How Privatisation is KILLING Britain's Cities

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]This video is brought to you by Incogn.

[00:00:02]Look around the world, my guy. We've built some absolute beauties. Venice, Nice, Oldtown, Brighton Lanes. These beautiful built environments with culture, community, creativity, and soul. And then look at this or this or this. Why do they always look like that?

[00:00:19]Clearly, something is missing. Why is that? Now look, the answer to that question is much deeper than just simply the architectural style or the need for more green areas or bike lanes. The answer strikes at the very core tension of the modern world. However, right, I must stress this, it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, my friends, there is another way.

[00:00:43]>> So, is this what you think of when you think of council housing? way that not only places in the world right now are doing, but a way that we here in Britain used to pioneer before, for some reason we completely gave up. The opposition say£17 million of rateayers money will have been squandered.

[00:01:00]>> £17 million to all sorts of strange groups.

[00:01:04]>> 6.5 million will be spent running sport centers and swimming bars on behalf of hardpressed labor burers. It also has a few luxury extras thrown in for good measure, like a badminton court, two tennis courts, a youth club, an old people's club, and the final icing on the cake, a fully heated 80° indoor swimming pool.

[00:01:26]Okay, so the topic that we're touching on has a name, right? It's called placemaking. What is it that makes a place feel like a real place? What makes Venice feel so different to, I don't know, a retail park in [ __ ] And like immediately my first thought was always it's probably to do with the age right surely it just you know it takes time to build culture and probably it's like that long history is what makes a place feel like it has salt and like yeah to a degree that is true. However I then remembered of a little place called Glastenbury. You wake up at 6:00 a.m.

[00:02:01]scorched by the sun sweating to death in your shitty oneman tent. You crack open the zip and you see a thousand different tents filling up the horizon. And as you get up, you walk past a group of lads in egg costumes freestyling over some drummer bass before you pop to an outdoor yoga class on your route to the main stage. Now look, I've only actually ever been to two different festivals, Glastonbury and Lost Village. But despite both of these places only being built for literally a week, somehow they feel more like a place than any of these new builder states have ever seen. Like they feel like they could have existed forever, much more so than the retail park in [ __ ] So probably time and history helps. But it isn't that alone which is the thing that makes a place feel like it has soul.

[00:02:47]All right. So for us to actually understand that we need to go back to a period of history where the very way that we built environments itself completely changed. And it all starts deep in the 1930s in the great depression in America.

[00:03:00]>> In the 1920s the great American word was prosperity. Now the 30s have begun. And there is a new word, depression.

[00:03:08]>> This is a period of time where people lived in very dense urban city centers, like very cramped, right? And they were living on top of each other where the places that they worked, like typically factories, were usually located directly in the center of the city. You, your dad, your brothers, your mates you grew up with, you all lived on the same street and you all worked at the same place, Freddy's fizzy pop factory. And then you spread that out. Different streets might have worked at different factories, but all probably in the same area. And every morning they would wake up and they would all walk to work together. Look at the bastards. How cute is that? You know, singing hi-ho, hi ho.

[00:03:42]It's off to work we go. Now, all of these people that you see, this is one community living and working in the same area. And all of them pretty much had a similar rhythm of life. Meaning that their lives all over overlapped in similar but slightly different ways. And it's that right there that I want you to keep in mind, right? The idea of overlapping lifestyles of different people doing different things in one physical area. This gives rise to a feeling of life in an area. And what is born out of that is what is often dubbed third spaces.

[00:04:16]Before we go any further with this video, I've been using today's sponsor, Incogn for a while now, and I was pretty surprised to find out that my personal data was just sitting there available on the internet. My full name, old addresses, and even family info.

[00:04:28]Luckily, thanks to Incogn, I didn't have to spend days and days knocking on doors, emailing to try and get my data taken down. Instead, with just a click of a button, Incognled it all. Every single month, Incogn showing me how many of the data brokers have actually removed my data. Honestly, it's great just having the peace of mind not having to worry about this anymore.

[00:04:46]But what's worse, and people often don't talk about this, is having your data out there on the internet like this can actually have negative real life consequences. Say you're applying for a job and they choose to Google your name, which they do. And some bastards set up a a fake dating profile on some strange website with your picture and your name attached. That might cost you a job. Or if you're trying to rent a flat, the same sort of thing. And that is literally costing you opportunity.

[00:05:07]Incogn takes care of all of this risk by wiping your personal data from people's search sites, shady directories, as well. They've recently launched a new feature, which is custom data removals.

[00:05:18]So, if you find your data on a random website, you can just copy the link, paste it into Incogn and Incogn's privacy team will just take care of it for you. Unlimited requests, unlimited peace of mind. So, if you're ready to take your privacy back and stop dodgy dudes dealing with your data, head over to incogn.com/jimmy thegiant and you can use the code jimmy thegiant to get 60% off their annual plan. That is unlimited data removal requests handled by experts. Take your personal data back with incogn. Anyway, back to the video.

