Chapter Nine Out-Of-Sync Estates
BEN CAMPKIN
Introduction
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2016 newspaper article, headlined ‘I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain’, typifies the – at best – muddled and reductive and – at worst – manipulative ways that historical and other forms of evidence are evoked in political rhetoric on housing.1 Such rhetoric by definition prioritises persuasion over accuracy, but in this chapter I take the content and presentation of Cameron’s words seriously, scrutinising his terms using the methods of demystification offered by historical scholarship. The article, given the alternative titles (and meanings) ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ and ‘Estate regeneration’ ...
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