Aysen Dennis loves her flat. Two bedrooms, a neat kitchen-diner, a cosy living room, lots of light, a separate toilet and bathroom, and a much broader hallway than in the poky million-pound Victorian houses that surround her in south London – all for £110 a week, plus £30 heating and service charge. Her flat is warm, and no one can see into it. “I feel free in my home,” she told me recently. “I can take off my clothes without worrying about curtains.” She still has the original 1960s kitchen cupboards, miracles of space-saving and clever joinery. South London hipsters would love them.

Dennis is not a hipster. She is 57, single, and has been unemployed for four years. She used to work in a women’s refuge. Before that, three decades ago, she came to London from Turkey: a leftwing activist fleeing the aftermath of a military coup, during which she had been shot at and imprisoned, and some of her friends had been killed. After a few uneasy years in squats and shared properties – “the husband of my last housemate was a racist” – she moved into her flat in the spring of 1993.

“I couldn’t believe my luck,” she said. “A council flat in London!” She gestured round her living room, at its two carefully placed sofas, the desert plants basking on its broad windowsills: “And this kind of generous place. It was the first time I’d had somewhere of my own.” Her favourite feature of all is the eighth-floor view: north, south and west, an uninterrupted, grey-green sweep of trees and towers and terraced houses, with an enormous, almost seaside sky above. These days, this is the kind of vista increasingly reserved for millionaires. After a quarter of a century looking at it, she still photographs the sunsets.

For someone as modestly-off as Dennis to still have such a home, only a couple of miles from central London – you could see it as a lingering vindication of the 20th-century British approach to social housing.

Aysen Dennis’s favourite feature of her home on the Aylesbury estate – the view from the eighth floor. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

For many more people, on the left as well as the right, her flat and the hundreds of thousands like it are remnants of a huge housing disaster. In January, David Cameron wrote in the Sunday Times that council estates epitomise the failures of the state: “Some of them, especially those built just after the war, are actually entrenching poverty … [On] these so-called sink estates … you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers.” The prime minister announced a scheme to identify the hundred estates most “ripe for redevelopment”. “For some, this will simply mean knocking them down and starting again.”

Dennis’s flat is on the Aylesbury estate in Walworth, in the London borough of Southwark. The Aylesbury was built between 1967 and 1977: a relatively late addition to Britain’s pioneering and unusually large-scale programme of high-rise public housing. The estate’s population has fluctuated since, from about 7,000 to perhaps 10,000. No one has ever been exactly sure how many people live in its sometimes overcrowded flats – which numbered more than 2,700 at the estate’s peak, in five-dozen enormous buildings linked by raised pedestrian walkways. But for decades, the 60-acre wedge formed by the estate has been one of the biggest housing complexes in western Europe.

The Aylesbury has probably attracted more important visitors than any other estate in the country. There have been leaders of the opposition seeking a dystopian example of government failure – Neil Kinnock, Michael Howard, David Cameron and Ed Miliband; members of the royal family with a Martian curiosity about architecture and poverty – Prince Charles and Prince William, the latter on a geography field trip from Eton in 1999; and the most remembered visitor of all, prime minister Tony Blair, in 1997 and again in 2005.

In 1997, Blair chose the “forgotten people” of the Aylesbury and estates like it as the subject of his first set-piece speech as premier. Generalising about council housing in almost exactly the same terms that Cameron would employ 19 years later, Blair warned: “There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the postwar planners is derelict concrete.”

For almost half a century, the estate has been at the centre of Britain’s unresolved arguments about class segregation in cities, about whether architecture can cause social dysfunction, about how to provide homes for the growing millions too poor to buy or rent privately, and whether the state should be involved in that project. Now, with the threat of demolition or radical redevelopment looming over the Aylesbury and dozens of other estates, these questions have never been more urgent. Is the Aylesbury, and council estates like it, an insoluble problem – or do its turbulent past and present contain clues about how to house 21st-century Britain?

In 1998, shortly after Blair’s first visit, Southwark’s Labour council was promised £56m of government funding to help transform the Aylesbury. A regeneration plan gradually crystallised: to knock down most of the estate and build a new settlement, including 1,000 extra dwellings, which would be sold to private buyers, in order to raise additional funding. Meanwhile, ownership and management of the rental properties would be transferred from the council to a housing association, Horizon Housing Group.

