We're building walls to separate social and private housing again

The segregation of the classes is back, and it's not done only by price. Here's a report by Jessica Murray and Michael Goodier from the Guardian:

The homes of people in Nunsthorpe, a postwar former council housing estate known locally as “The Nunny”, sit only a few metres away from their more affluent neighbours in Scartho with their conservatories and driveways.

Walking between the two is almost impossible because of a 1.8-metre-high (6ft) barricade between them, which blocks off roads and walkways that link the two areas in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Journeys that should only take a few seconds become a 25-minute walk down to the open field on the edge of the estate, or through the grounds of a hospital, to bypass the wall.

When I read that, I remembered that such walls had been put up in the 1930s. And then I saw that Municipal Dreams had posted a couple of examples from his blog on Bluesky.

The first was in Oxford, where in the city council built its Cutteslowe Estate. A couple of its roads joined up with roads on a private estate recently built by private developers, the Urban Housing Company:

The Company alleged council tenants were responsible for vandalism on the private estate. It also claimed that the rehousing of former slum-dwellers on the estate breached an undertaking given by the Council that it wouldn’t be used for this purpose. 

Whatever the (not so) niceties, it’s not hard to see the naked class prejudice and commercial interest that lay behind the Company’s supposed grievances. It erected two-metre high, spiked walls – separating the council homes from their private equivalents – across the connecting streets in December 1934. They forced a 600-metre detour for council estate residents trying to reach the main road.

And the second was in Lewisham, where this was the reaction to the opening of the council's Downham Estate: 

In 1926, a seven-foot high wall capped with broken glass was built across the street to the adjacent private estate, intended to prevent Downham’s residents using the street as a short-cut to Bromley town centre. The wall remained till 1950.

It was worse than that in Oxford where the Cotteslowe Walls lasted until 1959.

But they did come down. Today's society is putting walls up again.