London in a Council Flat
We spent the first five days of our trip touring through Dorset and Hampshire on the south coast, being driven around by our gracious hosts Pat and Chris (my former host parents from thirty-four years ago), going to tourist sites, a castle, museums, and a country house. In every little village we passed through, Chris would point out “council houses.” And I remembered them from years ago — public housing in every city, town, and village, owned by the council (local government), rented out to low income people. Chris’s mother lived in one for more than thirty years, until she died. Various rules governed who got one and who didn’t, usually income, number of children, and so on.
I don’t know much about the economics of British council houses. I’ve read a little. I’m sure there’s much I don’t understand. They were largely built in the postwar years as a way to deal with housing shortages. They have strict building codes and standards. They’re utilitarian, generally all look the same, they’re relatively small. There were a lot of them, all across the country. According to author Bill Bryson (American who spent many years living in England), at one time various levels of the British government (local, county, and national) were the largest landlords in the country.

Driving through Dorset and Hampshire, Chris kept pointing them out. From a car window as we drove by. How could he tell? Usually on the outskirts of a village. All together. Cinderblock construction, or pebble-dash walls. Solid, decent little houses. Chris, a former electrician, says they’re well built. If he had a chance to buy one, he would.
Starting with the Thatcher government in the 1980s, they’re slowly being sold off. The plan was originally to sell them with assistance to their long-term residents, then use the money to build more council housing for people who had been on the waiting lists for years and couldn’t get a place. Except that it largely didn’t happen, the houses, flats (apartments), terraced houses (rowhouses), and semi-detached houses (duplexes) were just sold to their residents. Or so I understand. Local governments are getting out of the nonprofit landlord business, all is well. Except that now many of them are being sold and re-sold on the open market, and that source of housing for people who need it is slowly disappearing.
We finished our time in Hampshire and came to London on the train, to our rented AirBnB flat somewhere in Pimlico, a neighborhood near central London. A short walk from Victoria Station (with roller suitcases… we travel light). Followed maps, walked through streets of lovely Georgian and Victorian row houses with white pillars and visions of gleaming expensive kitchens through windows.

We found our address. In a group of apartment buildings all together, the architecture from the 1950s and 1960s. Utilitarian. Functional. Clean and pleasant, not fancy. And yes, it’s a former council estate. It’s part of a housing association now, that has some kind of leasing/some social housing/something that I don’t understand. Somehow, someone bought this one and is renting it out through AirBnB. And here we are.

In my own city, Portland, Oregon, the debates about housing are raging. We don’t have anything on the scale of British social housing. Our city is full of homeless people camped out in parks, sidewalks, and roadsides. Some are mentally ill, some are drug-addicted, but some are victims of an economy that has no place for people who don’t make enough money to pay the rent. Every day brings another article about a developer buying up an older apartment building, kicking out all the residents with no-cause evictions, in order to fix it up and double or triple the rent. The poor move further and further away from the city, from their jobs, connections, and neighborhoods. As my city morphs into Silicon Valley North and our ordinary suburban tract house value goes up and up and up to stratospheric numbers that we couldn’t buy again, ever, I wonder where in hell normal people are supposed to live? We’re in our own house out of pure dumb luck of having purchased twenty-one years ago in a city that would one day have skyrocketing home values. I’ve read about the US government’s Section-8 housing vouchers to rent on the open market, but they’re inadequate, in incredibly short supply, and many landlords discriminate against Section-8 holders. I wonder where our kids will afford to live when they’re out on their own.
This is a council estate in central London, so people of limited means can afford to live in the city, and not spend half their limited time and money commuting to a far-flung suburb. The market would say that a central London flat should be expensive. But if only rich people can live in the city, that means more people are traveling on trains, buses, and roads, to get to work in a place where they can’t afford to live. We still haven’t solved that problem. Not in the US. Maybe not in Britain either.

When our family travels, we have to have down-time. We’re in a three-bedroom flat. The kids and my husband retreat to the bedrooms to read or play video games or just be alone.
And I find myself migrating to the kitchen. It’s always the center of any house, no matter how small. It’s where the food is, the dishes, the tea, the coffee, the heart. And I find myself wondering about the women who lived here. Who cooked in this kitchen? Who raised her kids in this flat? Where did she come from to get here? My favorite beloved British TV show, Call the Midwife, often shows families moving out of the squalor of postwar Poplar (London east end docklands) to other places. Did some of them move here? Did they love their new home? Did they miss their neighbors of wherever they came from?
This estate was built between 1946 and 1962, to replace Victorian-era housing destroyed during the Blitz. I’m imagining some postwar mum and her kids. Maybe her husband is working. Maybe she lost him in the war and is trying to rebuild her life. Maybe he got a great job in London and she’s lonely and missing her family in the countryside somewhere else. Maybe she’s happy. Maybe she’s miserable. I don’t know.
The kitchen has a washing machine but no dryer. There’s a balcony with a clothesline and a drying rack. I wash dishes by hand — there’s no dishwasher. And I realize, if I had to choose between a washing machine and a dishwasher, I’d make the same choice. I hang our washing, that I didn’t have to carry down eight floors on a tiny elevator and to a laundromat, on the clothesline. I drink coffee sitting at the little kitchen table while a breeze waves the curtains. I redecorate in my mind, painting walls and adding a shelf and planning where I’d store my pots if I lived here. It’s clean and furnished in IKEA.

And I feel conflicted… being some comparatively rich American, traveling to London for a vacation, to rent what should be low-income housing for a family. Yet someone’s making their living off of renting out this flat through AirBnB. Is it an investment? Is it housing for a family? I don’t know. Both. That essential question — is housing for people or for investment, and whose investment matters most, the owner or the renter — is right up there with numbers of angels dancing on heads of pins.
I hope the women who cooked and raised kids in this flat are well. Many would be my mother’s age now, or maybe older. Generations of kids grew up here. People my age now, people younger, people older.
Wherever you are, I hope your memories of this kitchen, this balcony, the life you had in this flat, were good ones.
