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The 1930 Housing Act enabled Local Authorities to work with the voluntary housing sector. This sector was dominated by women's organisations and the Act provided a new avenue for increased participation. The company known as the Women's Pioneer Housing Ltd was run as a Co-operative Society, employing its own woman architect, Gertrude Leverkus (1899-1976) to design each flat. There were four different styles on offer to suit diverse needs and by 1936 it provided 36 developments in London and one in Brighton.

The National Association of Women Civil Servants (NAWCS) had urged the government and local authorities since 1947 to build low cost rentals but shortage of land made single-unit dwellings expensive. NAWCS representatives were impressed by the model Buccleuch House, Clapton Common, London E5 with its 96 flats plus communal facilities for single women, which Hackney Council had built and invited them to visit in 1951.

Recent years have seen the faltering of economic growth, the erosion of the welfare state and the disappearance of social consensus. Nowhere have these processes cut more deeply than in the inner city, where industrial decline, low income, persistent high unemployment and housing decay are fuelling crime and racial tension to create our most daunting social problem. Combining interviews and eye-witness accounts with his own analysis, the author provides a portrait of the underside of the affluent society and the hidden human costs of public policies. From dying factories to social security offices, from single mothers to street thieves, it offers an insight into the realities of deprivation and social conflict in Britain today.

Recorded by Georgia Trower & Francis Qureshi

Patrick Keiller's extraordinary portrait of London re-imagines the city through the explorations of an unseen 'researcher' Robinson and his similarly unseen companion, the film's narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield).