Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20835 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

The Times (Roy Hattersley)
"(An) engrossing story of council housing since the war... (an)
absorbing book"

Telegraph (Andy Miller)
Hanley's Estates is many things - social history, memoir, mild
polemic... honest, informed and never whimsical... well-timed and truthful

Sunday Times
"Articulate, savage, poignant, engaged and vividly descriptive"

Customer Reviews

The story of a life
Both of the concept of council housing and the author's own. Keenly felt, written with absolute conviction, this is compelling stuff. Lynsey Hanley had clearly been waiting all of her brief life in order to commit this to print. Unmissable.

Not as good as the other reviewers suggest
This book doesn't quite work. It seeks to be a personal memoir and an account of public housing policies but falls short in both. For example, while there are references to the author's childhood, these are fleeting and not all that interesting or personal. And, while there is some information on Government housing policy, this is unoriginal and relies too much on a few sources (such as Anne Power's work for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation). Another annoyance is that in various places the author condemns people who look askance at people who live on estates and then does exactly the same herself - the section on shellsuits near the end is a perfect example of this. The author is also deeply confused about various things - especially the aims of national politicians, which are caricatured mercilessly but apparently unintentionally. On page 171, she writes, 'I like to think I know what I'm talking about.' This sums up the book perfectly - slightly arrogant and not as good as it thinks it is.

Excellent and refreshing
Lynsey Hanley has written a refreshingly personal and honest book in "Estates", which is partly a history of social housing in the UK and partly a personal account of her own upbringing on one of Birmingham's big estates.

The two sides of the story Hanley tells are meshed together beautifully, feeding into her central theme of how difficult it is to escape the "walls of the mind" that keep so many people trapped in these places.

She is quite warm and almost nostalgic in the descriptions of her home estate, less so about the sadly typical dump school which she and the other local kids were forced to attend, where a general air of hopelessness was allowed to pervade the atmosphere.

She's now even less complimentary about the estate in East London that she has rather ironically found herself marooned in, as a homeowner in a decaying environment trapped in a long and tortuous decision making process - to demolish or not to demolish.

The author is entirely open and honest about the inherent contradictions in her views and personal position, which could so easily have left her open to unfair charges of hypocrisy.

Excellently written, intelligent, and indeed optimistic in many ways, this is an outstanding work and I look forward to whatever Lynsey writes next.