SLIDING-SLEEVE 26

Oak, January 2008

It was cold and raining. I was waiting for Danielle, a resident of the Oak estate who sits on the TRA, and George, their housing officer, to go on the monthly estate’s walkabout. These walks are meant to give tenants and housing officers a chance to monitor the state of their estate, working together to improve standards. The activity consisted of literally walking around the entire estate, in the communal areas that are neither public, in the sense of belonging to the streets surrounding the estate, nor private, with the definition of private usually starting at somebody’s front door if not always. For example, if a front garden, which is meant to be private, in the sense that it belongs to the tenant and it is their responsibility to look after and maintain, is left to fill up with rubbish and thus becomes a hazard/nuisance for other residents (attracting vermin and smelling, mainly) than the residents may point this out to the HO, who will write to the tenant to get the issue resolved. Things are not always that easy, of course, and it can take years to resolve such issues, but that is how things are meant to be.

The route we took on our walk was negotiated between Danielle, who is an experienced tenant rep and long-term resident of the estate, and George, the Housing Officer. George seemed happy enough to go along the route that Danielle chose, acknowledging her experience and knowledge of the area. Danielle explained to me that because of high staff turnover, and various policies requiring staff to gain experience in more than one area/estate, not to mention promotion of ‘the good ones’, HOs always know a lot less than tenants, at least of those who have lived in an estate a long time and taken an interest in it. As another tenant once told me, it is very important that it is tenants who decide where to go and inspect with the HO. “It is

189 you who needs to say to them ‘we’re going to look at this over here, and then at that over there’!” However, in this particular case there didn’t seem to be any conflict over the route; in fact, Danielle trusted George to go up and inspect the stairs and landings on the higher levels of the estate (dwellings are arranged over two floors connected by stairs and passages, all communal spaces as defined above) by himself, while we waited downstairs. She could not go up the stairs easily because of a bad knee, and she walked rather slowly.

On the couple of occasions I walked up with George, the impression I got was of dirt and shabbiness everywhere, bad smells especially in the dark passageways. It got worse when we started inspecting the bin enclosures, the rooms where the big paladin bins sit at the bottom of the rubbish chutes that serve the upper levels of the estate. Danielle and George walked into every single enclosure, checked and then came out, remarking if anything needed to be done. Most of the time they agreed things were Ok. Most of the time I could not bear to even walk into the bin rooms for the smell. By the end of my fieldwork, however, I had learned the difference between shabbiness, which cannot be fixed without refurbishing the entire estate, and is not what those walks were about, and issues that could be raised with maintenance contractors and cleaners to be fixed as one-offs, which was the point of these inspections. The smells could not be helped, and one just learned to live with them.

We continued on our inspection moving on to the outer areas of the estate; we had started in the middle and were working our way outwards. We stopped by a ground floor flat with a beautiful creeper growing up the wall. It was January, so there were only a few leaves on the branches, but it was easy to imagine the glorious picture of this plant in full bloom covering the wall. The tenant was on the porch/balcony; as we walked by I asked her about the plant, and expressed my admiration. George, however, had other ideas, asking in a rather abrupt manner how long the plant has been there, and “Who’s given it permission?” The tenant replied the plant had been there a good long while and the previous Housing Officers never complained. George was concerned, he explained to me later, about the damage that ivy and many other creepers cause to rendering and mortar, but he decided to let the issue go, for now, and only noted it down in his records. The tenant did not look happy, and gave me a bad look too. Plants – and their leaves! – as well as animals –

190 and their faeces! – could be incredibly contentious issues and made frequent appearances in discussions, agendas and often arguments between tenants, or between tenants and council officers. Social and ecological worlds met and clashed in the inner city too, not just out in the country (DeSilvey 2006).

