A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates

‘It was like heaven! It was like a palace, even without anything in it … We’d got this lovely, lovely house.’ In 1980, there were well over 5 million council homes in Britain, housing around one third of the population. The right of all to adequate housing had been recognised in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but, long before that, popular notions of what constituted a ‘moral economy’ had advanced the idea that everyone was entitled to adequate shelter. At its best, council...