[00:05:47]If your first space is your home, your second space is work, your third space, that's the [ __ ] vibe spot. It might be, you know, after your work shift end, you and the boys on your walk back might pop into a bar to get a drink. You might head to a union hall to, you know, discuss bargaining for better wages or something. And then maybe you grab a hot dog on the way back and sit in like a local area that people tend to gather.

[00:06:08]You eat your food, you have a chitchat with your mates. That is the third space. And so these spaces along with more practical things like shops,armacies, grocerers. You throw all this [ __ ] into like a soup right in one area. Now you have like a bustling high street that is full of life and culture and community where spontaneous habits and traditions and cultures emerge from this environment organically. And it is that which gives a place a sense of soul. How [ __ ] lovely, right?

[00:06:36]Beautiful, romantic.

[00:06:38]Well, yeah, not really. I mean, obviously it wasn't quite as rosy as that back then. When the Great Depression hits, there's strikes, starvation, people are dying of preventable illnesses. Like, sure, probably no one was arguing that we need to build more third spaces, but I would say they they probably had slightly bigger problems to worry about back then.

[00:06:58]However, it would be this great depression in 1930 that would eventually completely change this way of life and the way that we build communities and environments forever.

[00:07:10]Okay, so after many years of this great depression and a world war, the American government and these major industries realized that they needed to come up with a way to make sure that demand for products stays high permanently. And one of the ways that they decided to do that was by fundamentally reshaping the way that people lived, the suburbs. Although the faces of America's major cities seem relatively unchanged, a quiet revolution has been taking place there for nearly a decade. Part of the lure of the suburb is in the greater elbow room it offers.

[00:07:45]Part of it is due to that relative newcomer to our economy, the budgetpriced home. This symbol of modern American living has brought with it more than a changing landscape. It has changed a great industry.

[00:07:58]>> So building a suburb, it was pretty genius to be honest, right? Because when you build them, you have to buy land.

[00:08:04]You have to buy materials. You have to transport the materials. You need people to buy the houses so the banks can give mortgages. And the government secured the mortgages just to make sure that nothing went tits up again. All whilst you had to employ workers to build it all. And once people move into these homes, you know, they need things. They need fridges. They need freezers, salad tosses, fondue sets. And the final most genius trick of it all was instead of building very dense high-rise apartments that could fit lots of people, similar to how old towns functioned, instead of that, we're going to spread these babies out. And by spreading it all out, what it does, right, it means that if you need to go to Walmart and get some Doritos, you need a car. Why not a a bus or a [ __ ] Sh, my friend, don't think like that. And also the government would do another little trick which would be to make it so that the zoning laws meant that you weren't allowed to build shops closer to the home. Pretty clever, right? So what does that mean? Right? It means cars. Cars means roads. Shitloads of roads. Loads of roads for you and the bros to go and get some hose. And cars need to be manufactured. They need oil. That means you need to produce oil. Cars need maintenance, repair, and insurance.

[00:09:17]Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get it. It's genius, right? Honestly, it is kind of genius. The only problem is that now you were stuck with the [ __ ] suburbs.

[00:09:25]Literally, what the piss is that?

[00:09:28]Suburbia is built like a city. You have houses, sidewalks, and streets. But where is everyone? Everything appears neat and organized despite being so desolate. It's the perfectly manicured lawns and the uniformity of the houses.

[00:09:42]Almost everyone is driving in cars because suburbia is designed exclusively for cars, and nothing is at a human scale. It's the large signs used to catch drivers attention and the massive roads and parking lots made to accommodate all the traffic. And the architecture is bland and functional because if everyone's going to drive past it, why bother making it look nice?

[00:10:00]So, okay, I want you to picture this now. It's the '7s and you're sat there staring at your brand new color TV watching the Brady Bunch. I don't know.

[00:10:08]I had to Google that one. drinking your fridge cold Freddy's fizzy pop and for a moment you turn and you you you catch yourself in the mirror and you look at yourself in the eye and you go, "God, I'm [ __ ] lonely." The suburbs really changed the social life and the way that people live. And by the 80s, after de-industrialization, you know, the closing of these factories, it meant that people increasingly were starting to work in offices. And whilst you're sat there, you might start pining over the good old days. Now sure we could die of cholera and you had to auction off your liver in order to buy your son some cough syrup but at least we had some godamn third spaces am I right? Now the term third spaces itself is actually quite interesting because it has definitely become a buzzword on YouTube and it originates from a book written by a guy called Ray Oldenberg called the great good place.

[00:10:57]>> Now in the United States everything built since World War II has been basically built wrong. you've heard of perhaps of American exceptionalism. It does not extend to our cities. Our cities are basically a disaster with a few exceptions, but basically it's all wrong. And that was written in 1989.

[00:11:15]That year is important, right? Because we're deep, deep, deep into this social shift, this transformation. After de-industrialization, the rise of mass car ownership and suburbanization and the rise of office work, Ry is starting to notice that the world feels a little bit isolating, a little bit more lonely, and that these natural third spaces that used to tie communities together was starting to disappear. And there's a really good video on this, I'll link it below by Radical Planet, and it actually points to the problem of the term third spaces itself. What I'm discussing is third place theory, which is the concept that an increase in third places will greatly reduce or even eliminate capitalist alienation. That's really not possible. Whilst sure it obviously provokes a conversation around the need for building more sociable environments, public spaces, and identifies that the modern world is more isolating.