Finally, as we were reaching the end of our round, we came across a drain in the ground, which Danielle congratulated George for having had fixed. It had not been working for a while, and when it rained the area flooded quite badly. As it was raining then but the drain was working properly there was no water sitting anywhere, which pleased Danielle. Cold and drenched, I said my goodbyes and retreated home, arranging to meet Danielle for the next walk the following month. I would have liked to interview her, ideally in her home, but she explained to me that she was her husband’s main carer; he was not very well and did not like having strangers in the house. Somewhere else then, maybe? Well, she was really busy; she would try and give me a call. In the end it never did happen. It had taken us about two hours to walk through the estate, and while George obviously got paid for this, I could not help but admiring Danielle’s commitment and generosity with her time, not to mention the intimate knowledge of the estate she lived on.

Golden Winter, February 2008

This time I walked with Louise and Tony, residents and members of Golden Winter TRA, and Phil, their Housing Officer. Golden Winter was a much smaller estate than the Oak, made up of terraced houses arranged around a close, which was the only communal space as such. Technically, Phil was no longer ‘their’ Housing Officer, due to a restructuring of his department, and this was his last walk on this estate. Louise and Tony were not at all pleased about this, or about the ‘new woman’ they were about to get. I have heard stories from other estates where residents protested when ‘their’ Housing Officers were changed and sometimes even managed to get them back. Being able to rely on their HO was clearly important to them, and as relationships take time to build, disruptions were not welcome. As my fieldwork progressed, I realised more and more how important it was to have a good relationship with one’s HO, and by the end of it I could almost tell if an estate had a good rapport with their HO by the way the grounds looked. It is not something easy to pinpoint exactly, of course; rather it is akin to what Bloch (1991) and Jenkins

191 (1994) refer to as non-linguistic knowledge that is borne out of experience and is not usually verbalised, and which an anthropologist can only acquire through participant observation.

The first issue Louise and Tony discussed with Phil was an overgrown hedge, situated along the perimeter of their estate and the cycling path next to it. Their main concern about it was not so much on the side of their estate, but for people walking on the cycle path who would not feel safe because the hedge was too tall and impeded visibility, making the cycle path too enclosed and potentially dangerous. Phil said he could not do anything about it; they would have to raise it with the ‘Visual Audit Team’, as it was their job. When I first heard housing officers reply in this way, I remember being rather surprised. A few months later, however, I had learned enough of the system to know that Phil could not have ‘raised’ this job himself to the other team. It had to be a resident doing it, or the order would not go through the system. The initial impression – “it’s incredible to compare the council’s disjointed, often schizophrenic system with the common sense, holistic thinking of those like Louise and the other TRAs I’ve seen” (field notes, 24.02.08) – was thus tempered through learning how the council’s bureaucracy worked. Long term residents, especially those who have been active in the movement a long time, usually know how the system works, or more importantly know enough to keep on top of the continual changes to rules and structures, not to mention high staff turnover, to keep their group and estate going.

During fieldwork, for example, housing officers (HOs) in the borough had their department restructured, and their job description and functions changed, at least twice. There were also three different Residents Involvement Officers (RIOs) on my own estate. It was so difficult to keep up with the various changes and reorganizations that there was a running joke about me amongst other tenants that “oh, so now it takes a PhD to understand how this system works then!” This was obviously meant as an amusing comment, but it is quite significant: it did take me around three to four months to find the my way into the meetings and networks that connected the council, tenants movements and various community groups operating on and around the estates. At the time, finding out about those people and their networks was my highest priority, and I was working on it full time, so one could argue that this sort of knowledge is by no means easily available to all residents,

192 which in turns questions the representativeness of those movements, community groups and, as a consequence, the council public engagement strategy as a whole.

As we moved on around the estate, Tony asked about a metal case/box fixed to the pavement, containing apparently electrical cables and fuses, but seemingly not working any more, considering the dust and rust accumulated on and around it. What was it? Was it working, should it be fixed, or if not could someone remove it please? Phil had no idea what it was, or who may have put it there, but wrote it down in his notes and said he would investigate. At the end of the walk a report on what needed to be done, as noted down by Phil, was signed by Louise and Tony. In a few days they would receive a copy of it, after Phil had raised the jobs identified in the walkabout, listed with a likely completion day, for Louise and Tony to monitor and report back to the rest of the TRA. On a small estate like the Golden Winter the walk took about an hour, and the monitoring of repairs that Louise and Tony would certainly keep up with, as they always did, shouldn’t take much longer. On estates of over 400 units spread over different blocks, this procedure (walkabout and successive monitoring) might take anything up to a few days, as another tenant, an OAP from the Long Summer estate, proudly explained to me.

