Talk:Aylesbury Estate

message: Could definitely do with improvement. Ackie00 21:47, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Improvement

message: I'd like to make a plan of the estate giving block names. This would also show the scale, and list which Buckinghamshire towns they are named after. Secretlondon 19:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Any news on that estate plan?  Or have the local council flattened it already? -- Francs2000  21:16, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

text: It's going to be there for several years yet.. I have a photo of a map on a sign but I hope I have something better to work from. I'm also not exactly sure re:file format etc. Secretlondon 22:42, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm mapping it via OpenStreetMap as it's a lot easier. Shiny estate map coming soon! Secretlondon 13:43, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Plan

message: It is misleading to simply state that the estate is known "colloquially" as "Hell's waiting room." The name was coined by feature-writer Paul Harris in the Daily Mail dated April 2005. The complete quote is: "To walk around the sprawling landscape of the Aylesbury estate is like visiting hell's waiting room." () The newspaper article is basically a middle-class, right-leaning polemic against Labour, obviously extremely biased, and based on a single - brief - visit to the estate to cover Michael Howard as he "swept through the [estate] on a crisp, spring day with his retinue behind him and a camera crew in tow." As The Guardian observed a few days later: "Howard popped by because it allowed him to rubbish Blair. Sections of the media came because it suited their agenda, and uncomplicated tales of despair and decay are the easiest to craft. When the bandwagon follows Blair back to the Aylesbury estate in the near future, residents hope they will get more candour and fair treatment." ()
Harris' phrase would pop up in the press a few years later eg The Independent: "The Daily Mail called the estate "Hell's waiting room..." (); The Times: "To be fair, the Aylesbury's appalling reputation is somewhat outdated. The authorities, and many residents, have made strenuous efforts to improve it in recent years. But not even its staunchest defenders want to preserve the forbidding, dilapidated Soviet-style blocks of what has been described as "the estate from Hell" and "Hell's waiting room"." (); the London Evening Standard: "A South London estate has ditched the PR company it hired to improve its image in the media. The Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, dubbed "hell's waiting room" in one newspaper..." ().
So, nobody other than the Mail has called it "Hell's waiting room." The residents haven't. The other newspapers merely reported what the Mail called it. As Sam Jones wrote: "[T]he Aylesbury became journalistic shorthand for inner-city crime, squalor and deprivation, with the Daily Mail describing a walk around its precincts as "like visiting hell's waiting room". The Mail's description is not popular with Southwark council - whose £2.4bn regeneration programme was accepted by the government at the end of last year - nor with all the estate's residents... [A resident said] "We find it unfair that the media always come here and think we're so bloody deprived. We're not. Money has been ploughed into the estate though the New Deal and Sure Start. We're not the only ones." () See also: "It is nonetheless a huge blow for Aylesbury residents, all the more so after they spent years trying to counter a media stereotype of their home as a crime-ridden ghetto, "hell's waiting room" in a tabloid phrase still recalled with anger." ( and "One newspaper once stigmatised it as "Hell's waiting-room".()
Contradicting the Mail we get: ""You know what, I'm proud to come from here," he says. "It's not hell's anything. It's home." Scratch the surface of the Aylesbury - look beyond its photogenic ugliness and behind its hoods - and things are not always how they first appear." (), "It was labelled "hell's waiting room" and film crews arrived every time they needed a backdrop for "broken Britain". And yet Aylesbury has also been an emblem of urban regeneration... [O]n my visits, I saw plenty that ran counter to my expectations. There were men in fluorescent tabards picking up litter. I visited a well-equipped nursery, dropped in on a table-tennis session at the youth club, and walked around as two policemen shared advice with local youth volunteers." ()
===tl;dr===
A detailed explanation of how the estate came to be associated with the name "Hell's waiting room", noting that it was first coined by a Daily Mail journalist to score a cheap political point, and often used in the media afterwards only to highlight a case of negative stereotyping, is fine. To include it as a standalone, pejorative term used to imply that this is the mainstream view of the estate is not. Blackberry Sorbet (talk • contribs) 01:48, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: As the tl;dr addition suggests, I realised by the time I had finished that screed that I might have been better employed to just write the section in the article myself. By then it was late, however, and I didn't believe I would be able to do it coherently. The estate has been blighted by many, many problems - even before it was completed in the 70s, it was attracting a good deal of negative coverage. But I think it's important to avoid falling into the Mail's trap and stereotyping the estate and the residents. I will have a crack at it this weekend, assistance/comments welcome. Blackberry Sorbet (talk • contribs) 12:21, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Hell's waiting room

message: A detailed explanation of how the estate came to be associated with the name "Hell's waiting room", noting that it was first coined by a Daily Mail journalist to score a cheap political point, and often used in the media afterwards only to highlight a case of negative stereotyping, is fine. To include it as a standalone, pejorative term used to imply that this is the mainstream view of the estate is not. Blackberry Sorbet (talk • contribs) 01:48, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: As the tl;dr addition suggests, I realised by the time I had finished that screed that I might have been better employed to just write the section in the article myself. By then it was late, however, and I didn't believe I would be able to do it coherently. The estate has been blighted by many, many problems - even before it was completed in the 70s, it was attracting a good deal of negative coverage. But I think it's important to avoid falling into the Mail's trap and stereotyping the estate and the residents. I will have a crack at it this weekend, assistance/comments welcome. Blackberry Sorbet (talk • contribs) 12:21, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: tl;dr

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