council allocates housing to the really really poor people, who’ve got families and maybe disabled children. And then rich people have moved into all the developments along the Thames and all the small housing. Even some of the council housing has been turned into luxury accommodation. So the ordinary middle class people have moved away out of the area—they can’t afford it. Many are not eligible for local authority housing and can’t afford to live in Battersea, so mostly people have moved. Only very tenacious people have remained, like me. This borough is now the fifth richest in London. So the purpose of the mural in retrospect was purely symbolic? It was a turning point. None of those things [depicted in the mural] happened. I noticed. And ironically many of these council houses that have been bought by the very occupants to whom social housing was made available. It seems problematic, if not immoral. What has happened is that many of the
people who bought their flats were then able to move out. They kept the flat and then they moved out and then let it to people for much more rent than they had to pay themselves. It was a the philosophy by the Tory council. It was about offering these flats at a very huge discount at 70% off, so you only had to pay 30% cost. So it was like an offer you couldn’t refuse on the understanding that if you are an owner/occupier or you sell again, that person will then vote Tory. It seems to have worked. So this mural represents all that was really good about social housing just before the rise of Thatcher. Panorama did a program with the mural as an illustration called “When the Tories Take Over.” This television documentary was about Wandsworth Council the year before Margaret Thatcher came to power. And it just talked about the mural and that housing would no longer be for local people, there will be no facilities for children and all the things that people wanted that were shown in the mural would not happen after the Tories took over. It was prophetic—it was exactly what happened.