Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building homes, neighbourhoods, and communities

About this event

Anne Power’s new book Beyond Bricks and Mortar presents a history of social housing in the UK, exploring the wider role that housing associations and councils have played in providing low-cost rented housing for low-income communities. Social landlords own over four million homes. By sheltering and supporting the poorest communities, they became key players in our cities, towns, and villages. Their record, documented in Beyond Bricks and Mortar, underlines the vital role they play in Britain. The book illustrates the huge contribution that social housing makes to social and community well-being. In this seminar, Anne Power will explore the origins and history of housing, provided at low cost for the public good, with radical social reformers organising housing, linked to work, childcare, education, and elderly care. As council housing grew rapidly between WW1 and the 1970s, many large estates had problems built in. Beyond Bricks and Mortar sets out what went wrong with the vison of decent, affordable homes for all and the lessons for social housing now. The book then charts New Labour’s efforts to target the poorest neighbourhoods and their impact on housing and communities, as well as on national urban decline and environmental damage. The book then looks at how social landlords responded to severe austerity policies from 2010 onwards. Through this history of social housing, Beyond Bricks and Mortar concludes that the only realistic way to make low-cost renting work for both tenants and landlords is to deliver local, ground-level, hands-on management of rented housing, with strong back up from non-profit landlords. This requires many social and environmental measures to make low-income neighbourhoods viable.