Mobilising Housing Histories

Chapter Five South Acton Unsustained

PETER GUILLERY

This chapter is a sort of memoir – a reflective and partly rueful account, more than a decade later, of a largely unsuccessful attempt to mobilise housing history. It is about the recidivism of obsolescence, about how serviceable buildings of entirely different types are repeatedly misidentified as the causes of social problems, and about the difficulty of confronting discourses and economic structures that prioritise renewal over continuity. It is also about the importance of retrospection, about how time colours research and knowledge. In 2004–5 I was responsible for an English Heritage survey of South Acton, an area that comprised one of the largest post-war public housing estates in west ...