Valued places

Abstract

This chapter examines pre-regeneration estates as valued places with reference to residents’ place attachment. Social tenants and owner-occupiers were attached to their homes as domestic spaces, to their blocks of flats/rows of houses, and to their estates as neighbourhoods – not ‘sink estates’. These were valued and valuable places where long-term residents developed traditional place belonging and a sense of community. Ontological security was rooted at the home scale in solid buildings and domestic self-provisioning (Pahl), and at the block and neighbourhood spatial scales in residential longevity and accumulated local social capital (McKenzie). Residents, especially working-class women, had built up trusting and caring relationships with their neighbours over years of co-residence. Neighbourliness was enhanced by estates’ design features, such as balconies, courtyards, and green space. By purchasing their homes under the Right-to-Buy (RTB), owners deepened their spatial roots, and hence the RTB operated as a buy-to-stay mechanism. Incoming middle-class market-homeowners (gentrifiers) expressed elective belonging, rather than traditional belonging, although they also began to develop local social ties. Despite neighbourhood conviviality, London estates do not form cohesive urban villages as identified during the early post-war period (Young and Willmott), but instead are complex socio-demographic places in terms of ethnicity, age, tenure, etc.