The Greater London Council’s Homesteading Scheme: Housing Rehabilitation and the Urban Imaginary of Conservative Politics in London, 1977–81

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the Greater London Council (GLC)’s Homesteading scheme, which gave away dilapidated, council-owned houses to aspiring homeowners. The first section provides an overview of the scheme and its North American origins. The second half of the article explores the scheme in the context of London’s electoral geopolitics, and considers how the relationship between the boroughs and the GLC influenced housing policy across the capital. The article then locates the scheme within the context of the ‘inner city’, and explores the complex relationship between race, homeownership, and the Conservative Party during the late 1970s. Finally, the article identifies the formation of a Conservative urban imaginary that envisioned London as a ‘city of villages’, resurrecting the brick terraced street as the ideal domestic form, in opposition to the high-rise housing of welfare state modernism—and in so doing, drew on a growing sense of popular individualism during the decade. To conclude, the article proposes that the GLC’s Homesteading scheme was a striking prefiguration of the kinds of urban interventions in British cities that characterized Thatcher’s premiership, and that it has significance for understanding a range of diverse, intersecting urban issues during the period.