[00:12:03]>> Coming to bed, honey?

[00:12:04]>> Yes, dear.

[00:12:05]>> Which is all a good thing, right? That conversation's good. The problem is the solution, right? It kind of argues that all you need to do is just rebuild third spaces, build more of them into the modern world. But somehow whenever we try this, they very rarely truly feel successful. Like in the same way, they don't feel quite as organic. Like even if you put a kids park, like a grassy area, these new build estates, especially in England, always end up looking like an unfinished Half-Life 2 map. And it's because of the way that we live now, right? People don't walk to work as much. they drive a car. So, you don't have people naturally passing by these places, often people have to elect to go there. And when they try and build in like shops and cafes to these areas, how often is it just a Tesco or a shitty Costa? And like lots of people critique how these new build estates look. They will say that they feel soulless and empty that there isn't just a flow of people living in it. It's just people living in their little houses and driving to work. And so, you get a reaction, right? that the reaction often is like a revival in traditional architecture because they often pin it down to the aesthetics of the place. So you see places like Poundbury spring up.

[00:13:11]>> Yeah. Good morning, Michael, and welcome to Poundbury. This is the town that Charles helped to build. And take a look. These buildings, they all look hundreds of years old, but actually this was a development built over the last 30 years. It's all about using design and architecture to change the way people live. It is about sustainability. It's also mixing the traditional with the modern and that is exactly the kind of king that Charles wants to be.

[00:13:35]>> And like whilst the architecture might look nice and people will often compliment the architecture, even still when you see many videos of people on YouTube going there, nearly all of them will say that it feels kind of soulless.

[00:13:46]They might not be able to quite put their finger on as to why, but they feel it. It's currently rated a 3.3 out of five with the main criticism being that it feels too clinical and like a film set. I do get that. It felt like many of the shops I walked past were essentially fake, like something out of North Korea.

[00:14:01]Hardly anything seemed to be open with no sign to tell you when it would reopen. And it's the same even with what is supposed to be these modern luxury living complexes. Like, sure, they'll give you a brochure and it'll say something about vibrant community life.

[00:14:15]They'll have a ping pong table, a patch of grass with a bench, maybe even a swimming pool and a gym. And it might be nice, it might be comfortable, it might be okay. But it's not [ __ ] Venice, is it? These spaces, they're not public spaces. They're private. They're closed off, which makes them feel cold and ultimately a little bit bland. And this all brings us to the point that I think many people miss when they discuss this topic of why modern architecture, modern public spaces don't feel soulful. And that is the reason why so many of these places feel like they have no soul is less about the specifics of how we build them and more about the motivations as to why we build them. That is the ugliest building.

[00:14:57]>> Yeah, it is.

[00:14:58]>> Certainly in London. It looks like a just a bunch of chicken cages. Not free range, is it?

[00:15:04]>> You know, it's like a nightmare. All Wellian, bro.

[00:15:09]>> So, I will get into that more. I will explain that for a bit later. But for it to make any sense, we need to look at a different time. A time where in Britain, we built houses and public spaces in a very different way. And that is in the 1960s. We created an institution called the Greater London Council, the GLC. The GLC, right? They were kind of like these these Minecraft big build project boys.

[00:15:33]It was a government body who were tasked with building not just housing, but entire environments with the objective of building highquality cohesive communities for mostly ordinary working-class people. Many of these people right a week or two before moving into their new council house were literally living in godforsaken slums which were falling apart causing disease and were basically awful unsafe environments. The GLC wanted to change that. They wanted to make luxurious public housing public luxury.

[00:16:04]>> Housing is perhaps London's most urgent problem. It is up to the bar councils and the GLC working together to provide all Londoners with good homes. So yeah, as I say, these were whole environments, places with green space, lots of green space, walkable routes that were designed to be away from cars and traffic as well, transport links to these places and community infrastructure, stuff like community halls, leisure centers, etc., all in one place. And I want to focus on one particular estate, right, which was one of the most ambitious of these projects and now one of the most infamous, the tempsme estate, >> where 60,000 people will live in environmental conditions unmatched by anything that has existed before. Tame's me with its own identity, but still a lively part of London growing from the river.

[00:16:53]>> Okay, just open your mind. Just look at some of these old videos, these videos of it originally, how it was intended to be. And all of this, this is all public open space. You can just go there, anyone. And like, isn't it kind of incredible considering previously the people here would have lived in literal slums. The stage one was to include a 30 acre lake, housing for about 5,000 people, its own local health center and schools, recreation and play areas. By 1969, plan and model started to become reality.

[00:17:31]>> And then jump forward to now. Now look at it. What the actual [ __ ] happened?

