In Thatcher & Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (2006: 125–6) Simon Jenkins reports that ‘When Thatcher was briefly an Opposition housing spokesman in 1974 I offered to show her examples of London's good and bad council estates. She cut me short, “No, there are only bad ones”.’ Well, Clapson has found one of the many good ones – Whitley in Reading – and narrates its history as an antidote to the glum academic accounts of council houses contained in other studies: Charlesworth (Reference Charlesworth2000), Marchant (Reference Marchant1997), Hanley (Reference Hanley2007). It is an interesting and well-told story containing some informative episodes. Here are two.

In 1935, there was a debate on the merits and limitations of employing ‘women estate managers in the Octavia Hill mould’ (p. 42). The idea was rejected in favour of ‘a masculine, business-like style of management’ (p. 43) with the Housing (Rents, etc.) Committee of councillors and the Borough Accountant effectively managing the estate. Reading's Housing Committee believed that its tenants, albeit from the slums, did not require the attention of ‘housing visitors’ to ‘encourage the maintenance of a reasonable standard of housewifery . . . by establishing mutual respect’ (p. 42).

Then there was the Whitley Survey. During the war, a local vicar, GP and a district councillor organised a survey of Whitley which, as social surveys do, categorised the inhabitants into four classes, recording a ‘primary group of 20 per cent of all houses unclean to a major degree. The atmosphere of filth and squalor is striking, and there is a gross degree of overcrowding’ (p. 91). The survey was taken up by Ian Mikado, preparing for the 1945 General Election, and received considerable coverage in the local press. The survey had high-minded objectives but, at a residents meeting, ‘some felt “great harm” had been done to the estate by the publicity generated by Mikado’ (p. 96). Perhaps a timely reminder that stigma can be generated from a diversity of motives.

I would have liked more vignettes relating Whitley's history to cover wider issues. For example, we are told that from the original Whitley residents re-housed from the slums, ‘very few families appear to have applied for rent relief in their early months and all were paying full weekly rents’ (p. 35). But what was this ‘relief’: a rent rebate scheme or an application to the Public Assistance Committee and how many people did not move from the slums because the council rents were too expensive? That the early socio-economic profile of Whitley ‘although heavily influenced by slum clearances evidenced some typical general characteristics of populations on council estates’ (p. 55) suggests some self-selection. Perhaps the necessary material to answer these questions does not exist: historians can only work with the information available.

A number of factors appear to have contributed to Whitley's relative success. The first houses were spacious and attractive, some with the mock-Tudor facades beloved in owner-occupied suburbia and others with ‘parlours’ – characteristics perhaps reflecting that it was planned under the 1923 Wheatley Act although constructed under the 1930 Greenwood Act which concentrated on slum clearance. Subsequent houses built for people from the slums ‘were severely utilitarian in character’ (Branson and Heinemann, Reference Branson and Heinemann1973: 211). The initial inhabitants from the slums were not dispersed but re-housed in fairly close proximity to their former neighbours. Reading as a whole was economically successful, for example, Clapson notes that Ken Barrington, a Whitley resident and future England cricketer with a Test average of 58.67, the highest of any post-war England batsman, ‘earned a living from the burgeoning employment opportunities offered by motorisation’ (p. 54) when he left school aged fourteen. Even in the early 1980s, when manufacturing jobs disappeared and with ‘occupationally most people in Whitley . . . not geared towards supervisory, clerical, managerial and administrative employment generated by the service sector’ (p. 157), Reading did not experience the massive job loss of Rotherham (the subject Charlesworth's book). The development expanded in phases post-war, and this allowed adaptation to overcome difficulties such as the overcrowding in the war years. Mixed tenure contributed – there had been modest sales before the Right to Buy – and in the 1980s and 1990s housing associations built houses on the estate. A successful local football team helped but most important was the steady supply of activists – local people and Labour councillors – constantly campaigning for better facilities and generating a sense of community.

Perhaps ‘decent’ is a better term than ‘good’ to describe Whitley. However, given the mud that has been thrown at council housing, especially since the 1970s, it is a noteworthy story of resilience and resistance culminating in a petition warning against any assaults on council housing under the 1988 Housing Act with its ‘tenants’ choice’ and Housing Action Trusts.

A final thought. Why do we call neighbourhoods such as Whitley ‘estates’? My council house was on an ‘estate’ but my present home, despite being in an identifiable area, is known only by its street and number.