Coming up from the street

A block of flats rises above a murky brown cityscape. Lamplight from some of the windows lends scant warmth to the concrete exterior as trains pass by on the tracks at the building's base. It's high-density housing of the kind you'd see in any of the UK's inner cities, but this block is different: it's the picture on the front of a best-selling CD.

It's the cover image of Original Pirate Material, the first album by Mike Skinner, better known as The Streets. He's based not only his music but his entire image on the persona of an ordinary bloke from a council estate. Other musicians, too, flaunt roots in social housing as a fashion accessory: Dizzee Rascal, last year's winner of the prestigious Mercury Music prize, found fame rapping about his Tower Hamlets estate; the prize's 2002 winner, Ms Dynamite, started her career MCing on council estate pirate radio and filmed the video for her single "It Takes More" on a housing estate in Peckham.

Similar things have been happening on television, where the Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless lent a fictional Manchester estate a warm, feel-good glow. The main characters were a chaotically dysfunctional family but the message was that their social housing cul-de-sac had strong family and community values.

Can this be the same council housing that in the 1980s was deemed synonymous with low-quality housing, joblessness and crime? Is this the start of a new era in which social housing will shake off the negative aspects of its public image?

Over the decades, books, TV, films and music have all charted changing attitudes to council estates – and helped to shape the views of non-tenants and prospective tenants (see "An image in the making", below).

In the 1950s, council housing was something the working classes aspired to and was seen as a better alternative to profiteering private landlords. The media portrayed it as a real achievement of the post-war era. But by the 1970s and 1980s, a crisis had hit estate management and council estates were no longer seen as homes for respectable people as much as dumping grounds for the undeserving. Many entered a spiral of decline, and negative TV and film images reinforced discouraging attitudes.

"People paint these things in very broad brush strokes," says Bill Smith-Bowers, senior lecturer in the University of Westminster's department for urban development and regeneration. "In the 1950s and1960s, council housing was a symbol of hope; in the 1970s and 1980s, it was emblematic of problems. Whenever TV producers on programmes like Z Cars and The Bill wanted to symbolically represent social problems, they placed them on a council estate."

Now the image-making seems to be changing tack again – and not just because of the National Housing Federation's attempt to 're-brand' social housing with its In Business For Neighbourhoods project. "If there is a shift in popular culture, that's very welcome," says John Perry, former policy director of the Chartered Institute of Housing. "But I think the process of changing the image of council housing is a long one, and depends mainly on things that take a long time to turn round, like achieving more mixed communities. If there is a new cultural image of council housing, that will help, though."

Towering above
Londoners have already had a taste of what this more positive image could look like. In the past few weeks, Trellick Tower in Notting Hill has been emblazoned on bus shelters as part of the media campaign for the mayoral elections on 10 June. "It's a positive depiction that's about having pride in where you live," says Fran Page, account director of advertising agency DDB London, which created the ad. "We've got a picture of it in our reception area – and people keep asking for copies. There's something really celebratory about the image."

As these fresh depictions of council housing enter the public arena, some of the old cliches are also being broken down. Council estates are traditionally associated with working-class culture but, in the new service-driven economy, such class categories are changing: in 2002, for example, a MORI poll showed that 68% of a sample of adults over the age of 15 viewed themselves as "working class".

"Massive changes are taking place in the economic structure of society and it's becoming cool to claim working-class credentials in language and style," says Professor Les Back, a sociologist at Goldsmiths College in south London.

Massive changes are taking place in society – and it’s now cool to claim working-class credentials

Professor Les Back, Goldsmiths College

"Class and culture can be evoked by language, taste or fashion."

The link between urban music and council housing is contributing to this blurring of class identities and may help to melt away some of the negative associations of council estates. But the relationship is a complex and contradictory one, as Mykaell Riley, director of the Black Music Education Trust, explains.

Artists such as Big Brovaz and So Solid Crew associate estates with a gritty authenticity perceived as "cool", but also subscribe to a "bling" culture that aspires to conspicuous wealth, which sends out a different message. "It's about success, and demonstrating they've been successful in escaping the streets," says Riley.

"Media and advertising then try to locate the musician in a particular 'street' locale. They're saying 'the culture is cool and this is where it's located'. But because the musicians have left that behind, it reconfirms a negative stereotype. I think the audience can see through this: they buy the music, but they're not buying into that lifestyle."

The message is similarly mixed when politicians claim council estate backgrounds – home secretary David Blunkett, to name but one. In interviews and autobiographies, the phrase "I grew up on a council estate" is often used as shorthand to show a knowledge of ordinary people's lives, but also to emphasise how far the individual has travelled to reach their current success.

Professor Back believes it also refers to the community values portrayed in Shameless. "They're proud of coming from a more intimate world, but beneath the posture is a sense of being in exile."

Nor is popular culture a faithful reflector of what is actually happening in housing, says Bill Smith-Bowers at the University of Westminster. "The registered social landlord sector is virtually unrepresented and very little of the major transformations the sector is undergoing – right-to-buy sales, large-scale voluntary transfers or the current emphasis on key-worker housing – is filtering through to popular culture images. No one's singing about regeneration."

Things aren't helped by the fact that the media's images of estates tend to be in the hands of non-tenants or ex-tenants and often have little to do with the experience of tenants themselves (see "What's it really like?", below).

It may be going too far to suggest that urban music and TV programmes can turn council housing into a lifestyle choice for a rising generation – but they could help sweep some outdated stereotypes out of the way.

"The media perception doesn't stop me wanting to live there: that's for people in their ivory towers thinking 'oh yes, that's how it is,'" says Lorna Reid, an active campaigner on her estate in Islington and a candidate in the local elections.