[00:17:37]>> The place became a criminal's paradise where all sorts of antisocial behavior could go unobserved. Fly tipping, littering, and vandalism became commonplace. Junkies and muggers would hide out in stairwells and on walkways.

[00:17:50]As was so often the case, maintenance was neglected. This young man had ammonia sprayed in his face and his two black friends were beaten up in the local shops. In 1990, the number of racial assaults reported to the police on Tamesme doubled.

[00:18:05]>> So, okay, the GLC, it was set up in 1965 and it was responsible for hundreds of projects all around London. TMSE, Pepe's Estate, Alton Estate, Haygate, just to name a couple. Nowadays, many of these places I just listed have become synonymous with crime. They are now tred as dystopian failed urban housing projects. But I want you to listen to how some of the people who lived in these what are now problem estates, how they spoke of the early days there.

[00:18:32]>> It was a whole new place and everything was new and you got involved. All the community and the people were nice. You used to talk to your next door neighbor and go in for cups of tea and that you could look forward to the afternoon, get my work done and then take the children out and let them play in the paddling pool and the swings and everything.

[00:18:52]>> They speak of it fondly that they were high quality. There was a sense of life, a community. So something had to have happened for that to change.

[00:19:03]Obviously it was Margaret Thatcher, right? You guys knew I was going to say it. So 1979, right? Margaret Thatcher comes in. now the prime minister of the UK, leader of the Tory pie, and now she has a very different idea about how things in Britain should be built.

[00:19:15]Previously, the GLC and part of this sort of post-war model saw housing planning and infrastructure as things that the state should actively build and provide. Thatcher's view was that the state shouldn't have a role in housing, but instead the private sector. a nation of homeowners will be self-reliant, independent, and able to do what they want with their own lives in their own homes.

[00:19:41]>> So, Thatcher, yes, she weren't a fan of the GLC, and she was heavily squeezing their budgets. And in response to this, the GLC goes to war to defend themselves against Thatcher. It was clear that if we were going to become a rallying point against that the Thatcher government and a rallying point for the left within the Labour party, we need a left leader.

[00:20:02]>> Ken Livingston was in charge with his own people immediately installed in key positions on the council. The Labor group was ready to take on anyone, including the Conservative government.

[00:20:12]>> Under the leadership of Ken Livingston, the GLC wasn't just building housing. It was also investing into public services, backing transport subsidies for people, funding community programs, and on top of doing all of that, it was also launching public smear campaigns against thatcher all across London. Like one of the most famous examples was they took out a giant billboard displayed on county hall like right across from Parliament, which listed the unemployment figures due to the Thatcher government.

[00:20:38]>> With abolition now a government commitment, the GLC was determined to save itself. The campaign was an extraordinary success, turning the most odious man in Britain into everyone's favorite lefty.

[00:20:51]>> And they did many of these campaigns on different issues like cuts to public services, nuclear disarmament, and general inequality. Now, it wasn't just because Ken was a bit of a spicy boy.

[00:21:01]You see, thatchar was hollowing out the state and the state's capacity to do big projects and help people. This was directly affecting the GLC. And like to the fat, you know, the GLC represented everything she was against. It was a powerful centralized public body with the power to plan and build large parts of the city outside of the private market. The GLC was the enemy. So obviously, yeah, she cuts their budgets as well as launching political attacks against her. She increased the narrative and the conversation around waste and government overreach. And this narrative builds, right? You see it in media.

[00:21:41]Constant conversations around how these bodies are wasteful. Doing evil, stupid things like building swimming pools and sports facilities for ordinary people.

[00:21:51]How dare they?

[00:21:52]>> 17 million, I understand, is going to be rushed through on a so-cal urgent basis to all sorts of strange groups.

[00:22:00]>> 6.5 million pounds will be spent running sports centers and swimming bars on behalf of hardpressed labor burers. So eventually in 1986, Margaret Thatcher abolishes the Greater London Council because of course she did.

[00:22:14]>> Midnight came and went and so did the GLC and 97 years of Londonwide government. Even the flag was defiant.

[00:22:20]It stuck halfway down. Moments later and chairman Tony Banks had performed the final act. It was all over by the fireworks. Now, what this does, right, with the GLC gone, there's now no centralized body for all of London who's responsible for planning the city as a whole. Instead, it's broken up and so are its responsibilities distributed across burough councils and various agencies. Each are then put in charge with dealing with their own area, their own budgets, their own priorities. But with that, you now lose the ability to coordinate on a mass scale. None of these bodies had the same capacity to coordinate largecale developments across the city like the GLC did. So yeah, what you end up losing isn't just like, you know, a political enemy to Thatcher. You lose the power and the mechanism that made projects like TMS possible in the first place. And quickly with the GLC gone, these projects were just left to die.

[00:23:19]So even before this battle, right, the GLC was having its budgets squeezed anyway. During the 70s, there was a major economic crisis and so budgets were squeezed. And for TMSE, what this meant was all of the promised infrastructure such as a proper rail connection to London, which was basically the entire idea, the whole point of the project in the first place that never got built. So it wasn't so easy for people to get good jobs in the center and come back and use that money in temps me as well. local employment opportunities that were promised in the beginning, they never materialized along with a promised commercial center which ended up just being incomplete. Also, yet long-term investment and maintenance into the physical space was also cut.

