• Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle

    In 2015’s Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain, film-maker Paul Sng used the Nottingham duo to tell a story about British working class discontent in the age of austerity. His new film, Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle, takes a longer historical perspective, aiming to examine the failures and dysfunctions of modern British housing. As Maxine Peak’s narration outlines, post-war liberalism championed the country’s new council estates as fulfillments of a democratic promise, ambitious concrete guarantors of secure and dignified shelter. How, the documentary asks, did we get to the present moment, when the term ‘council estate’ is mouthed with a sneer? How…