Between 2007 and 2010 Southwark council licensed 76 films to be shot on the high-rise Heygate estate in London’s Walworth area, providing a gritty backdrop for dramas of poverty and crime. This “theatre of stigma”, a term coined by historian of modern Britain Holly Smith, had come to dominate the narrative of high-rise social housing.
But it didn’t chime with the reality of those who live in these places. A decade earlier in Liverpool, mostly elderly residents from the city’s high-rise tower blocks attempted to “challenge perceptions of high-rise living” through the creation of Tenantspin television productions.
The slippery relationship between the representation and reality of high rises and their residents is one that Smith identifies from the earliest case study in her book Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain.
