Enter Deer Park is fixed around the ‘second-phase’ segment of the Aylesbury estates 25-year redevelopment of the estate. The provisional idea being that it can sprawl across the site from Walworth road to Old Kent Road, with option of using Burgess Park. Currently the development has stalled at the High Courts, due largely to local former resident Aysen Dennis which means much of the development is stalled until there is a ample resolution of social housing in the proposed ‘new deal’.
Phase two was provisionally meant to complete in 2025 meaning the only part of the Aylesbury regeneration completed in 10 years has been part 1 of 4 with the original aim of regeneration being 2036. Looking at old Greater London Authority plans from the 90’s it in many senses gave a licence to print money by the staggering inflation of land & property prices in the capital since the mid- to-late 1990s—to build ‘affordable housing’ fanning incentives for the ‘right to buy’ council housing, the end of new council-house construction & a yawning rent gap, resulting in the current landlordism crisis. Landlordism. Gallerism. Artist/Curator/Critic/Collection.
Side note, being kindred children of Blair his located his first public speech as prime minister, hours after New Labour’s landslide general election victory in May 1997 occurred at the Aylesbury Estate believe to be on Wendover House. There is photographic proof. His report was something of the beginning of the term ‘social negativity’ inherent to ‘sinkhole estates ’, wherein the collapse notion of social housing had ‘failed its ideals and its residents’, a typical roll back & roll out neoliberalism.
The importance of the Aylesbury estate is largely to do with its size, it was at one point in time the largest social housing estate in Europe and now acts as the yawning closure of the very logic of social housing stemming from socially democratic governments. Its destruction and prolonged demolition as effectively the point of no turn. Hence the provisional title, Enter Deer Park. In medieval times deer parks were established by Kings (and, later, other titled persons) in order to facilitate hunting and the enjoyment of nature by the nobility. Almost all the deer in Britain were at one time contained in such parks, so eating venison was considered a symbol of status (very little venison was sold, so the only people who could get it were the nobles). Norman Mailer wrote a novel called The Deer Park (1955) about a resort town called Desert D'Or ("golden desert," a fictionalized Palm Springs) in which the upper classes behave quite badly, much like in medieval deer parks. The title, however, is thought to be a reference not to a medieval deer park but to the Parc-aux-Cerfs ("stag park") of Louis XV of France (1710-1774), a more modern version of the deer park in which the king kept a mansion where he installed various women with whom he had sexual liaisons.
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Cole&Tim
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