Estates: the history of an idea

The estate became the model for public housing development in England and Wales from the late nineteenth century as a response to poor living conditions and housing shortages. To match the scale of the problem, solutions generally involved comprehensive construction or reconstruction (in the case of slum clearance) in the form of physically distinct developments with social and community provision. While estates were often built within or on the periphery of urban areas, they were typically laid out as discrete, somewhat self-contained entities, separated from their surrounding context. Council housing estates still form a significant body of the UK housing stock and are typically managed as distinct concerns by local government or social housing providers. This research examines the history of the estate as a genealogy, drawing connections between the publicly owned municipal housing estate that emerged in the late nineteenth century and earlier models of estate ownership developed by the landed gentry. Landed estates were conceived as territorialised landscapes, and the estate map became the means to display its wealth. The study investigates how established surveying and cartographic practices involved in estate layout and management shaped the genesis of municipal housing as a new form of estate. The work also explores how this new conception of estate drew on visions of village life to embody ideas of self-contained community. The research is informed by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on practice theory, as well as concepts of emptiness and the geo-body from the field of cartography.