Tony Blair’s ‘forgotten people’ speech from 1997 on YouTube

It was a typical New Labour scheme: social justice supposedly achieved by a mixture of public and private means. In 2001, the estate’s inhabitants were given a vote on it. With New Labour and its policies then broadly popular, and the Aylesbury increasingly rundown, it was widely assumed outside the estate that the residents would approve the plan.

But Dennis and others campaigned against it. Organising block by block, and working with local leftwing housing activists, including Piers Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, the campaigners used public meetings and leaflets to argue that the regeneration would lead to years of disruptive building, a more cramped estate, higher rents (housing associations charge more than councils), and worst of all, the expulsion of some Aylesbury tenants to make way for richer people. To dramatise the latter scenario, the campaigners deployed a phrase that has since become ubiquitous in the debate about who should live in British cities: “social cleansing”.

Seventy-six per cent of the Aylesbury’s residents voted in the ballot. Seventy-three per cent voted against the regeneration. “After the result had been declared, one of the Southwark [council] people approached me,” Dennis remembered. “A real fat cat. And he said, ‘If you think you’ve won, you are making a mistake. We are coming back.’”

For the next four years, there were no more dramatic regeneration announcements, and many Aylesbury residents assumed the estate was now safe. Then, in 2005, Southwark declared that it would be demolished, regardless of the ballot.

Since the late 90s, political control of the borough has switched from Labour to a Lib Dem-Conservative coalition and back to Labour again, but the council’s determination to knock down the Aylesbury has remained. “The fabric of the buildings is shot,” said councillor Mark Williams, Southwark’s brisk young head of regeneration, when he gave me a relentlessly downbeat tour of the estate on an appropriately soaking day in April. “The centralised heating system is constantly breaking down. The flat roofs of the blocks aren’t suitable for the downpours you get with climate change. There are hundreds of leaks that you can’t trace. Rainwater zig-zags down inside the blocks. Huge swaths of the estate – the communal spaces – are hardly used. In the undercrofts beneath the blocks, you get prostitution, fires, all sorts. In the local elections last year, we had people on the Aylesbury saying to us, ‘I’ll vote for you if you tear this block down.’”

There is evidence for Williams’s claim. Jean Bartlett has lived on the Aylesbury since the 60s, and in Walworth for longer than that. “We watched the estate go up,” she told me with a certain south London flintiness. “Now it’s had it. It needs to come down.”

Bartlett’s views carry weight on the Aylesbury. As tireless and intense as Aysen Dennis, Barlett has also spent decades as an activist on the estate, but of a less rebellious kind: as founder of a parent and toddler centre, chair of the Aylesbury Tenant and Resident Association, and now as a trustee of the Creation Trust, a charity set up to represent the interests of the estate’s residents during the regeneration. In 2009, prime minister Gordon Brown invited her to Downing Street to thank her for her achievements.

“I just wish the regeneration would hurry up,” said Bartlett, perched impatiently on a cheap chair in the Creation Trust’s offices, a cheery blue temporary building dwarfed by a ring of Aylesbury blocks. “There’s been enough consultation to sink a battleship. We’ve had a lot of say on the design of the new housing. But the amount of people who still won’t say they live here … We’ve got to lose the word ‘estate’.”

Since 2012, small portions of the Aylesbury, on its western and northern edges, have been replaced by neat, understated brick homes for sale or rent. During 2014, Southwark emptied a much larger section of the estate of all but a handful of its residents, and rehoused them elsewhere – or “decanted” them, in the sometimes cold jargon of council estate management. Working with Notting Hill Housing, a long-established London housing association, Southwark now plans to transform the whole Aylesbury into a more attractive, more mixed, less isolated settlement of almost 4,000 dwellings – 50% more than on the original estate.

New blocks (left) alongside the originals on the Aylesbury estate. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

“This is an opportunity to do the best,” said Nathalie Websdale, who wrote Notting Hill Housing’s successful bid to regenerate the Aylesbury, when I met her on the estate. Websdale is a persuasive woman of left-of-centre views, who has been involved in social housing for more than 20 years. “We want the area to have more intimate, more properly used open spaces,” she said. “Normal London streets. More houses. Homes with more bedrooms, to accommodate the bigger families that often come with immigration. We want there to be fewer cars, more local shops – at the moment, all there is on the estate is one convenience store. We want the area to feel more open to people from off the estate.”