[00:23:57]So, instead of TMSE being what it set out to be, a city within a city that helped grow with London, it instead became an isolated mini city, isolated both physically and economically. On top of that, they started using these council estates as a way of dealing with people who were higher need and more vulnerable. You know, if they had problems, disabilities, mental health problems, people who, you know, probably need a bit more support, assistance, and help. Instead of really doing that, they just dumped them in Tesme and said, "Good luck."

[00:24:26]>> Worse still, TSME became a dumping ground for poor or difficult families.

[00:24:30]Today, two out of three are on housing benefit. Half the adults are unemployed.

[00:24:35]And so predictably, Tamesme and many other places like it went into sharp decline. And with that, you get drugs, crime, gangs, homelessness, neglect, graffiti. The place just starts looking worse cuz no one is looking after it.

[00:24:51]And whilst that might suck for everyone else, for the neoliberals like Thatcher, this was the win she needed to be able to say and prove, look, the state can't manage housing, my friends. No, we must leave that entirely to the private sector. For all of the talk of the failure of council housing, sink estates, and all this [ __ ] by 1979, the UK had built 5.5 million social homes.

[00:25:15]That's a mix of council housing and housing associations. Council housing made up 30% of all households. By around the 60s to 70s, we were building 150 to 200,000 council homes per year. Then when Thatcher delivered her final killing blow with the right to buy scheme, which meant that she sold off these houses to people for an absolutely discounted rate, way under the market rate, which led to 2 million of these social homes being sold off. After the right to buy, comes the need to rent. No new council housing, though, private investment in the rented sector instead.

[00:25:49]Existing tenants on council estates are promised the right to transfer their teny from a council to a housing association or other approved landlord.

[00:25:58]And that brings us to where we are now where we almost build like zero council houses a year. I'm not exaggerating. And despite Thatcher and many people's claim that the council cannot build housing, some of these previously council houses have since sold for up to £2.96 million.

[00:26:17]one is currently valued at 4.5 million and like look when you look at tempsme and you see these early videos you see what they had in mind and like for the period of time you have to remember that is pretty incredible what they achieved and it's clear like just from the execution itself there were there were mistakes like they didn't do it perfectly the brutalist vibe is definitely not to everyone's taste but right instead of you know over time adapting and changing it I don't know adding a few pops of color some big art murals more trees more grass some textures and detailing to make the buildings more interesting and maybe allowing the people in the area to participate in ideas for how and what gets built and what they want, letting the place take on its own life. Instead of doing any of that, instead we just [ __ ] get completely gave up and went the complete opposite way. It is to me genuinely sad the story of council housing in the UK. It was an egalitarian dream of creating highquality affordable housing and vibrant communities for all people. And now the term council housing is just synonymous with urban decay. But it is important to look at what the GLC got right. And I think there's two really obvious places that really show just what it could have been and how successful it even is to this day. And they are the Golden Lane estate and the Barbin.

[00:27:32]>> Golden Lane was the result of a competition design from the early 1950s for a new housing estate on a site in the city of London which had been flattened during the Blitz. The developer, City of London Corporation, appointed the winning architects, Chamberlain Pow and Bon. Together, they designed over 500 apartments and masons in a mix of medium and high-rise buildings. Okay, I get it. You know, people don't always love brutalism. The concrete, I accept, can be a bit much at times. But that aside, these places are incredible success stories. The Golden Lane estate was a council estate that had its own leisure center, a [ __ ] indoor swimming pool, tennis court, shops, open courtyards, like proper communal space. All of this just there for the tenants included in the rent.

[00:28:13]It's called the Golden Lane Estate. And not only does it have its own private lingerette where a housewife can make an appointment to do her washing in comfort without even leaving the building, it also has a few luxury extras thrown in for good measure. Like a badminton court, two tennis courts, a youth club, an old people's club, all the shops you could possibly want, including a travel agents for tenants to book their summer holidays in Morca, a nursery school fees 5 p a day, and the final icing on the cake, a fully heated 80° indoor swimming pool. To this day, properties in the Golden Lane estate sell for 750K, 800K, 840K. And what's even more impressive, right, is just around the corner, the Barbacan. You cannot say that visually the Barbacan looks boring and generic and placeless like many of these modern luxury housing estates you see today. It has its own thing going on. It really has an identity, its own look, its own feel, its own style, its own sense of life and sense of place. The Paracon as well was built not just as housing, but it had schools, gardens, art, infrastructure, this crazy indoor garden thing, public roots, places to sit, places to walk, and places that built a communal life. My Lord Mel, I beg to move that there shall arise in the Barban a residential neighborhood in which people will not only be close to their place of employment, but will have schools, shops, open spaces, and all other amenities to enable them to live a full life with purpose and with pleasure. Now, what is ironic about the barbecue who, might I add, properties there are selling right now for about £3.75 million. This was built by another government body similar to the GLC called the City of London Corporation.

