estled in the corner of Brockwell Park, Cressingham Gardens housing estate feels like an extension of the rolling municipal greenery. The low-rise fingers of housing weave their way around clusters of mature trees, framing pedestrian paths flanked by lush patio gardens. Slightly higher blocks to the west mask noise from the main road, creating an oasis of calm where a village green faces a community hall rotunda, designed with “fairground overtones of merry-go-rounds and bandstands”, as a 1979 issue of the Architectural Review put it. Cressingham Gardens is, in the words of council housing expert John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams, “one of the finest council estates in the country”. The London scheme was designed in the late 1960s by a team of Lambeth Council architects led by Ted Hollamby, a pioneer of high-density low-rise housing who championed a move away from tower blocks. Hollamby wanted his developments “to create a sense of smallness inside the bigness” of the city, and to have “the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together”. His philosophy is embodied in the layout of Cressingham Gardens, with its village scale and neighbourly feel, encouraged by front doors facing each other and ample space for children to play in the patchwork of lanes and wooded areas, a particular boon in these times of being trapped at home. Despite all this, Lambeth Council wants to knock the estate down. For the last eight years, since the local authority declared its intention to bulldoze the area, the residents have been living on the edge, the future of their homes and community ties uncertain. The council insists that the buildings are beyond repair, and that by redeveloping the land they can create an additional 158 homes (fewer than half of which would be “affordable”). The residents strongly beg to differ. The dilapidated homes can be easily repaired, they say, while a more sensitive plan could see the addition of 33 homes built for social rents, retaining the character of the neighbourhood. Since 2012, the community has used every possible tool to battle the council’s plans. They have leafleted, demonstrated, drawn up a fully costed People’s Plan, twice brought the council to judicial review, attempted to have the buildings listed, successfully applied for both the ownership and management of the homes to be transferred to the community, and registered assets of community value under the Localism Act. Their campaign has been extraordinarily successful – yet the council still plans to press ahead with demolition. “It’s like dealing with jelly,” says Tom Keene, who has lived on the estate since 2006 and is an active member of the Save Cressingham Gardens campaign. “It takes a huge effort to extract any accurate information from the council. They keep us in the dark. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare trying to find out what’s going on.” The residents’ story is one of several told in a new free-to-download book, Community-Led Regeneration, by Pablo Sendra and Daniel Fitzpatrick, a pair of radical academics at University College London’s department of planning. Described as a “toolkit for residents and planners”, this is no dry theoretical survey, but a practical guide for the thousands of people currently facing uncertainty about the future of their homes. Campaign group Just Space estimates that there are at least 60 council estates currently under threat of demolition in London alone, on top of 160 estates that have already been demolished since 1997 – equating, they say, to the displacement of 130,000 people. Despite the widespread negative publicity around a number of recent high-profile regeneration schemes that have become synonymous with social cleansing – from the Heygate Estate in Southwark to Woodberry Down in Hackney – the threat of demolition and displacement remains very much alive across the capital and beyond. “There is now more awareness of the importance of involving the community in decisions about the future of estates,” says Sendra, “but demolition is still taken as the starting point. The mayor’s guidance is directed at achieving the councils and developers’ goals, rather than the interests of the existing communities.” In 2018, following the backlash against a number of regeneration schemes, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, introduced a new requirement for every estate regeneration project involving demolition of social homes: there would have to be a ballot of residents before receiving City Hall funding. But, as many have pointed out, the ballots are open to manipulation and can be easily framed to achieve the desired outcome. Sendra is currently working with a community in Brent where, he says, the council is only presenting the residents with one option. “So far, most ballots follow the template, ‘Do you agree with regeneration? If so, you get a nice new home. If not, you get nothing.’ Communities are not being given the full picture.” He hopes some of the examples in the book will provide residents with the ammunition they need to fight back. The case studies range from the lengthy battle to realise the groundbreaking Walterton and Elgin Community Homes project in Westminster, to the fiery direct action of the Focus E15 campaign in Newham, to the collaborative strategies of the People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House. In each case, the key obstacles, tools and lessons are drawn out, painting a picture of how communities can triumph against the odds when they pull together. “The strategies are all focused on challenging the linearity of the council-led regeneration processes,” says Fitzpatrick, “and putting spanners in the cogs of their logic to slow it down. These tools can also help to organise the community towards a common goal.” Linda Sanders, of the West Ken and Gibbs Green estates campaign in Hammersmith and Fulham, says she and her neighbours have spent the last decade fighting attempts to bulldoze their homes, which were in the firing line of Capco’s gargantuan Earl’s Court redevelopment. “We know that sticking together has been imperative,” she says. “We’ve learned to share ideas from other campaigns and just get stuck in.” She says their tactics have ranged from holding a Victorian dressing-up day and parading outside the local pub when it was threatened with closure, to “visiting the developer’s own backyard”. Their carnivalesque direct actions have been combined with the formal tools of setting up a Community Land Trust and preparing their own People’s Plan for up to 300 new homes, without demolishing any of the existing housing, as well as launching a judicial review and applying for the right to transfer. All of which helped to grind the developer’s momentum to a halt and encourage the newly Labour-led council to demand the estate be handed back to the local authority. As Sanders puts it: “After all these delays, selling luxury flats became harder to do.” What comes across in all of the stories is the sheer amount of effort and willpower required to keep these campaigns going for so many years, as well as the uphill struggle to find the required expertise to challenge the developmental juggernauts. “You’re hit with this tsunami of disciplines that you’ve got to get your head around very quickly,” says Keene. “I considered myself reasonably politically active, but I didn’t understand how a local authority worked, or housing management, or the law, or the planning process.” He has since drawn up a “Regen cheat sheet”, as a quick guide to help others in his position get their heads around the fiendish complexities of estate regeneration. The book adds to this kind of work, bringing activists together to share their experiences and build a collective body of knowledge that will be so important for future campaigns. Its release is timely: the coronavirus pandemic has shown just how powerful community self-organising, mutual aid and the solidarity of local support networks can be. By compiling such a broad (if London-centric) range of case studies, Sendra and Fitzpatrick have performed a vital public service, helping to ensure that any communities facing top-down regeneration in future know that they are not alone – and that it is eminently possible to hold off the bulldozers. For now, at least. • Community-Led Regeneration: A Toolkit for Residents and Planners by Pablo Sendra and Daniel Fitzpatrick can be downloaded for free here.