This book looks beyond the Aylesbury's public face by examining its rise and fall from the perspective of those who knew it, based largely on the oral testimony and memoir of residents and former residents, youth and community workers, borough Councillors, officials, police officers and architects. What emerges is not a simple story of definitive failures, but one of texture and complexity, struggle and accord, family and friends, and of rapidly changing circumstances. The study spans the years 1967 to 2010 - from the estate's ambitious inception until the first of its blocks were pulled down. It is a period rarely dealt with by historians of council housing, who have typically confined themselves to the years before or after the 1979 watershed. As such, it demonstrates how shifts in housing policy, and broader political, economic and social developments, came to bear on a working-class community - for good and, more especially, for ill.

Autorentext
Michael Romyn received an AHRC-funded PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. He has published essays in Planning Perspectives and The London Journal.

Inhalt
1. Introduction

2. 'The End of Slums' and the Rise of a 'Housing Disaster', 1945 1970

3. Community, in all its Complexity, 1970 1979 4. Plotting a Map to Marginality, 1979 1997

5. New Deal? Aylesbury Regenerated, 1997 2010 6. Conclusions