[00:29:55]But it wasn't social housing in like the traditional sense. Instead, it was built specifically for wealthier people, bankers, lawyers, professionals. But the land there to this day is still owned by the state. The flats are sold privately on lease holds of 99 to 125 years. The whole estate again to this day managed by the city of London Corporation. In other words, the Barbacan is a middleclass council estate built, designed, owned and maintained by the public sector and rich people actively seek it out and actively choose to live there. All Thatcher told us that the state can't build housing. So what did we do instead? Okay, instead of following the public housing model, we went down the route of the private housing model. And whilst you know sprawling suburbia is definitely more of an American thing, in truth, the same process happened here in Britain as well. More and more we build new housing estates in suburban areas because, you know, the land is cheaper and more spacious. So people live there and then they take a car and commute to work. And this has had that same effect where because workers left local areas and headed to different offices, the ripple effect is that over time the high street has started to die because it's kind of lost its inherent purpose that it used to serve. Because you know, following this logic of sort of living a bit further out, using your car more, this same logic changes consumerism. They start to build out of town retail parks with comfortable convenient parking, supermarkets and shopping centers. All of it built around the same market logic of convenience and commercialism as opposed to fostering local organic culture. And this process has got even worse with the rise of online shopping and Amazon.

[00:31:38]>> This shop wasn't killed by competition from the internet, not directly anyway, but by a drop in the number of people shopping on these streets coming through these doors. A striking contrast to former decades.

[00:31:52]>> People had money in the hand to spend them days. Nowadays, they go to the supermarkets, buy everything under one roof. Shopping's just changed, and I can't see it ever going back to how it was.

[00:32:04]>> And so, yeah, all of this whole process has led to the way that we live our lives completely changing. Increasingly, we don't build our lives around a centralized physical space anymore and with it a local community, but instead our lives become more individualistic, more carentric, and more spread out. And this right actually in the past was sold as being a good thing. It was the concept behind Milton Kees. You get in your car, you drive everywhere, life will be convenient. Melvin M. Weber coined the term the non-place urban realm. He argued that modern life no longer needed to be organized around physical proximity. You know, around your street, your neighborhood, your local pub, and god forbid, your neighbors. Instead, with technology, cars, telecommunications, it would allow you to build a world based on choice rather than location. He sold this as a good thing. But he was wrong and his idea was [ __ ] Like, you know, how many times have you had this situation where you and four of your mates have been trying for the last 2 or 3 months to organize going to the pub, which cost you, I don't know, £15 for a taxi, cuz the pub is like a 50minute walk away.

[00:33:10]It's been so hard to organize it with your mates cuz you all work different times in different jobs in different towns away from each other. Your lifestyles are completely out of sync.

[00:33:18]And when the day comes, one of your mates has to stay late at work. The other's knackered and says he just wants a quiet one. And the last two just think it'll be too awkward if it's just two of you. So, you just stay at home, play Fortnite, and order Dominoes from Deliver Room. multiply that situation which I'm sure many are familiar with across an entire economy you end up with a more alienated isolated culture and when you lose that more spontaneous shared rhythm of life then you also lose the public realm that is born around that and the third places that are left struggle to survive the pub, the bars, the restaurants, the parks, the central squares. Increasingly, these things are having to compete for your time in a world where our lives are becoming busier. We are working harder and we feel more tired and exhausted. And the free market has solved the problem by giving us all TVs, computers, laptops, Tik Tok, iPhones, gaming. So if you create a world where people have less money, less time, and less energy, and those similar patterns of life are all gone, then how can you be shocked that the public realm, the public spaces are slowly feeling like they are dying? In the last 35 years, a quarter of the pubs in the UK have disappeared. In London, 32 of the city's 33 districts have less bars and pubs than they did at the turn of the millennium. Hackne was the only one which saw an increase. The core problem with the modern housing market being so heavily privatized is that the motivations for why you build things is fundamentally different than that of something like the GLC. And we see that, right? Cuz increasingly in these private locations, even those luxury housing complexes, they might seem nice on the surface. You know, they have the good amenities, it's clean, it's modern, good parking, might even host some social events. Like look, they're not terrible, but fundamentally the reason they are built is as investment assets, and they are often sold to private landlords who don't live there, but rent them out to other people. So the people who live in that building are less likely to build deeper roots in a local community, less likely to get to know their neighbor, to build local networks. It even affects things like the types of shops you will get in places that have good local culture and these natural third places.

[00:35:30]You tend to see a lot more independent shops, restaurants, cafes. They tend to be higher quality and more interesting and unique, but they exist because they rely on word of mouth. Building a local reputation and relying on regular return customers. If your population in a building is more transient, maybe they live there 1 2 3 years. It's harder to build that trust. So I'm not surprised that many of these places tend to just have a Gales a Wagamas and Nandos because those brands don't rely on word of mouth and trust through locals. They rely on global marketing. So they win.

[00:36:04]But then you get the problem which is that if every single one of these places work on that same mechanism and they all have those same businesses, they look like they could be anywhere. They don't have a local identity. They are indistinct, soulless, and placeless. To create anything like a high quality of human life and viable communities, you need public land. You need land that everyone can use, land that everyone can enjoy, land where they can meet each other, land where they can exercise, land where they can have fun, you know, all all the things which make our lives worth living happen in that public domain. And the public domain has to have a physical base to it.

[00:36:48]This is also coupled with what type of person is going to live in this kind of building anyway. These luxury living complexes are basically designed for middle class professionals to be able to commute in and out of say a job in London. So very likely they're going to be the same type of person, the same professions, lawyers, managers, accountants, and that's fine. I'm not [ __ ] on those people, but it's one type of person. You don't have students or young families, even pensioners, local artists, painters, musicians.

[00:37:15]You're not going to get them there. the people that, you know, make a culture, they they can't afford to live in this place. So then you might not see a young family running around in the park, old person sat out having their coffee playing chess, I don't know, or students getting drunk, a group of skaters or a guy with a guitar playing Wonder Wolf [ __ ] 20 times in a row. Instead, you get a homogeneous work orientated community. And that's why you get these very strange places like Canary Warf.

[00:37:42]Again, Canary Wolf on the surface can look clean, tidy, nice, high quality, but what it lacks is life and soul and different types of people. It is very robotic and very controlled because no one lives in Canary Warf their whole life. They work there for a few years, get burnt out, and leave. Even if you wanted to have a group of skaters or free runners using a space kind of adding some life to the place in Canary Warf you literally cannot because in this increasingly privatized housing model we have allowed Canary Warf to be privately owned by private investors namely the Qatar Investment Authority.

[00:38:18]That means that in this area this is a fully privatized area. This whole zone it's like Hunger Games. You don't have your human rights that you have in a traditional public space in Canary Wolf.

[00:38:29]If you film, you can be banned. If you protest, you can be banned. And it's these tightly controlled, rigid environments where you just don't have the freedom to create organic culture.

[00:38:39]It's what a lot of people even say about Dubai that whilst it might look clean and nice on the surface, it doesn't have a salt because you are left with a more transient, less connected, and more isolated culture of people with no deep ties to that area. They don't care about that area. And it is that right there.

[00:38:54]Which is why modern private development can almost never generate truly interesting unique culture like those places around the world that we idolize so much.

[00:39:08]When you look around the world at those idyllic places I mentioned, you know, Nice Old Town, Venice, Brighton Lane, they're just ones I like. The things that make it unique and interesting cannot really be planned. They are born out of randomness and spontaneity. I'll give you some examples, right? In Britain, right, it is cold as [ __ ] Heating is super expensive and people live very close together. So, in the past, instead of people staying at home and paying for their own heating, they would go to what were called public houses, aka the pub. They would drink beer. They would sing songs. They would play pub games. This created the great British pub culture.

[00:39:43]>> For many people, nipping around the corner to the local for a quick one is part of their lives. They enjoy a natter with a barman, a game of darts, a cigarette, maybe a song, but most of all, they enjoy a glass of beer.

[00:39:57]>> Men on gondelas singing in Venice is due to the unusual geography of the place that might not be that convenient and people finding ways to work around it as a response. And that is the thing that private developers could never really plan. Take this pub, right? It's called Ye Old Old [ __ ] Tavern. This is on Fleet Street. Look how [ __ ] weird that is.

[00:40:16]It's a super thin. I think it's the thinnest pub in London. Strange flags.

[00:40:19]If a modern developer owned this land, they would never that would be the last thing they would think to do. Oh yeah, we'll just stick a really thin pub between there. No, it's going it's going to be housing or office space or maybe a nice bigized Tesco. But you see, due to that decision making, this place now becomes quirky, original, and unique. It gives it shape and character. And it's things like that which ironically despite maybe not being market efficient in the short term is what makes a place more attractive in the long term because people love this sort of thing. But places that are built purely through market efficient logic where every single square meter is planned meticulously to maximize shareholder returns. The public spaces and the way it looks and feels is all created from that logic. So if market research tells you that you have 400 people living in the building then you need x amount of shops. This is the type of shop that this class of people typically will purchase from. That is where they'll eat. That's where they'll sit. Good job.

[00:41:14]Well done. These decisions are made based on what is expected to sell and increase property value over time. And so you lose the unplanned overlapping strange spontaneous things and you lose the potential for unique culture to spawn from that. To me, it's like the difference between a corporate pop star, I don't know, like the Cheeky Girls versus an organic artist grown out of real life like Nana. I'm I'm sorry if you're a cheeky girl's head, but you get what I'm saying.

[00:41:45]So, this brings us to in 2026, is there another way? The answer is yes.

[00:41:51]Obviously, it's yes. All around the world there cuz you know there's a world outside of the UK and people do things differently. Like in Copenhagen, a significant amount of the housing is run through nonprofit associations which are backed by the state a system called I'm going to butcher it, alm buler, sorry.