More ambitiously still, she went on, “We want residents to get away from the estate mentality – that things have to be done for you. We want to get people involved in the design of local services, to take responsibility for the area outside their homes.” She paused. “I’m not saying we’re going to get everything right. We’re going to constantly adjust, listen to people, rather than ploughing on regardless.”

Yet the current scheme seems stubbornly similar to the one rejected by residents 15 years ago. Except for one, pivotal detail: the amount of social housing provided by the regeneration, which has been steadily pared away. According to Notting Hill Housing, only a third of the new homes – roughly 1,300, less than half as many as the estate originally provided – will be let at a “social rent”. Social rent is calculated according to an opaque government formula, which takes into account local property values and wages. I asked Websdale what the rent levels would actually be. “We don’t know yet, because we haven’t built the homes yet,” she said. But later she told me that the weekly cost of a two-bedroom Notting Hill Housing flat comparable to those on the Aylesbury is £128 – about 16% higher than Dennis’s council rent.

In 2015, the campaign to save the Aylesbury switched to what Dennis approvingly calls “direct action”. A march by a few hundred protesters through Southwark to defend council housing turned into an invasion of some of the emptied blocks. The protesters used ladders to get access to the balconies, as if in a medieval siege, and an occupation followed. The high sides of the blocks were strung with banners: “Housing Is a Right”, “Public Housing Not Private Profit”. Activists lived in the desolate buildings for two winter months.

Southwark council responded by putting a fence around the blocks, manned by private security guards. “There were no local people occupying those blocks,” councillor Williams told me. “I saw people getting out of black cabs, with expensive wheelie suitcases. Trustafarians from west London and Hackney.” Dennis says that she was involved in the occupation, but most of the other participants, it is true, were not from the Aylesbury. In a blog post on 1 February 2015, they described themselves as “tenants, squatters, and other people who care about how our city is being grabbed by the rich, by developers and corrupt politicians.”

Behind the latest struggle over the Aylesbury is a wider divergence in how Britain regards council housing. On the one hand, there is an increasingly small-state Conservative party and urban councils such as Southwark, which have dozens of ageing, expensive-to-maintain estates, and face seemingly endless budget cuts. On the other hand, there is a re-evaluation of council housing, particularly among younger Britons.

The blatant inadequacies of the private housing market, the booming populations and enduring poverty of many cities, a revival of interest in postwar Britain and the welfare state generally, as the government threatens to bury them for good, a shift in architectural and other taste towards austerity after the candy-coloured excess of the Blair boom years – all these have gradually made council housing seem more desirable.

Rising architecture writers such as Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy celebrate 60s and 70s tower blocks for their social and aesthetic boldness. Seductive websites such as Love London Council Housing, This Brutal House and Modernist Estates linger over their rugged concrete surfaces – and on the latter, offer estate properties for sale or rent. Acclaimed painters such as George Shaw and David Hepher make municipal housing look full of beauty and mystery. The Aylesbury, despite long being considered mediocre architecturally, is currently the subject of two art exhibitions, one of Hepher’s pictures at the Cartwright Hall in Bradford, another at the Geffrye Museum in east London. In the bookshop at the Royal Institute of British Architects, you can even buy a lovingly detailed cut-and-paste model of one of the Aylesbury’s rectangular, monotonous blocks. It comes complete with graffiti, and a sign that says “Demolition In Progress. Keep out!”

The Aylesbury estate and others like it are now celebrated for their ‘aesthetic boldness’. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Websdale, of Notting Hill Housing, finds some of this exasperating. “There are beautiful pieces of brutalist architecture, but a lot of these people are … holding on to relics of a time gone by. And it’s all very well talking about keeping something you don’t live in.” But one reason for this council estate revivalism – which extends beyond tower blocks and into the less adventurous municipal housing built before and after them – is that an increasing number of tastemakers do live on council estates. An unintended consequence of the right to buy for tenants introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, usually considered the beginning of the end for council housing, has been to create a new kind of advocate for estates: well-connected, often left-leaning young professionals who like the cheaper property, more modern design and better communal space than in traditional streets.

