Brooke House is the iconic looking tower block right in the middle of Basildon town centre. While it may look iconic from the outside (and from a distance), when you get inside, it’s a different, considerably grimmer story altogether as you can see from the images above…

Phil Turner, the Tory leader of Basildon Council, has come up with some grandiose schemes for Brooke House, none of which take any account of the wishes of the residents currently living in the block. One such scheme was converting the building into a hotel! When ‘consultations’ were held about the future of the town centre, the residents of Brooke House were not included despite them living right in the middle of the area to be ‘transformed’.

While the powers that be attempt to formulate a plan for the town centre, Brooke House continues to suffer from a policy of deliberate neglect. The images above from public areas of the block show missing ceiling tiles, rusting hand rails and blocked up rubbish chutes to name just a few of the indignities residents have to endure.

While the long term future of Brooke House is being decided, Basildon Council appear to be totally uninterested in spending any money on maintenance of the block. The council are giving the impression that they regard the current residents of the block as a nuisance they wish would go away.

This is part of Basildon Council’s plan to gentrify the area with the aim of turning it into a Tory voting commuter town. They hate the idea that the iconic Brooke House is inhabited by social housing tenants instead of young professionals. It would seem that the policy of deliberate neglect is aimed at driving the social tenants out so they can pull in a developer to ‘transform’ the block.

All of this shows the twisted priorities of Basildon Council who seem to be more concerned about the image of the town centre and socially engineering and cleansing the area, than they are about the residents currently living in Brooke House. This is what we get in a political, economic and social system that views housing as an asset rather than the basic right it should be…