just went off in my head. I just thought, how dare they? That phone call changed the course of my life, and I’ve never stopped since. I simply can’t stand bullies.’
Jonathan and other residents threatened with eviction formed the Walterton and Elgin Action Group, which waged a seven-year war with the council to halt their expulsion and secure control of the estate by its community instead. Members ranged from twentysomething ‘soul poets’ to grizzled octogenarians; together they lobbied council meetings, targeted potential private investors, and stencilled a huge ‘Not For Sale’ sign on top of one of the estate’s tallest towers, Chantry Point. The local authority, led by Dame Shirley Porter (of homes-for-votes scandal fame), put up a ferocious resistance to the idea of community ownership, deploying an array of dirty tricks and at one point even housing homeless families on the estate in units that it knew were contaminated with asbestos. But in 1992, campaigners won the battle and the site was formally transferred to a new entity entitled Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH) – a democratic body, run by its own residents. WECH is now one of the largest community land trusts in the country, responsible for over 600 homes. Community land trusts take different legal forms, but common to all of them is that they don’t generate profit and are designed to benefit a particular local group, members of which all have an equal say when it comes to decision-making. ‘Communities can own anything: housing, agricultural land, woodlands, ports, lighthouses, castles, you name it,’ argues Jonathan, who has gone on to become a full-time advocate for the community housing model, and now advises residents’ groups and local authorities all over the country. He pointed out that the majority of land has been held in common for much of human history. ‘Private ownership of land is actually a very modern aberration,’ he told me. ‘Bullies started stealing from poor people a few hundred years ago, and they haven’t stopped since.’
Community land trusts are not a panacea for the housing crisis. Lots of things have gone wrong along the line that runs from Grenfell to MIPIM, and the job of repairing them will require a number of different tools. Rent controls and more robust rights for private tenants may be among them, alongside a reversal in the decline of social housing and a dramatic rebalancing of the relationship between property developers and local authorities, all rooted in a reconceptualisation of housing as a fundamental social good rather than a global commodity to be gambled on. But to their supporters, community land trusts are key to providing a route not just away from the violence of estate evictions, but also towards a future that doesn’t involve blandifying the city. ‘Commodification only really became possible by stealing land out of community ownership,’ argues Jonathan. ‘Now if it can be said that the privatisation of land – taking land out of community ownership – is one of the major drivers of commodification, then putting land back into community ownership is an antidote to commodification: a very deep antidote too, not just something that treats symptoms but something that actually gets at the cause.’ At WECH, a sense of communal ownership is woven into the fabric of the estate: when residents first won the right to take control of the neighbourhood themselves, a democratically elected management board ensured that friends and families were placed in refurbished units next to one another – compare that to the vast displacement of former residents on the Heygate estate – and the administrative office is located only a short distance away from anybody’s home. ‘A community land trust headquarters should be within fifteen minutes’ walk of any property,’ insists Jonathan, ‘because residents need to be within walking distance of staff and more importantly staff need to be within walking distance of residents. If they can’t walk to people’s homes, they won’t see them, and if they can’t see them, how will they ever understand them and look after them?’
An independent study in 2010 designed to measure the impact of community ownership found that WECH residents, despite being more economically deprived than the regional or national average, reported a much stronger sense of belonging to their neighbourhood. Over 90% of WECH inhabitants felt secure in, and proud of, their homes – a rise of more than thirty percentage points compared to their previous, precarious, living situation under Porter’s Westminster council. Jonathan showed me some of the old campaign posters produced during the battle against eviction, including designer John Phillips’ iconic image of a figure in a hat, suit and tie with a face made out of a mechanical digger, and the strapline, ‘We are a little worried about our landlord’. ‘WECH residents have gone from a deep level of insecurity to an extraordinarily deep level of security,’ concluded Jonathan. ‘It’s transformed us psychologically, because we don’t have that fear or worry about the landlord any more. The landlord is benign, the landlord is amenable, the landlord is ourselves. There is no us and them. The landlord has a face at last.’
As of 2018, London councils have already granted planning permission for more than 26,000 new luxury apartments valued at over £1 million, most of which are yet to begin construction.41 Council leaders cite the impact of austerity to justify these decisions, and it is true that the capital has been among the hardest hit by national cuts; local authorities in London lost, on average, a fifth of their budgets between 2010 and 2018, and in places like Hackney that equates to a reduction in spending power per household of nearly £1,500 each year.42 Income from top-end developers helps make up for some of that shortfall. But that on its own does not account for councils’ repeated refusals to hold developers to account for breaking their public commitments on affordable housing, nor for the hostility with which community-based alternative development proposals have routinely been met. At many councils it seems that the logic of late capitalism – of markets, ultimately, knowing best – is continuing to stifle political imaginations. If the housing needs of those who live in the city do remain subordinate to the interests of global capital, it is not hard to envisage what this next wave of de-urbanisation might look like: flats snapped up overwhelmingly by investment outfits, anonymous tax-haven addresses and absentee landlords, guarded by concierges who sit in a small pool of light on the ground floor at night, propping up towers of ghosts. Almost one in five MPs are landlords and nearly a hundred London councillors have links to the property industry; given the money already sunk into a perpetuation of the housing status quo, the prospects for change can often seem dim.43
And yet change is materialising. The LRU are already racking up successes, both for individual members and the renter community more widely: in April 2019, following sustained pressure from the union and other housing campaign groups, the government announced that – despite furious lobbying from the Residential Landlords Association – it would begin consultations on the scrapping of Section 21 and ‘no fault’ evictions. And to the south of Kensington at Earls Court, another attempt to ‘decant’ a social housing community in order to make way for a multibillion-pound redevelopment project – this time helmed by the global management and consultancy company Capco – has hit the buffers thanks to a concerted effort by residents of the imperilled estates to stand firm and insist on a community-ownership alternative instead. ‘Grenfell has changed the mood, and a new political consensus is emerging,’ says Jonathan Rosenberg, who is supporting the ‘People’s Plan’ for the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates. At least one of the local authorities concerned has now turned against Capco and is considering using compulsory purchase orders to force the company out; the current mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has also declared his opposition to the original ‘regeneration’ plan, and is urging Capco to hand back the land to the local community.44 ‘Now that the dragon is on the ground,’ observed Jonathan, ‘the invitation to come and do some spearing has gone out, and there’s a queue down the street.’ In among the stalled cranes and CCTV-monitored construction hoardings encircling the site, there is a feeling that the tide might finally be turning against the sort of makeover inflicted on the Aylesbury or Heygate estates, the sort of makeover residents of the Walterton and Elgin estate battled so mercilessly to resist. ‘We won’, reads graffiti on some corrugated iron fencing in the area.45 ‘You should fight them too’.
Just before I left MIPIM, I tried out one of the conference’s star attractions: a virtual-reality simulator created by the French bank BNP Paribas, who are heavily invested in property development projects and keen to position themselves as central to the ‘future of real estate’. The company’s head of digital innovation, Florian Couret, ushered me in to an eight-sided grey box spotlit by neon green lamps, and sat me down in front of a large flatscreen television displaying the words ‘Bienvenue Sur Le Pod’ (‘Welcome to the Pod’), against a background of Chinese lanterns. He fitted a headset over my eyes, and I found myself in a digitally rendered skyscraper in Saint-Ouen, on the north side of the Parisian Périphérique. A shiny black table was in front of me, surrounded by office chairs; through the windows, the cityscape glowed in the early evening sun, and the names and location of other BNP Paribas construction projects shimmered on the horizon. A small digital maquette of the building I stood in was positioned at the bottom of my field of vision, and as I focused on it and nodded my head up and down, storeys melted away and re-formed accordingly. In its pixelated rigour, the world before me lost all distinction: three-dimensional blades of grass flickered in a non-existent wind, blocks of colour appeared and vanished, metal became wood, wood became glass, glass became cut-out people. ‘The Pod is a marriage of start-up innovation that will enable clients to make even more informed and empowered decisions about their real-estate investments,’ read the promotional material that BNP Paribas sent to me that evening. ‘An investor can project himself into a building, even those that do not yet exist, in any city in the world … Or, a town-planning committee can envisage a new urban landscape, giving them the potential to truly embrace the concept of place-making.’ It was the kind of language that has become commonplace among both developers and local authorities in Britain, and the thought of town-planning committees determining the future of our neighbourhoods by sitting in virtual-reality boxes mediated by BNP Paribas made my head swim all the more. ‘The primary role of the council has become one of place optimisation and entrepreneurship,’ claimed Lambeth officials recently.46
Soon after the end of my time at MIPIM, I visited a small art gallery near Waterloo which was displaying a series of artworks responding to the London housing crisis.47 One of them, created by the artist Jasper Delamothe, was a virtual-reality experience shot inside the council flat of Aysen Dennis, a fifty-nine-year-old woman facing eviction from the Aylesbury estate.48 Wearing a VR headset identical to the one installed in Le Pod, I was able to view a 360-degree panorama of Aysen’s living room and watch her feed her cat, put the kettle on, and settle down to watch some tennis on TV. Nothing else happened: no disappearing floors or rising rebars, no pulsing dots indicating a portal to other real-estate projects, no marketing blurbs flashing down the left-hand side of the screen. All I could see was a person, sitting on a sofa in front of windows that looked out across her city, savouring the prosaic and dwindling wonder of feeling safe and secure in her home.