[00:42:08]So the rents there are tied to the actual cost rather than whatever the market can squeeze out of people. So yeah, as a result, the people that live there will stay there longer and build up more community. Places like Nab, bro, this is a dense sort of mixeduse place, benches everywhere, there's parks, and they have this crazy park, right? And it's so unique. It really feels like a place that you just I've never seen anything like that anywhere else.

[00:42:29]>> The red square is mainly for skaters.

[00:42:32]There's the black square is more classical square where the locals are hanging out and kids are playing. And then the green park is more for exercise and uh more bigger sports activities.

[00:42:45]>> And very crucially through housing associations and local governance, the residents can have a say in shaping how these places are run and developed. That is something that is much harder to do in a purely profit-driven model. In Barcelona, they built these things called super blocks. Again, state-led projects like the Barcelona City Council where they took back large spaces from where cars were, pedestrianized them, and just made them like communal zones.

[00:43:07]And these places came to life. People hanging out, making cafes, kids playing.

[00:43:11]within this nine square block perimeter, you're going to have kind of a pleasant uh streetscape where people can walk around and mingle and do things without this kind of constant fear of cars around.

[00:43:24]>> But I mean like really the clearest example and the model I think we should be looking at is what they do in Vienna.

[00:43:30]Over half of the people in Vienna live in social housing or subsidized housing.

[00:43:34]And it's not just like the poorest people in society, it's everyone. You get teachers, office workers, families, older people, younger people. It's it's a normal thing and these places are [ __ ] insane. Some of the developments like Von Park ala god I am not good at that include rooftop swimming pools, sauners, sports facilities, green space as well as shops and schools. They are all built together in this environment and included as part of housing. Instead of these private luxury living complexes, this is public luxury. Oh wow. They've even got an indoor swimming pool as well. They have nurseries, schools, and tennis courts all conveniently on site. Monica pays the equivalent of £600 a month rent for her flat. And with the vianese having such secure tenencies, there's little temptation to buy. So Monica has no stress of being moved on, which is handy as her dad, Hines, lives in the block next door.

[00:44:32]>> How long have you lived here? Oh, 40 years.

[00:44:36]>> 40 years.

[00:44:36]>> 40 years.

[00:44:37]>> Amazing. Amazing.

[00:44:38]>> Amazing.

[00:44:39]>> We have 15 uh physicians, doctors. We have all the all the shops, >> groceries, drug stores, >> for schools.

[00:44:47]>> For schools, >> and you have your own TV channel.

[00:44:50]>> Yes.

[00:44:50]>> Is that right?

[00:44:51]>> Yes.

[00:44:51]>> The way they do this is that the city owns a significant amount of land and gets to control how that land is used.

[00:44:57]And so they continuously build houses either directly or through tightly regulated nonprofit developers. And so that means they can control the rent and the prices and people don't get priced out of areas, meaning they get to stay there longer. People live there decades.

[00:45:11]Families can grow up there. And that stability is what allows a place to truly foster something that's organic.

[00:45:17]People make memories there. They build families there. They build their lives in these places. And so they also build an identity there. And this results in these public spaces being properly used.

[00:45:26]They become integrated into the lifestyle of the people that are there.

[00:45:29]And ultimately places feel alive. And this brings us to the sad reality of modern Britain.

[00:45:37]The real red pill of all of this isn't that the idea of public luxury is impossible that we can't do this because well we used to do it. People do it all around the world right now and we could also be doing it but it requires a fundamental attitude shift. The two concepts I really like are one public luxury. George Mombot speaks about this a lot. The idea that we should be building luxurious public space for all instead of private luxury for a few >> as what public luxury does is to create more space for everyone. So for instance a fantastic public park is something which creates space for everybody. It takes space which might otherwise have been enclosed grabbed by a few and turns it into space for the many space where anyone can turn up and use that space.

[00:46:24]>> There's also this idea which is called the right to the city. David Harvey speaks to this a lot, which is to bring the decision-making of cities and towns into the hands of local people, increasing the democratic participation in deciding what gets built in your area. Like literally, you and the people own the land together and you decide what is built. So instead of living environments being dictated by private developers who seem to only be able to make soulless, boring [ __ ] the people instead get to decide. And the only thing that really holds us back is politics and choices. We have structured and built an entire country around the philosophy of privatization, squeezing money out of every corner and endlessly cost cutting. In return, what we got is astronomical housing prices, terrible railway that costs an insane amount, energy that costs an insane amount, and a water system that pumps piss and poo into the seas. And the only way of getting away from this is by having a big plan pushing for a concept of building up great British institutions like the GLC and many others all around the country led by the state, decision-m by the people that can build incredible luxurious environments for all people providing solid work, community, and purpose. The problem isn't expertise.

[00:47:32]It's not that we don't know how to build amazing public spaces. It is that we have structured our country in a way that means that we choose not to. And that is what we should all be fighting to change.

[00:47:44]If you enjoyed this video, be sure to support me on Patreon. Massively helps me and the team. Like the video, subscribe to the channel. I'll catch you in the next one. place.