LAUSR

and twenty-first century literature and culture’ returns to examining the journalistic ‘slumming’ of the 19th century, now applied to the council estates. Here Cuming explores surveying and narrating the council house estate through the work of, inter alia, Paul Harrison, Tony Parker, Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Lynsey Hanley’s ‘insider’ estate account and fiction such as Alice Irvine’s The Road is Red and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Cuming concludes that accounts that take into consideration ‘the subjectivity and viewpoints of particular individuals in specific circumstances result in portrayals of mass housing estates, that, against the dominant narrative, reveal images of heterogeneity, ambivalence and difference’ (p. 212). Despite some over-elaborate theorising and an erratic use of vignettes in her account of the diversity of housing interiors and the reactions to these interiors Cuming injects nuance into the housing story. The book could have made more use of mainstream housing literature such as Chris Allen (2008) Housing Market Renewal and Social Class and Alan Mayne’s (1993) The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870–1914, but it is a valuable contribution to unsettling the normal in housing discourse. In her conclusion Cuming refers to a fight-back against dominant portrayals of council housing as revealed in the New Era housing estate in Hoxton, London. The ‘Brexit’ vote, with its high turnout on ‘social’ housing estates to vote 69% in favour of leaving the European Union, ought to be a reminder that disparaging others may produce unwanted consequences for the ‘liberal elite’.