Lynsey Hanley: Healthy and Sustainable Neighbourhoods

Wednesday 18 November 2009, 17:30 - 19:30, University of Hull

Description :

Following the success of our first Talking Points, Lynsey Hanley presented the second in our series at University of Hull.

Lynsey Hanley is author of 'Estates: An Intimate History' and a regular columnist in publications such as The Guardian, the Observer, The Word and the New Statesman.  Lynsey Hanley was born in Birmingham in 1976. She moved to London in 1994 to study politics and history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London.  She is married and lives in the east end of London.

"Lynsey Hanley doesn't pretend that the stereotypes are altogether misplaced.  She too feels her heart sink whenever concrete towers or suburban boxes loom into view; she too sees them as "hutches" and "cages".  But having grown up on one estate (near Birmingham) and made her home in another (in East London), she resents the vilification of those who live there - all sneering at scum, chavs, pikeys and the great unwashed.  More importantly, she believes the greatest division between people today isn't the work they do or what they earn or whether they have children, but the kind of homes they love in.  And she wants to understand why being housed by the state has come to be seen as a confession of failure.

Hanley's parents and grandparents were beneficiaries (or guinea pigs) of the post-war effort to remove the urban poor from inner-city slums to green-belt havens.  Many such families were grateful to be rehoused, but others felt lost, stranded on windswept, anonymous acres far from the life they knew and deprived of any sense of neighbourhood.  As she revisits her old haunts, next to the M6, Hanley feels little nostalgia: when the place you come from is a notown in the middle of nowhere, what sense of belonging can there be?  Inher teens, she suffered from depression and went a little mad.  Now she sees that the architectre of the estate, a vast people-locker "designed by a cyborg", had insanity written into its plan: "How can you fight something as concrete, as concretey, as this?"

Blake Morrison, The Guardian, Saturday 6th January 2007.

Based on her experience and, subsequently, her book, Lynsey Hanley's presentation was on social policy, urban planning and housing.  Questions and discussion were welcomed during the event.

This event is in partnership with the University of Hull.

 

Author: Laura Jarvis, August 2009.  Last updated: 25 November 2009.

Talking Points: Walls in the Head, Lynsey Hanley from Laura Jarvis on Vimeo.

Competences & Levels :

None applicable

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