Estates, An Intimate History. By Lynsey Hanley

In this insightful book, she writes with passion, humour and a sense of history, and looks at how the estate shaped the person she is. She tells the story of estates in Britain, from the rise of social housing a century ago through to the present, where the council estates of Britain seem to be synonymous with crime, drug abuse, single parent families, failing schools and burnt out cars.

Hanley focuses on how shifting trends in urban planning and changing government policies from the Garden City Movement through Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’ to Thatcher’s Right to Buy has affected those millions of people who live on council estates.

She argues that council estates have physically mapped Britain’s class system on the landscape of the country, reinforcing the idea of them and us, and resulting in social exclusion and unemployment. Hanley explores who is responsible for the failure of the dream. What she has written is a personal memoir mixed with fascinating social history. As she says herself, the book is as much about class as it is about estates since the history of council housing is also the history of how the industrial working classes were and continue to be housed.