Social housing was once called council housing. Instead of its tenants being treated as burdens and second-class residents who don’t deserve to share the same spaces as their better-off peers – as children living in the “affordable” part of a south London luxury block found out last week – their homes were often assigned the best architects money could buy.

Sheffield's Park Hill: the tangled reality of an extraordinary brutalist dream Read more

That was the case with Park Hill, the Grade II*-listed Sheffield estate whose reputation has ebbed and flowed with the tide of social change and political ideology. Such is Park Hill’s current status within the city that Sheffield’s Crucible theatre has produced a musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, telling its story through the songs of the Sheffield native singer and songwriter Richard Hawley.

The estate was celebrated when it was first opened in 1961 and later vilified, for a host of reasons largely beyond the control of its residents. In recent times, in spite of the crisis in affordable housing, Park Hill has been commodified.

For its part, Sheffield was once known as “the socialist republic of South Yorkshire”, in reference to its extensive council house-building programme and subsidised bus fares. Park Hill and its counterparts, Hyde Park and Kelvin, were flagship estates whose fortunes declined from the 1970s onwards as Sheffield suffered catastrophic job losses and was further punished by Tory rate-capping and right-to-buy policies.

When Park Hill was listed by Historic England in 1998, it was half empty, but the council could no longer knock it down, as it had done with less-loved Kelvin. It stayed looming over Sheffield city centre until Urban Splash, a specialist developer of inner-city buildings, took it off the council’s hands for a nominal sum in 2004 once its remaining residents had been forced to leave.

But why, 20 years after it was listed, and 15 years after Urban Splash took it on, have only 260 of the nearly 1,000 flats at Park Hill so far been renovated? Figures from 2017 show nearly 40,000 households on Sheffield’s waiting list for social housing.

Before seeing the Park Hill musical, I walked up to the estate for a view over Sheffield that I never tire of. The path up from the station has been named South Street Park, while the ground-floor units contain an art gallery, a coffee shop and a design agency. A steady stream of visibly well-heeled people passed me on their way for a gawp at an ex-council icon. Park Hill’s listing by Historic England may have opened up a new seam of potential for the appreciation of postwar architecture that was designed to be enjoyed and made use of by ordinary people. But thousands of estates across the country remain ignored and unvisited except by the people who live there.

What’s suppressed in this rush to admire is the injustice of Sheffield’s dire need for secure, affordable housing while 700 well-located flats have sat empty for years. Park Hill has become symbolic for all the wrong reasons: a sort of mannequin development that stands in for a whole raft of festering symptoms caused by extreme social inequality. Meanwhile, the complex and saddening story of council housing in Britain – its role in housing more than a third of the population by the 1970s, and of its gradual strangling by class prejudice, poor maintenance by councils and the political cynicism of right to buy – is shrugged off in case it gets in the way of livin’ the dream of home ownership.

As for the musical, it too chucks salt on an open wound, though it’s clear that its writer, Chris Bush, has tried hard not to. The tangible injuries of class are reduced to a series of jokes about Ocado deliveries, designed to get us to laugh at middle-class consumer neuroses without challenging the way in which Park Hill is now marketed directly at those consumers.

You can’t help but ask why, if the Crucible wanted to make a musical about Park Hill, it didn’t recruit the people who once lived there to write it. (And for sheer nerve it’s hard to beat the inclusion, in a set of “people of Park Hill” testimonies available through headphones in the Crucible’s foyer, of the opinions of someone whose flat in the Urban Splash development is their second, part-time home.)

The next phase of Park Hill’s redevelopment is being marketed as part of a new “mid-century modern quarter for Sheffield”. As if another “quarter” is what Sheffield needs. Jo Meredith, a former planner interviewed at Park Hill by John Grindrod for his 2014 book Concretopia, reflected on the estate’s legacy and told him: “Apart from making me very angry, it makes me want to sit down and weep.” I couldn’t put it better myself.

• Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide