With its patterned brickwork, wooden sash windows and wrought iron railings, the Hillview estate stands as a beautifully restored remnant of Victorian King’s Cross, an area that has been transformed beyond recognition in recent years.
Arranged in its present incarnation around four courtyards, it was built at the turn of the century by charity the East End Dwellings Company as ‘model’ housing for the poor as part of a slum clearance programme.
During its first few decades, the estate was regarded as one of its most successful ventures, fulfilling its remit of social reform. In the 1950s, though, it fell into the hands of a speculative property company and by the late 1970s Hillview had itself become a notorious slum, damned by neglect and overrun with pimps, drug dealers and gangsters from the adjoining red light district. In 1980 a prostitute operating from one of the flats was murdered there.
The estate had been acquired in 1974 by Camden Council to add to its ever expanding property portfolio following years of lobbying by tenants protesting against deteriorating conditions. The plan was to demolish four of the six blocks and build new housing once the financing was available. In the meantime to stem any further rot, its ambitious young housing chief, Ken Livingstone, decided to rent out 230 empty flats to young people on ‘shortlife’ – temporary – tenancies in a scheme administered by Shortlife Community Housing.
Many of these latter day property guardians had been part of London’s radical squatting movement and were savvy and well organised. As members of the Hillview Residents Association they managed to get rid of the brothels and drugs dens and began smartening up the estate, even planting trees and shrubs in the courtyards.
In an effort to erase the estate’s reputation as a no-go area, festivals were held that offered entertainment for all, featuring music from the likes of the Pogues and Rico Rodriguez alongside tea dances for pensioners and children’s puppet shows. Soon Hillview was as well known for its cutting edge arts as it was for its alternative housing. Links were also made with other tenants organisations as part of wider efforts to reinvigorate a district that had been so sorely neglected by the authorities.
But how long was shortlife? Tenancies that were expected to last between six to 12 months began to stretch uncertainly into years because the council kept postponing its demolition plans through lack of cash. This was the Thatcher era which saw cuts in council funding. People began to settle down and the inevitable happened – small children were soon playing in the courtyards.
In 1982, the two blocks the council had chosen to retain, Tonbridge and Hasting houses, were refurbished, revealing what once rundown tenements could look like if proper money was spent on them. It was at this point that the Hillview Residents Association launched its campaign to save the rest of the estate from the bulldozers arguing at the same time that, having transformed it on behalf of the council, shortlifers had now earned the right to stay for as long as they wanted.
For good measure, it commissioned a firm of architects to draw up an alternative refurbishment scheme.
Councillors insisted they would press ahead with their plans and accused shortlifers of trying to jump the housing queue. But local opinion was no longer on their side, and nor were their finances. After a protracted tug-of-war battle that saw heritage architect fan Prince Charles brought on board in support of refurbishment and local Labour councillors who backed demolition deselected, the council threw in the towel, selling the estate to a housing association in 1994 for £1.4m on condition that it was restored to its former glory and residents given permanent tenancies.
Although delighted with its latest acquisition, the new landlord, Community Housing Association, was keen from the outset to douse any spirit of independence, resulting in strained relations with the Hillview Residents Association that persist to this day.
Today about a third of the original shortlifers make up the 220 households on the estate and it is their community spirit and self-management ethos that continue to make Hillview such a distinctive place to live.
Ironically, having arrived there in the first place because of one housing crisis they now find themselves in the midst of another in which socially rented homes have become downgraded as shelter comes to be seen as a source of profit rather than a basic need. This was underlined a few years ago when a number of vacated flats were upgraded and let at market rents.
It seems that the story of the Hillview estate that began in 1891 looks set to continue, mirroring the history of social housing in all its vicissitudes.
By Angela Cobinnah