The regeneration scheme that changed more than the housing

This is the story of a historic regeneration scheme and the lessons it has for housing professionals today. It is also a unique chance to bring together two senior figures shaping regeneration policy, whose thinking is still influenced by their experiences on the Boundary Road Estate.

Growing up

Structural concerns aside, the estate had been a happy place to live – at least for the kids, according to Ms Robinson-Gayle.

“I’m not sure that our parents agreed,” she says with a smile. “For the children it was pretty convenient. The primary school was there, there was a park, there were loads of play areas. People had stayed here for a long time. It was a community without a lot of churn. People stayed here and people knew each other. It was that thing where everybody knows who you are – everyone knows your name.”

As Ms Robinson-Gayle was starting out in life, Mr McDermott, who is now chief executive of Peabody and chair of the G15, was building his career. After a stint as a housing officer, he was part of the large panel construction team at Waltham Forest Council.

Initially the plan for the estate had been to “move people out in order to strengthen the blocks”, he says. “We were going to use the surrounding land to create temporary housing so that we could move people out and do it. Then somebody just said, ‘Why don’t you make it the first phase of a redevelopment?’”

After several false starts – a 1997 National Audit Office report states that the borough “pursued a number of options for financing the works, without success” – Waltham Forest set up the second-ever Housing Action Trust (HAT), following a successful tenant ballot. 

HATs were non-departmental public bodies introduced in the Housing Act 1988 to get resources for housing estates that councils were unable to sort within their existing resources. Four estates in Waltham Forest, including Boundary Road, were transferred to the trust in 1992.

Then began what the team claimed was “the first phased redevelopment” project in the UK, with new homes built on patches of land like car parks, play areas and unused space which existing residents were then moved into so the homes could be redeveloped. Mr McDermott’s job, as a project manager, predated the formation of the HAT. His job was to work with the community on the plans and front many of the public meetings about the project.

“I was clueless really, but I loved it,” he reflects today, as we walk around the estate. “It was such an exhilarating experience working with the communities.”

The whole process was resident-led, he says. “They were very much in the driving seat.” While the redevelopment of the site took about a decade, that was predated by lots of work with the community to draw up the plans, he says. “We put two outreach workers on each estate, and they just got to understand the community and made the links with community groups.” That leg work “built the trust and built up a sense of common purpose”.

“The time it took was a huge benefit,” he adds. “Actually, in the end, it became a battle that the residents led to get the funding for the redevelopment. That sense of ownership transferred from what started off as a local authority wanting to solve a problem into something that captured the imagination of a community. That changed the whole dynamic. It wasn’t middle-class people coming in to tell people how they needed to live and how they wanted their estates to look, it was actually local communities getting together and sort of demanding change.”

For Ms Robinson-Gayle, it was a process that would dominate the rest of her childhood, her teenage years and her early 20s.

“Until I had a conversation with Ian, I hadn’t thought about how much of my childhood this whole process took up,” she says.

“For most of my childhood, this was in the background in some way.”

Quite often it was in the foreground, too. With parents often out working, older children from the estate would head off to consultation meetings on their parents’ behalf. “There was lots of reporting back to adults,” she says.

“When I was 16 or 17, I distinctly remember reviewing the plans. I was sent off by the various adults to go and have a look at them because I drew and people knew that I could draw. They sent me off and I went to review the plans.”

It was a role that many children on the estate filled, she says. “It was a very mixed community. So there were lots of adults who didn’t have English as their first language and were relying on a whole hoard of children, basically, to interface between them and the whole process in a way.”

And if the opportunity came up to make a decision, Ms Robinson-Gayle was happy to jump at the chance. Residents were consulted about who they wanted to live close to when they were moved out of their homes.