A FEW WEEKS BEFORE Christmas 1964 “Richard Crossman, Labour’s new Minister of Housing, legislated for Birmingham City Council to purchase green belt in the borough of Meriden”. Lynsey Hanley is right, in Estates: An Intimate History, her engrossing story of council housing since the war, to identify that decision as the last great drive to clear the English slums.

But the story of Chelmsley Wood, north of Solihull, where she was born and reared, does not begin there. The creation of Britain’s most ambitious public building programme has to be seen against the background of a visit that Crossman made to my constituency of Sparkbrook, ten days after Labour’s election victory.

I met the Minister of Housing in Gladstone Road — a street of three-storey, once prosperous, Victorian villas that by the mid-Sixties were in what the jargon of the time called “multi occupation”. Whole families lived in one room, sharing a cooker on the landing and a lavatory in the yard which had to meet the needs of two dozen or more.

Chelmsley Wood was meant to be the promised land to which the residents of Gladstone Road, and millions like them, escaped. Crossman had chosen Birmingham as the venue for his first public visit because it was near his own Coventry constituency and its housing crisis was as deep as anything in England. Sparkbrook was the focal point of his tour because, a couple of months earlier, we had met to talk about municipal housing.

Before my election to Parliament I had been successively chairman of the Sheffield Council Public Works Committee and Housing Committee. So I had first “built” and then managed more multi-storey flats than anyone in England.

“High-rise” was, everyone believed, the answer to the urgent need for more decent accommodation. It was cheap and, we all wrongly assumed, would reduce the amount of land needed for the biggest housing drive in British history. Walking across Burbage Moor, just outside the city boundary, Crossman had told me of his plans to link subsidy to height.

High-rise flats — many built before 1964, more after — became social and aesthetic blots on the landscape. Many of them have been pulled down. Quite right, too. But while it was right to demolish them in the Nineties, it was equally right to build them in the Sixties. It was the only way to rescue thousands of families from 100-year-old houses that were unfit for human habitation even when they were thrown up during the Industrial Revolution. Hanley is right to call her second chapter The End of Slums: The Rise of the Council Estate.

The two things were indivisible. Without large-scale council building the slums would not have been cleared for another 50 years.

Our plans all depended on “comprehensive redevelopment areas” — as Estates puts it, “high-density blocks of flats” which “encircle the city centre” and “peripheral housing schemes” in the nearby green belt. Typical of such city-centre schemes was Park Hill, in Sheffield, which, she tells us, was soon described by its residents as “San Quentin, after the tough -nut California jail”. When Park Hill was built, with water-borne refuse disposal in every kitchen and “launderettes” on every landing, it was so popular that families on the waiting list postponed their rehousing until a flat there was available. That Park Hill has become unpopular is a matter for rejoicing. The world has moved on.

It has not moved on so quickly that there is no longer a snobbish feeling that a “council tenant” is in some way inferior to an owner-occupier. And that absurd identification of “second-class citizens” has, as much as anything, caused the paucity of aspiration that Hanley rightly regards as the curse of municipal tenancy. The right-to-buy legislation introduced by Michael Heseltine in 1982 and described by tabloid newspapers as “the sale of the century” accelerated the differences between “them and us”.

It was assumed that everyone with ambition and even modest savings would choose to own rather than to rent. The idea that the worst families remained council tenants was a myth. But it was certainly true that the worst houses were left in corporation ownership. The quality of the bricks and mortar, not the character of the people, extended the great divide.

Some reformers always sought to create mixed communities. Aneurin Bevan reportedly spoke of building a “living tapestry of mixed communities”. In Sheffield, during the 1960s, we persuaded builders to scatter owner-occupied semi-detached houses on the council estates in the hope of bringing communities together.

Though Hanley is kind enough not to mention it, local housing committees prejudiced the prospects of achieving something like equality of esteem by forcing tenants to conform to pointless regulations that owner-occupiers would never have tolerated. Front doors had to be painted a standard colour. No pigeon lofts were allowed in the back garden. Communal front gardens could not be personalised by fences.

Because of the sell-off, we are left with residual council estates that are increasingly the refuge of people who accept (or perhaps just endure) housing standards that the rest of society regards as inadequate. That degeneration has been accelerated by the Government’s obsession with ending municipal ownership completely and, as an incentive to agree to private buy-outs, leaving thousands of properties in desperate need of repair and renovation.

The council tenant is fast becoming the paradigm of 21st-century Britain. Everyone is better off except the most desperate and dependent 10 per cent at the bottom of the heap. But in its time the council estate was good and right. Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing book proves that to be so.

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