Estates

A seriously good read by Lynsey Hanley that’s seriously relevant today, despite it being published in 2007 (and clearly well researched before publication), certainly because of the current climate and because of years of austerity and political avoidance of awkward social matters.

Again and again, a life spent on a council estate is proved to be an endurance test. To live in council housing in Britain is to be bound and trapped in all manner of ways. There is not only a wall in the head to contend with, but barriers to full participation in almost every area of mainstream society. We seem reconciled to the existence of poor and marginalised people, while failing to integrate them in ways which might not only relieve their poverty, but could transform their status from unequal – humiliated, vilified – second-class citizens into equal, first-class ones. Instead, we reinforce all the things that serve to make people poor: we house them on large, blank-faced, inaccessible estates, we make them ill, and we are content to offer them a peasant’s education and a pauper’s diet. And still people say that poverty and low status are exclusively in the mind.

Lynsey Hanley Estates