Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (28 page)

In the 1990s, Quinn was officially recognised as too sick to work as the result of a bundle of ailments (she lists them: joint pain, migraines, gastritis, bouts of depression, underactive thyroid) and since then has had her rent and council tax, currently £120.39 a week, covered by housing benefit. For living expenses, she received £112 a week in incapacity benefit. (The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reckons £200 a week, excluding rent, is needed to maintain a decent life.) But last spring, everything changed. The bedroom tax – which effectively fines Quinn for losing her husband – slashes her housing benefit to £97.15 a week, leaving her to make up the £23.24 difference out of her incapacity payment. Except now she's not getting that
either. At the same time she was hit by the bedroom tax, she was called in for a medical to reassess her fitness for work under the government's new, tighter incapacity rules. The assessment consists of ten checks on physical ability, such as:

Then there are ten checks on your ‘mental, cognitive and intellectual functions': ‘Can you deal with people you don't know?' or ‘Can you usually manage to begin and finish daily tasks?'

Each check answered ‘no' scores points. The more points you get, the more likely you are to continue to be recognised as disabled. Quinn got zero points and a message telling her that the government accepted she was ill, but that she was not ill enough: she would have to start looking for work, and as long as she was unemployed, she would be switched to the Jobseekers' Allowance – a cut in the money she lives on of 40 per cent, down to £72 a week. But because of the bedroom tax, £23.24 of that has to go towards her rent, leaving her with just £48.76 a week to live on; £22 comes out of that for gas and electricity, which leaves about £27 a week for everything else. She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, she doesn't go to the bingo, she doesn't have a car, but that £27 has to cover the TV licence and her phone, as well the dozens of small items everyone needs, like toothbrushes and soap and light bulbs and postage stamps.

And food.

Britain's ever helpful banks have contributed to the picture. They have permitted Quinn to build up a debt of £6,000 on three credit cards. ‘It's a nightmare,' she said. ‘I had to apply for crisis loans. I haven't paid the rent, the electric or the gas. At my age
it's embarrassing to be in this position.' It wasn't that she didn't want to work, she said; she left school at fifteen, on a Monday, and got a job on Tuesday. She does unpaid volunteer work as a local health champion. ‘I can't do the heavy stuff. I'm not saying I can't work at all but they want you to work a full forty-hour week. They should prepare you for work and find out what you can do, instead of saying you've got to be prepared to work from now, without any preparation or anything.'

She will get a state pension, but not until November 2015. If she can hang on to her flat until then she'll be exempt from the bedroom tax. But it isn't clear how she will survive in the meantime. ‘I think there should be a fairer way of asking people to leave their accommodation,' she said. Council tenants face a jail sentence if they try to sublet. I asked Quinn if a relative could move in so as to avoid the bedroom tax. ‘That defeats the purpose of having a second bedroom,' she said. ‘Why shouldn't I have a home I don't have to share with anyone? I could have my granddaughter move in. But if I had her, my daughter would have to give up the family credit. There's a way round it but somebody else has to lose money.'

One of the curious things about Quinn's situation is that the government would love to give her £100,000, but she's not prosperous enough to qualify for it. That figure is the maximum discount on the market price a council tenant who exercises Right to Buy can now claim in London. Given that her flat would be worth at least £300,000, Quinn could, in theory, buy it, sell it on and pocket the difference. But then she'd have nowhere to live; and she can't raise the missing £200,000, because she has no money for a deposit and no way of getting a mortgage. She and her husband didn't have a principled objection to Right to Buy. They just never got rich enough to get richer.

In most people's understanding of the world I'd be considered a homeowner, although since I have a mortgage I am, for the time being, renting it from the bank. I was born at my grandparents'
house in Blackheath in the middle of the great London smog of December 1962, and since then I've had about thirty different homes: private flats my parents rented in London, a housing association property in Nottingham, state-owned homes in Lanarkshire during my father's years working for the Scottish prison service, a council house in Dundee, then a private terraced house there (the first home my parents owned, bought when they were in their early thirties), student digs in Edinburgh and London, private rentals in Northampton, a flat of my own in Edinburgh bought when I was twenty-seven, various rentals in the Ukrainian equivalent of privatised council flats, residency in Moscow apartments belonging to Russia's Diplomatic Corps Administration, two floors of a Georgian terraced house in North London bought with my then wife, a post-divorce rental in the East End, and now, my third tilt at home ownership, a flat in a converted school in Bethnal Green (Pat Quinn's old school, as it happens).

I don't expect to find myself living in a council house in the traditional sense – that is, a household dwelling owned and run by the state – any time soon. But that's more to do with the shortage of council houses, and the way they're run, than with any objection on principle, or a conviction that council houses are doomed to be ugly and uncomfortable. None of the things tenants found repellent about life on some council estates in the 1970s – the crime and anti-social behaviour, the damp, the powerlessness in the face of council bureaucracy, the noise, the distance from children's playgrounds, the difficulty of imposing personal style on a habitat you didn't own, the penny-pinching bodgery of council repairs, the obstacles to moving – is inherent to municipal tenure; they're the result of incompetence, carelessness and unreasonable economies.

Councils made some terrible mistakes in their postwar housebuilding programme, partly because of pre-Thatcherite Conservative populism. The Tories started a race with Labour over who could build more houses, abandoning Bevan's conviction
that numbers weren't enough, that the homes had to be spacious and well built, too. The worst blunder involved the use of a Danish system of prefabricated concrete panels to build tower blocks three times higher than they were designed to be, assembled by badly supervised, badly trained workers and engineers. Hence the Ronan Point disaster in 1968, when a twenty-two-storey block in East London partly collapsed after a gas explosion, killing four people. The block was finally demolished the year before the great storm of 1987, which might literally have blown it down. Ronan Point was designed to withstand winds of up to 63 mph; some of the gusts during the storm reached 94 mph.