In 1971, the sociologists Pearl Jephcott and Hilary Robinson published one of the few even-handed studies of life on postwar council estates, Homes in High Flats, based on interviews with tenants in Glasgow. They found that the privacy and self-containment of life in big council blocks particularly suited “middle-aged couples, with grown children gone … and people who worked hard, go out a lot, want city centre convenience”. In today’s increasingly urban, individualistic Britain – as opposed to the more family-orientated, collectivist country where these estates were hastily thrown up and discredited – there are ever more such households.

Geraldine Dening is a young architect who lives on another estate, near the Aylesbury. “Part of my estate was threatened with demolition, and it radicalised me,” she told me. In 2015, she helped found Architects for Social Housing (Ash), which uses confrontational tactics to defend estates and attack their regenerators. That June, at an outdoor summer drinks party held by the Architects’ Journal, which included members of a firm involved in the Aylesbury regeneration, Ash bombarded guests with paper aeroplanes, printed with the words: “Why do architects always wear black? Because they’re the funeral directors of the working class.”

I met Dening at a conference a few hundred yards from the Aylesbury, about the threat to council housing. In a hot, energised room, while cold spring stormclouds piled up outside, she and other young middle-class housing activists greeted veteran Aylesbury campaigners such as Aysen Dennis with easy camaraderie. There were onstage updates from participants in other estate-saving campaigns: “We happened to have a lawyer on the estate, who’s been really quite helpful … ” Southwark’s faintly world-weary head of housing, councillor Richard Livingstone, gave a presentation doggedly justifying the borough’s approach to estate regeneration as a pragmatic response to a rising London population and a hostile government. He was frequently interrupted: “You’re a liar, and we know you are!”

But the most memorable remark came from another speaker, Paul Watt, a reader in urban studies at Birkbeck college in London: “As many as 90 council estates are potentially facing demolition in London.” Even if most of these are much smaller than the Aylesbury, this could mean the disappearance of anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 council homes. In Southwark alone, according to the council, there are currently 11,607 households on the waiting list for social housing.

After the conference, I walked to the Aylesbury, through Walworth’s alternately smart and shabby streets. Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of it. “When I first saw the blocks,” says Laura Fudge, who has lived on the estate since 1984, “they looked so awful, I nearly didn’t attend my interview with Southwark afterwards to secure my flat.”

I first went to the Aylesbury in 1999, to visit the council’s regeneration department, then pointedly based on the estate. Fred Manson, the department’s director at the time, talked to me about his ambitious plans to smarten up the historically poor borough with more upmarket housing and lavish cultural amenities such as Tate Modern. Soon afterwards, Manson became briefly infamous for reportedly saying that too much social housing generated “the wrong sort of residents”.

The Aylesbury runs along the edge of a broad, mostly flat park. The biggest blocks, which are hundreds of yards long and several minutes’ walk apart, rise like a row of battered old battleships above a sea of grass. Their sides are grey and deeply stained, with endless rows of windows and concrete panels barnacled with small stones – a sort of monumental pebbledash. Tiny stalactites hang underneath, formed by deposits from dripping water. The 12-storey blocks are surprisingly slender, only two flats across. They look utilitarian but also awe-inspiring; intimidating but vulnerable.

Before the Aylesbury, slum tenements were packed together here. According to Ben Campkin’s 2013 book Remaking London, the estate’s site was “reputedly chosen” by Southwark officials “as they were chauffeured around the area in the borough’s limousine one rainy afternoon with the plans on their laps”. Then as now, the council was not known for its delicacy in housing matters.

The estate was financed by borrowing, a common practice during the postwar rush for council housing. When I asked Southwark about the loans, a press officer eventually replied: “The records don’t go back that far.” Yet she went on: “As [our] loans are centralised and refinanced and rolled into others … it is reasonable to assume that we are still paying off loans taken out to build Aylesbury.”

Southwark hired the giant contractor John Laing to build the Aylesbury, cheaply and fast. Huge cranes, moving in parallel lines through the site, swung all the identical concrete panels into position. This construction method – and the fact that, unlike now, inner-city populations were falling – gave the estate its spacious layout. Urban council tenants, it was thought, could, and should, be given plenty of room. Garages, launderettes, personal storage cupboards on communal landings: the Aylesbury, for all its frill-free architecture, was an elaborate system of collective provision.

