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”.