As the decades pass and the council homes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s grow into the urban landscape, as their brick and concrete weathers, as they benefit from comparison with the mean little boxes being built by private housebuilders, as a mix of new management, new investment and funds from the last Labour government have dealt with some of the backlog of repairs and design flaws, as the original intentions of architects become unexpectedly visible to a new generation, they are beginning to look like more attractive places to live. Too late for the less well-off; just in time for the hipsters. Rural peers now snap them up for their London pieds-à-terre. Wealthy parents buy them for their children. Buy-to-let investors cram them with students. I might have bought one myself, to live in; friends have done so. Once privatised there was no chance of the councils getting them back. I was shown plenty by estate agents in Tower Hamlets when I was looking for a place to buy – the agents call them ‘ex-local', as in ‘ex-local authority'. They were among the few places of any size I could afford, and they still sell for slightly less than homes built for the market. This is unlikely to last. In the capital, council houses have gone vintage; council houses in inner London are the new lofts, to be boasted about and refitted with salvaged Bakelite and Formica by the trendiest of their new inhabitants. In addition to all the other indignities the poorest
of the poor in London suffer, they now have an extra one: the implication that they never saw the potential.

From my window, council houses – many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun's listed Sulkin House, built on the site of a bombed church, twin stacks of council maisonettes at an angle to each other, linked by a central, cylindrical shaft, like an open book propped on end – an early attempt to create a vertical street. But the main vista is on an altogether more epic scale, an inhabited twentieth-century Stonehenge, a seventeen-acre site of six towers and five lower blocks, widely spaced apart and angled in such a way that at least one face will always be catching the sun and the shadows cast by the towers will rotate like the spokes of a wheel. This is the Cranbrook Estate.

Cranbrook calls attention to itself. It's startlingly different from other estates. The piloti – stilt-like struts cut in from the building's outside edge at ground level – of the high towers are shared with Le Corbusier's modernist
étalon
, the Marseille Unité d'Habitation (which is smaller), but the most striking feature of the blocks, to the non-architect, are the superfluous details that depart from Le Corbusier's functional modernism: the flying cornices, concrete frames like giant handles that jut from the tower roofs, and the frog-green bosses studding the beige brick façades. The initial effect is of some vast, elegant set of combination locks, or duochrome Rubik's cubes, poised at any moment to whirr and counterspin, floor by floor, to trigger the catch on some deeper, hidden secret. Yet familiarity humanises it. You become aware not only of how soaked in light it is but of the architects' legacy to the people who live there. Close to Roman Road is a crescent of red brick bungalows for the elderly, grouped around a garden with a fountain and a bronze
sculpture by Elizabeth Frink,
The Blind Beggar and His Dog
. The toy-like bungalows are superficially so different from the beige and green high-rises behind them that you might assume they had nothing to do with each other, yet they were part of the plan from the start.

The architects hired by the then Bethnal Green Council for the project, built between 1955 and 1966, were the trio of Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey and an elder mentor, the legendary bringer of the torch of modern architecture to Britain from Europe, Berthold Lubetkin. There's a received idea that Lubetkin was only peripherally involved in the design of Cranbrook. He was living in rural Gloucestershire, where he'd been based ever since evacuating his family there in 1939, farming pigs and brooding over the collapse of his hopes of becoming the master builder of a new town for coal-miners in Peterlee, County Durham. Yet as his biographer John Allan has shown, Lubetkin didn't step back from his vocation till much later. Indeed, he was responsible for the overarching design of Cranbrook. Each month he would come up to London, sketchbook bulging with plans.

Lubetkin and his protégés, backed by the public purse of Bethnal Green and London County Council, make an easy target for haters of publicly subsidised housing, for haters of the experimental in architecture, and for those more nuanced sceptics who believe with great passion in state housebuilding but condemn the execution of the great concrete monuments of residential modernism. The argument is that councils treated their tenants like factory-farmed livestock, stacking them on top of one another in concrete boxes in defiance of their traditional British desire for two-up, two-down homes with a patch of garden; that they left them prey to the visions of egotistical architects, who thought only of the grandiose shapes they would carve in concrete, shapes they would never imagine themselves inhabiting, or their children, or anyone they knew. There's much truth in this. In her book
Estates
(2007) Lynsey Hanley, who
was brought up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, mocks architectural critics who describe various notorious London council tower blocks as inspiring ‘a delicate sense of terror' or ‘incredibly muscular, masculine, abstract structures, with no concession to an architecture of domesticity'.

‘After all,' Hanley remarks, ‘domesticity is the last thing you need when you have a family to raise.' The professional avantgarde's take on residential modernism, she argues, ‘seems to fall for the idea that housing should be art. It ought to be beautiful, yes, but not at the expense of the people who have to live in it.' She doesn't explicitly mention the work of Bailey, Skinner and Lubetkin in Bethnal Green, but Lubetkin and his work on Cranbrook would seem, on the face of it, to conform to her archetype of the selfish modernist. Her critique is from the democratic left, but the legacy of Lubetkin and Cranbrook could just as easily be damned by conservative aesthetes in the mould of Prince Charles as having yoked the English working man to alien, totalitarian forms of dwelling.

Lubetkin, who died in 1990, gave his critics plenty to work with. He did have an ego; he deployed his enormous intellect with more force than tact. He and his wife, Margaret, were lifelong communists, and his early designs for Cranbrook were sketched under the influence of a trip he had made to his native Russia in 1953, after the death of Stalin, where the superhuman scale of state planning's achievements thrilled him: