‘Concrete Soldiers UK’: New Documentary Film About Social Cleansing and Council Estate Destruction in London Features Andy Worthington as Narrator

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I’m delighted to announce the launch of the website for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a new documentary film directed by Nikita Woolfe, for which I’m doing the voiceover. I met Niki at ‘The Truth About Grenfell’, a powerful event the week after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in June, organised by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), which Niki was filming (and which also features in ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’). The completed film of the event, which has had nearly 15,000 views to date, is here.

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A few months later, Niki asked me if I’d like to narrate the film, and I was honoured to say yes. I live in social housing (which, for foreign readers, is rented housing that is, essentially, run on a not-for-profit basis), and am a passionate defender of it, and it has been thoroughly depressing watching as it has been denigrated by those who seek to destroy it so they can make a profit from its privatisation or its destruction and replacement by new private developments.

Those who want to get rid of social housing have a number of ploys: one is claiming that it should only be for those who are especially poor and desperate, and not, as I think it should be, for anyone who wants to rent rather than own a property, but who wants to do so cheaply, and sees that as a fair trade, as those who rent never end up owning the properties they live in, unlike those who take out mortgages.

Moreover, the insane housing bubble that has dominated Britain’s economy for almost the last 20 years makes the case for social housing more, not less compelling the more the bubble continues. Far from being something that only the very poor should have, social housing is now something that is needed by everyone but the very rich, as house prices are completely out of reach for all but a small number of ordinary people, and private rental prices have followed suit into the stratospherically expensive. Where once it was accepted that no more than a third of a person’s salary should pay for their rent, people are now regularly paying over two-thirds.

While the argument for social housing for all is not widely aired, but should be, another huge threat to social housing is the planned destruction of housing estates — council estates — on the generally false basis that they are too run down to renovate. Whilst it is true that some estates were poorly built, most of those examples were demolished long ago, and most surviving estates are run down because councils themselves have failed to invest in them, and, moreover, could be renovated much more cheaply than it costs to demolish them, as ASH has persistently demonstrated.

However, those who seek to destroy them are not interesting in renovating properties for their existing tenants and leaseholders, and, as ASH has also demonstrated, paying for these works by infilling with new properties that can be sold on the open market. Instead, they are in thrall to private developers, whose preferred method for profiteering is to demolish estates and build replacements that are largely for private sale, with some available through inadequate alternatives to social rent (which is generally between 30% and 50% of private rents); for example, “affordable” rents (the greatest linguistic misnomer in modern Britain, as “affordable” rents are set at 80% of market rents, and are therefore unaffordable), and shared ownership deals, a scam that involves people paying far more than social rents to nominally own a proportion of the properties they live in.

In addition, existing tenants and leaseholders are treated with contempt, and, in general, are socially cleansed not only from their former homes, but from the entire area in which they lived. Tenants, if they are allowed to return, get smaller properties that cost much more, with no security of tenure, while leaseholders are generally priced out by being offered, through compulsory purchase orders, far less money for their old homes than is required to buy a replacement — either in the new developments or elsewhere in the vicinity.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ looks at the epidemic of social cleansing that is currently underway in London — most of it, it must be noted, engineered by Labour councils, with a particular focus on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and two estates in Lambeth: Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, which I have covered before. See Surprise as Tories Judge that Compulsory Purchases for the Regeneration of Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate Breach Leaseholders’ Human Rights, for example, about the struggle of the Aylesbury leaseholders to prevent Southwark Council from offering them a derisory amount for their homes.

It is also an important part of the film that it presents a positive message, encouraging people to believe that they can make a difference, and that they can succeed in their campaigns, as happened with a small estate of sheltered housing in Streatham, Leigham Court Road, which was saved from its planned destruction by Lambeth Council through a concerted effort by its residents, with support from its architect, Kate Macintosh, and other architects.

The world premiere of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is on Friday December 8 at the Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way, Lambeth, London SE11 4TH. Niki and I will be part of a Q&A, as will other housing activists, and there will also be a performance by the acclaimed spoken word artist Potent Whisper.

A second screening will take place at Deptford Cinema, on Monday December 18, at which I’ll be doing the Q&A, and there will also be representatives of housing campaigns in Lewisham — specifically, Old Tidemill Garden and Reginald Road in Deptford, and Achilles Street in New Cross, which I wrote about here — and if you’re in London tomorrow, please come to a benefit gig I’ve organised at the Birds Nest pub, featuring Potent Whisper, my band The Four Fathers and many other performers.

Please email Niki (or phone 07413 138909) for further information about the film, interview requests, and inquiries about screenings.

A short teaser for the film is below, via YouTube:

Note: This article has been updated to reflect the change of the film title from ‘Concrete Soldiers’ to ‘Concrete Soldiers UK.’

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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