South London exhibition showcases residents’ fight against ‘social cleansing’

Aysen Dennis lives on the eighth floor of the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, a south London borough. The steep ascent to her flat is littered with rubbish. Water gathers in pools on the uneven stairwell. Her corridor, when you finally reach it, is deserted. The neighbouring flats are boarded up with thick metal panels, old door numbers burned into their rusting surfaces. 

“On my floor there’s only five of us left,” says Dennis. “The others are all gone.” In 2005, Southwark Council announced it would demolish the council estate – one of the largest in Europe – as part of a wider project to “transform” the area. At the time, the sprawling mass of concrete blocks, built between 1967 and 1977, was home to around 7,500 residents. Today, it stands mainly empty.

Since 2010 residents have slowly been moved out as, block-by-block, the Aylesbury is torn down. Over the years, as political enthusiasm for post-war social housing projects waned, the estate and others like it have fallen into disrepair. The death knell was perhaps sounded in 1997, when Tony Blair used the site for his inaugural speech as prime minister, launching New Labour’s regeneration policy for Britain’s “no hope areas” and “forgotten people”.

For Dennis, the estate’s fall from grace was not because of poor design or because its occupants didn’t care. She believes it is the victim of a “managed decline” – deliberate neglect – that has served the interests of profit-led development companies.

Beyond Aylesbury stretch large swathes of green space, a luxury in London’s Zone One. The tower blocks back onto grass squares and border Burgess Park – an attraction Dennis is all too aware of. “This is my home,” says the 64-year-old, who has been a council tenant on the estate for 30 years and wants to stay. “They don’t think people like me deserve to live here.”

Dennis’s block will be among the next to go. Walking along the corridor of the condemned building, her home is hard to miss. Daylight spills out the front door, which is defiantly wedged open, excavating the gloom. Inside is a hive of activity and colour. The sunny two-bedroom flat has been transformed by a collective of residents and campaigners into an exhibition, ‘Fight4Aylesbury’, open 14 to 23 April, documenting the lives and resistance of the people who have lived there.

“It’s a celebration of our fight,” Dennis explains. The exhibit reframes the demolition by foregrounding what residents and housing campaigners feel has been a deeply flawed process. Southwark calls it ‘regeneration’, Dennis calls it social cleansing.

As plans have dragged on, now expected to be completed in 2036, the estate’s residents have been split up and scattered across the capital and beyond. Of the 4,200 new homes being built on the site in partnership with housing association Notting Hill Genesis, the council says 1,575 (37.5%) will be social rent or council housing. This represents a loss of more than 800 homes: 87% of the 2,758 homes on the Aylesbury were socially rented in 2008, according to a 2015 Greater London Authority case report. Leaseholders on the estate, meanwhile, have had their homes compulsorily purchased for a price set by the council.

What’s happening at Aylesbury is being mirrored all over London: low-income residents being driven out to make way for more expensive housing. The exhibition centres their experiences. Lining the walls in the entrance to the flat, documents and newspaper clippings tell us that 73% of residents voted against proposals to sell off the estate in 2001. Four years later, the council announced its plans for demolition, claiming an assessment had found that it would be too costly to simply refurbish the existing buildings.

A video playing in Dennis’s living room shows hundreds of riot police evicting housing activists who occupied empty blocks on the estate between January and April 2015. Banners hung from windows read “Housing is a Right” and “No Demolition”. The scenes that unfold over shaky-camera footage feel more reminiscent of a war zone than a neighbourhood struggle. At one point you can hear police officers smashing up flats to prevent the occupation spreading. Activists later unceremoniously dumped the detritus of this outside council offices.

Southwark Council responded to the occupation by erecting a metal fence around the blocks in March 2015, guarded by a private security firm. Torn down by activists a month later, it was swiftly reassembled, staying up for almost two years. A Freedom of Information request in May 2017 found that in two years it had cost the council £705,000 (£24,000 a month). The redevelopment, the exhibition makes clear, has been a constant battle.

Dennis dedicates her bedroom to telling her story. It’s one of building a home with her sister, with whom she fled Turkey after the 1980 military coup, only to wind up living in uncertainty and loss for over 20 years as deadlines stretch and her home is left to decay. Out of the window, looming and skeletal on London's skyline, cranes are busy working on the first phase of redevelopment, where she will be moved by the end of the year. For Dennis, the impact of losing your home cannot be underestimated. “It’s always in the back of your mind.”

For Dennis, anger and rage are essential to survival. But so is laughter. Among the artefacts of struggle, she herself is a living archive – rich with stories of life on the estate, readily served up to visitors along with endless Turkish tea. At the heart of the exhibition, she reclines on a purple sofa, arms outstretched, cigarette at her fingertips. Her face is serious, but her dark eyes have a mischievous glint and smile lines trace her cheeks.

She talks about a time when the lift was constantly running with people coming and going. When they would sit out along the corridors to keep cool in the summer heat, chatting to passing neighbours and children playing out. “People even dyed their hair.” Through footage of the estate’s heyday and photos of Dennis’s life – her two cats, her sister, who died recently, and friends – we are reminded that there was joy to be had here. 

It’s why Dennis wanted to host the exhibition at her flat. “I want everybody to come and see from the inside,” she says. “Everyone is always looking from the outside and making assumptions.” For years the Aylesbury has been vilified, used as a symbol for urban crime and poverty. But when you go inside Dennis’s home you forget all this. The exhibition transports us, allowing us to see the beauty in these ruins and giving room to a rare politics of hope.

Southwark Council had not responded to openDemocracy's request for comment at the time of publication.