“Social housing, not social cleansing.” Not long ago, on the hottest day of the year, I saw these words scrawled on a bedsheet in the boiling sun, draped on the gate of an empty east London council home whose tenants had been evicted to make way for “redevelopment”.
There was a time when such a statement would have been considered hyperbolic, but on the Carpenters Estate in Stratford, with its boarded-up windows and vacant lots tucked away behind the glittering Westfield shopping centre, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Rents are soaring and London is becoming a city for the rich, with the poor driven out of their communities, away from their families, jobs and schools.
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