This is the latest in luxury London living.
But these developments, like so many new developments in the UK,
have something missing from their glossy brochures.
It's the fact that all new UK developments must have a percentage of properties that
are categorised as social housing.
So if you can afford to buy one of these flats outright, you own
it privately and this is your entrance, but if your flat happens to be classified as social housing,
which includes shared ownership where you part own part rent, then this is your entrance.
That's right. Same building, different entrances.
This is what has been dubbed a poor door and is how new housing developments are built all over the UK.
Segregation of new housing is not just limited to poor doors.
As we'll see, there are many ways residents are affected.
There's lots of ways that you'll cut off from each other as tenants.
The social housing bit will often
be down a little alley way down the back and kind of near the railway line.
We looked at one that's described as
by the bins entrance the social housing door and then you might have a nice
blingy reception, concierge, almost hotel-style reception area for the people who are paying
top dollar for the flats.
In buildings where private owners have amenities such as on-site gyms,
there have even been examples of social housing tenants being barred from paying to use them.
This segregation has been designed even down to the separating of children's play areas.
What the poor doors and these other facets of segregation do is that they symbolically
mark into the landscape the inequality, it makes it visible.
People do feel that it is
a constant reminder of the fact that they're of a certain status and for people who always have
to go around the back of the building to get in.
It does sort of make them feel very much 'them and us'.
Housing segregation in the UK is nothing new.
Possibly the clearest and most extreme example
was a case in Oxford in the 1930s when private properties were deliberately separated
from newly built social housing.
So what the developers did was that they constructed
a wall literally to separate off a Cuttlestowe Estate from the private development.
This caused a huge furore.
It was such a sort of a symbolic marker of social inequality, it was, you know,
we're separating out the respectable, wealthier, private residents from the poor council tenants, working-class
council tenants.
This dividing wall mirrors what is happening today in many poor door scenarios.
But why is this still happening nearly 100 years later?
The reason that new developments
divide properties into part private housing, apart social housing, at all is because it's enforced
by a piece of government legislation called section 106 which was introduced in the 90s.
This legislation grew out of a political desire to reform mono-tenure developments
where social housing accounts for the majority of the units.
At the time, the belief was that these
were creating deprived ghettos so instead the idea of mixed-tenure developments was championed.
So the argument is you have the private tenants, you have the social tenants, you mix them together
and hey presto you're going to have this marvellous social interaction between them
and the social tenants will benefit from living cheek by jowl with the private owners.
It doesn't work.
There's no social areas and you've got no shared facilities, so it doesn't
matter if your rooms are kind of in the same block, you're still in a different world, really.
So we find ourselves in a situation where developers see poor doors as a solution for keeping social
housing tenants out of view in order to keep their developments attractive to private buyers
and make up for losses on the percentage of enforced social housing.
It is deeply dysfunctional. It's clearly working for some people, it's working for landlords,
it's working for developers but it's not a socially functioning system really for ordinary people.
If you want to provide decent social housing, the government needs to pay for that and
design it with their citizens in mind rather than get a developer to kind of reconfigure their plans
to sort of tack this on the end ... it's never going to provide social housing in
great numbers.
There's a strong irony here.
That some social housing has been torn down
as the basis that it was preventing social mixing and that these have now been replaced
by new developments that are segregating tenants more than ever.
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