The amount of time these tenants devote to their estates denoted a care for, and commitment to, their homes and their areas that did not fit with the logic that equates private property with care, or the argument that it is only through ownership that people can feel an attachment and a sense of belonging to an area. This was the argument that Thatcher had used to promote the Right to Buy policy she made into law in the Housing Act of 1980 – but let us remember that the Labour party did not abolish it during the twelve years they were in power after Blair’s victory in 1997. Both parties, argue Jones and Murie (2006) were supportive of the policy and the alleged merits of promoting ownership to make people care about their homes and communities. From this point of view then council estates, and publicly owned housing in general, necessarily become symbolic sites of anti-social behaviour, if caring and the right kinds of sociability can only be obtained through private property.

One could instead turn the argument on its head, and instead say that tenants' behaviour on the estates is a form of caring for the common good, the res publica that

193 was at the core of ideas of democracy and current society as we have inherited it from Greek philosophy. The idea that a collectivity may be able to care for common property and resources has been so deeply undermined by Garrett Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons (1968) as to be currently counterintuitive. Hardin’s argument was that, to put it briefly, resources held communally were destined to be overused to the point of exhaustion, and that private property was the only way to avoid this ‘tragedy’. This line has been enthusiastically adopted and applied by a variety of disciplines - economics, political economy, conservation and so on - to the point that it took a Nobel Prize winner economist, Elinor Ostrom (1990), to point out what anthropologists had known for a very long time. The people that anthropology has traditionally studied – calling them ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, ‘underdeveloped’ and so on – had been able to hold on to and successfully manage their commons for a very long time, usually until they came into contact with western capitalism through various forms of colonialism, at which point their commons were often privatised and destroyed by external influences (Ostrom 1990). Hann’s (1998) review of anthropological approaches to property relations shows the richness that our discipline can bring to this subject and highlights the importance of distinguishing between public property and common property, which is usually regulated by the people who use it in order to avoid precisely what Hardin posits. From this perspective then holding common resources, or value, communally is not only possible, but a potentially succesful strategy with a very long tradition – one just needs to consider the countryside that supported English peasants before the enclosures began, for example.

Furthermore, spending time with the tenants walking and working on their estates brought into question another aspect of the equation that usually sits with private property and ‘appropriate’ social behaviour, namely the idea of the ‘village’. The rural villages that dominate English ideals of ‘escaping’ the madness of the city (see for example Escape to the Country, Grand Design and Location Location

Location) are often portrayed, as in the television programmes mentioned, as havens

of neighbourliness and sociability, symbols of a lost time of true, authentic relations on a ‘human’ scale. The fact that the reality of the countryside may not be quite related to what city dwellers idealise has been explored by Williams (1973) in depth, of course. We may also want to consider that post offices, pubs and local schools are under constant threat in many villages for a number of reasons, that public transport is

194 often patchy and problematic and that many villages become second homes for wealthy city dwellers while locals cannot afford to live there (Watt 2009).

Considering all this, one could then say tentatively that the kind of sociable behaviour observed on the estates could not compare so negatively to the idealised, but maybe not so ideal, sociability of ‘a-social’ suburbs and empty villages (Watt, 2009). Of course, this was already observed by sociologists in the fifties (Willmot and Young, 1957) when East Enders, and many others, where relocated to outer urban areas, suburbs and countryside, and it turned out that by and large they much preferred and missed their old urban environment, if not their actual lodgings. The reality of complex sociable behaviours and commitment to the public good found on housing estates may thus have to be reassessed and readjusted in light of the activities of its residents, as the next section will also show in detail.