But long before it was completed, a hostile climate had been created for it: by influential books such as Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s subtle, regretful 1957 study of the social costs of estate development, Family and Kinship in East London; and Oscar Newman’s rather less subtle 1972 study of the links between crime and estate architecture, Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City.

At the Aylesbury’s official opening in 1970, a local Conservative MP, Ian Andrews, condemned the estate as “a concrete jungle and just not fit for people to live in”. The same year, the Architects’ Journal described it as “dehumanising”. In 1983, the famous scholar of British architecture Nikolaus Pevsner called the Aylesbury one of “the most notorious products of industrialised building”. “An exploration can be recommended,” he wrote, “only for those who enjoy being stunned by the impersonal megalomaniac creations of the mid-20th century.”

In 1974, Oscar Newman examined the Aylesbury for the widely watched BBC2 series Horizon. Newman was a Canadian-born architect and urban theorist much influenced by his experience of troubled American cities. Wearing a long Grim Reaper’s coat, he stalked around “Aylesbury estate”, as he mistakenly called it, missing out the “the”, with his voiceover lingering over every potential peril: “Walking along these walkways in the evenings … you get quite nervous. There’s so many nooks and crannies … where anyone could be.” Residents complained to him about the estate’s car break-ins and bad soundproofing. But on the edges of his interviews were unconcerned-looking children, charging up and down the stairwells. Compared to American housing projects, Newman grudgingly conceded, the Aylesbury had “the vandalism but not the crime rates”.

During the 80s its reputation worsened further. There were steadily more leaks, and infestations of mice and cockroaches. The estate-wide heating system began to break down regularly, sometimes for days. Rough sleepers and drug addicts found their way into the indoor stairwells, which have never been protected by entryphones, and into the poorly maintained residential floors beyond.

In 1985, Alice Coleman, a fierce University of London geography professor and disciple of Newman’s who became a policy guru for prime minister Margaret Thatcher, used the Aylesbury as a case study in an unforgiving survey of postwar council estates, Utopia on Trial. Her and Newman’s claims about the malign effect of communal areas and high-rise living on the behaviour of residents were criticised by many academics as too deterministic, and for largely ignoring the impact on estates of the wider economic and social upheavals of the 70s and 80s. The ideas still seeped into national and local government. To this day, you frequently hear Newman’s 44-year-old arguments – that private space is better than public space; that public space must be overlooked by homes to be safe – repeated verbatim by Conservative ministers and Southwark councillors, but unattributed, as if these notions were mere common sense.

Still, for decades, Aylesbury residents have found ways to cope with, or even enjoy, their derided environment. Beverley Robinson, who moved to the estate in 1988, remembers: “I made some of my closest friends hanging around in the laundries. I used to go clubbing with them.” Ground-floor tenants extended the tiny, exposed yards of the original estate design into straggling, fenced-off gardens. Upper-floor tenants learned to use the lifts rather than the indoor stairwells. “You learn not to take silly risks,” says Fudge. “If you do see someone suspicious, there’s a choice of lifts. You learn how to carry yourself.” And to be sanguine: “Problems come and go on the Aylesbury. I had a phase when there was a rough sleeper in my storage cupboard in the corridor outside my flat. I didn’t ever see them, but I would hear them singing.”

Other intruders she got to know. “In the 80s there were quite a few squatters. They were decent neighbours: one went into teacher training. His flat got broken into, and he was scared about the thieves coming back, so we looked after his record collection.” The Aylesbury can be much more collaborative than its critics notice: people babysit and fetch things from the shops for each other, talk to strangers in the lifts, hold impromptu barbecues on the grass between the blocks. And when the scale and the problems of the estate get too much, says Fudge, “You close your front door, and you get a sense of a refuge. I have a three-bolt front door. Burglaries are not an issue.”

Starting in the 90s, some of the raised walkways between the blocks – which gave pedestrians sweeping views and freedom from cars, but also provided useful routes for criminals – were taken down. Better lighting was installed in public spaces. Security guards were introduced to patrol them. According to most accounts, crime fell. Between 2000 and 2005, writes Ben Campkin in Remaking London, “crime rates were consistently lower on the estate than for the borough as a whole”.

