Review: Estates by Lynsey Hanley | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books: "Apartheid is alive and well in Britain
Having grown up on a council estate in Birmingham, Lynsey Hanley is ideally placed to chart the chronic failures of Britain's housing policy in Estates, says Sarah Wise
Sunday January 14, 2007
The Observer
Estates: An Intimate History
by Lynsey Hanley
Granta, £12, pp244
Isn't it strange,' Lynsey Hanley asks in her moving and forthright book about class and council housing, 'that this act of civic socialism - the state sequestering large tracts of virgin land so that it might house its poorest in the clean, wide-open countryside - ends up feeling like a boot on the face?' Hanley, now 30, grew up on the vast Wood estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, which was completed in 1971, and her part-memoir, part-history examines from both inside and outside the causes of the 'spirit-sapping' effect of so much postwar social housing on its residents."
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