Squalor by Daniel Renwick;Robbie Shilliam; & Robbie Shilliam

Author:Daniel Renwick;Robbie Shilliam; & Robbie Shilliam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

BROADWATER FARM

The Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham provides a lucid case study in how these struggles over the city were neither small nor incoherent but rather magnified and shaped the politics of housing in our contemporary era. Building of Broadwater Farm began in 1965 and was not finished until 1971. But within months of its development, the estate was already being denigrated by the local press as a den of criminality. In the previous chapter we tracked the change in apprehensions over the moral consequences and social utility of high-rises. In the case of Broadwater Farm, its highrises were depicted not as facilitating upward mobility but rather as reaching new heights of human misery (Severs 2010).

The poor reputation that the estate suffered from at its very inception led to many prospective residents rejecting offers to live there – some 55 per cent. Haringey Council therefore filled the estate with those who had no choice other than to live on the Farm or face homelessness. For this reason 70 per cent of residents were in receipt of benefits, and almost half of occupants were single-parent families – a pathology to the state, who preferred the nuclear family, and also a stick to beat the Black community over their supposed “absent fathers”. The conceit holds that women à la Beveridge “should, according to common ideology and state policy” have a man to support them (Pierce 1980: 84). Recall, also, the moral panic over mugging. Similarly, when it came to Broadwater Farm, the press race-baited a multiracial youth visà-vis a predominantly white elderly population. Overall, the Farm was framed through an increasingly populist distinction between respectable working-class residents versus a semi-criminal (and heavily racialized) underclass.

A decade after its construction, Broadwater Farm had attracted such a bad reputation that calls were made to demolish it. Yet residents on the estate pursued a meaningful life for themselves – as all residents in all built environments tend to do – and a play group, youth centre and old people’s club brought together the multi-racial population in some kind of convivial fashion (Sivanandan 1990: 134). This is no surprise since the estate had been built by architects with the intention of fostering precisely such a community.

Except that this fostering was increasingly of a communalistic kind that, even if a response to injustice, was held in derision and fear by local administration. At Broadwater Farm, spaces were opened but away from the street such that the public/private divide was smudged. The underground car park extended these spaces in a subterranean fashion. In this environment, those youth fleeing the police could often lose their predators so long as they made it to the estate.

Unsurprisingly, the police became highly critical of the estate’s architecture, so much so that measures were taken to henceforth include the force in the planning of large estates. Many of the estate’s residents ended up living under near constant surveillance. Animosity between the police and the estate’s youth intensified despite the actions from residents of the estate to improve their conditions.

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