Since 2011, the number of offences recorded by the police in Southwark’s Faraday ward, which is dominated by the Aylesbury, has fallen from 150-250 a month to around 120 on average. Burglaries, muggings, and drugs and weapons offences are rare: a couple of dozen a month, added together, in an area with 10,000 residents. “Antisocial behaviour” and sexual and violent offences are more common, but the worst area of the ward for crime is usually its northwest extremity, which is not part of the estate.

‘Utilitarian but also awe-inspiring; intimidating but vulnerable’ … the Aylesbury estate. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

There is less litter and vandalism than the estate’s reputation suggests – no more than in a typical inner-city neighbourhood – but the long vistas make every broken window stand out. Possibly the one thing that Southwark and the Aylesbury campaigners agree on is that maintaining the estate has always been a problem. “They cleaned the windows soon after I moved in,” says Fudge, “but never regularly again.”

And yet, in some ways, the Aylesbury still works. In today’s crowded London, its spaciousness feels liberating. Broad, glass-sided corridors run past the front doors of many flats. Some people sit out in them in the summer, and chat to passing neighbours. Other flats back on to sunny areas of grass and trees the size of Georgian squares. “My kids can play out here,” said a young Polish mother I met in May whose garden opened on to one of these half-hidden, car-free corners. Compared to most of London, the estate is quiet, with only one busy road. The usual daytime sounds of the Aylesbury are birdsong, blurts of music and chat from somewhere in the maze of windows, the wind in the big estate trees, and the occasional arguing couple stomping along an echoing walkway.

Starting this summer, according to the current regeneration schedule, the evacuated blocks will be “unbuilt”: taken down piece by piece. Walworth is too densely inhabited for a faster, more traditional demolition involving explosive charges – the sort of towerblock-toppling that has been a familiar media spectacle since the late 70s. Instead, the Aylesbury is to disappear in stages, a few buildings every few years, until in 2032 there will be nothing of the estate left except some of its trees.

But before the erasure can begin, Southwark council needs to remove the last residents from the estate’s emptied section. Beverley Robinson is one of them. After the 2001 vote against demolition, she thought the Aylesbury’s future was settled, so she decided to buy her two-bedroom flat, which was on the 10th floor of one of the western blocks and overlooked the park. For three years she struggled to secure a mortgage based on her modest salary as an address manager at the Royal Mail. In 2005, she finally bought her home. Two months later, Southwark announced it was going to knock the Aylesbury down. Robinson and the estate’s 500 other leaseholders were to have their homes compulsorily purchased, for a price set by the council.

After years of argument, in 2015 the council said it would pay Robinson £187,500 for it – less than one-third of the price of a typical two-bedroom flat in Walworth. Robinson and 10 other Aylesbury leaseholders began a legal challenge against the compulsory purchase, and stayed in their homes to await the outcome, which has been expected for months now.

The leaseholders’ flats are scattered inside otherwise deserted blocks, behind the high wooden security hoarding that Southwark erected around the estate’s empty quarter in 2015. Abandoned gardens with palms and creepers run wild amid the concrete, like an apocalyptic film set – or the death of council housing foretold.

Aylesbury estate residents Beverley Robinson (right) and Nike Akinwande. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Robinson lives alone, near the end of a long corridor. Over the past year, she has endured break-ins elsewhere in her block by squatters, confrontations between those squatters and police, intermittent or non-existent postal deliveries, even a seven-week blackout in her block’s public areas. “I had to feel along the wall to find the button for the lift,” she told me, “then get into a pitch-dark lift.” At night, a loose cable from the decaying building bangs against her window and wakes her up. “I am a bit frightened,” she said. “I cannot function well enough to go to work. I’m sometimes bed-ridden through the stress. If I leave the estate, sometimes I can’t even get back in. The guards who are supposed to let you through the security fence aren’t always there.” She looked at her living room wall. “I’ve got nowhere else to live.”

Residents opposed to the regeneration say that it has long been in Southwark’s interests to let the Aylesbury deteriorate and become dysfunctional. “Making it look as terrible as possible,” Robinson told me, “is a way for the council to say: ‘This estate can’t be saved.’”

Southwark disputes this. A large council sign on the Aylesbury announces: “We are investing over £12m in window repairs, general repairs, roof repairs, roof works and electrics for properties on the Aylesbury estate.” Some of the smaller, still-inhabited blocks are covered with scaffolding; other flats have new windows, which are less draughty than the originals. With much of the estate not scheduled to be demolished for years, Southwark will be patching up the Aylesbury even as it dismantles it. Such is the strained logic of estate regeneration.

I asked councillor Mark Williams why Southwark didn’t simply keep the Aylesbury and modernise it properly. “We just can’t afford to,” he said, stopping in front of one of the biggest, tattiest blocks. “It would cost 100K plus, per leaseholder … Actually, we costed it at 140K-plus in 2006.” Councillor Richard Livingstone points out that Southwark are building new council homes elsewhere. He says there will be 11,000 by 2043. On the face of it, it is a bold and welcome initiative, given the ongoing lack of interest in both Whitehall and Westminster in providing, rather than simply criticising, social housing. But Southwark’s critics respond that the policy – if it is kept to – will mean barely 400 new council homes a year. They say the council is always deliberately vague or pessimistic about the feasibility of refurbishing the Aylesbury instead.

The estate’s defenders have a strong piece of evidence. Only a few miles from Walworth, in Finsbury Park in north London, is the Six Acres estate: built at the same time as the Aylesbury, by the same construction firm, and in the same modular style. Between the 60s and 2000s, Six Acres acquired an Aylesbury-style reputation for shabbiness, structural malfunction and crime. But instead of demolishing it, between 2004 and 2012 the local council, Islington, kept most of the estate and sought to improve it.

The results seem impressive. All the concrete exteriors have been softened and brightened with a smooth cream render that is strikingly free of graffiti. Entryphones and fences have been added to exclude outsiders from the blocks and communal areas. There are well-tended new flowerbeds, not much litter, and many CCTV cameras. The work cost just over £17m in total, or about £50,000 per home – far less than Southwark’s estimates for refurbishing the Aylesbury.

“Six Acres is a lot better than it used to be,” the caretaker there told me. “I’ve worked on estates all over Islington, and you used to keep your head down here. Now you get a lot more residents coming out after dark. People seem to get on better.” A young mother in a ground-floor flat did not quite agree: “All the fences make it harder to say hello to people you know in other blocks. But at least they’re trying to fix up the place. And they were so considerate when they did the work. No one moved out. And my kids love all the new greenery …” She pointed at the neighbouring block, which looks almost whitewashed in the sun: “It looks almost Mediterranean.”

* * *

For some people with long attachments to the Aylesbury, the possibility that they might live on such a reformed version of their estate has already gone. Last year, after 21 years on the Aylesbury, Gil Mutch moved to a newly built Notting Hill Housing property directly across the park. Her new home is similar to those the housing association envisages building on the Aylesbury site.

Mutch is an art teacher and an artist, and used to paint large, light-drenched abstract landscapes in her flat on the estate. “My bedroom was only 10ft wide but 20ft long – you could divide it up and use it as a studio,” she says. Her new flat is smaller, squarer, less accommodating of an unorthodox life. The other flats on the development press in from all sides. While on the Aylesbury, Mutch never bothered with curtains, but in her new home she keeps most of her windows covered with coloured paper, day and night.

The remnants of a protest against the plan to demolish the Aylesbury estate. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

In the corridor and stairwell outside her new flat, there are no wandering drinkers, no rough sleepers, no squatters, no vandals or other hazards you might encounter on the Aylesbury, just CCTV and security lights: a chain hotel ambience. “I’m getting used to it,” says Mutch, as we sit surrounded by unpacked boxes. Does she think the Aylesbury regeneration can be stopped? “No. This is the council that knocked down Victorian and Georgian terraces. What do you expect?”

Even Aysen Dennis has moments of defeatism. “At night time, I look out of my window and see red lights all around in the distance – the red lights of cranes. Gentrification is happening everywhere in London.” She glances at her precious 60s kitchen cupboards. “I want to take them with me if I have to leave.”

Then she rallies: “We will delay and delay Southwark. We’ve already delayed them for over 15 years. And when we stop them, the Aylesbury will get a proper repair.” It is possible, just, that the infamous, unlovely Aylesbury will be where the long war against council estates comes to an end.

Main picture: Martin Godwin for the Guardian.

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