The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate

Abstract

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.

After Grenfell: accumulation, debris, and forming failure in London

“…In 1850, Charles Dickensone among many commentators -described it as 'a plague spot, scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London' (quoted in Gladstone 1969Gladstone [1924: 136). As many scholars have noted, such stigmatization has cast long shadows, with Victorian categorizations of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor finding their contemporary echo in distinctions between 'hardworking families' and supposed 'benefits scroungers' (Alexander 2022;Shilliam 2018;.…”

“…As an externally imposed category – ‘failed communities’, for example – failure can be stigmatizing, deeply inadequate for capturing the richness of life as lived, whilst also triggering interventions including regeneration and demolition (Wacquant 2007; Woodcraft 2020). Branding Grenfell as a site of failure risks labelling its communities and histories as failures too – something not lost on the neighbourhood, which, along with other working‐class areas of London, has been at the sharp end of debates about the ‘undeserving poor’ since Victorian times (Alexander 2022; Shilliam 2018). Yet, in the case of disasters and systemic breakdown, there remains an ethical imperative to name failure which is sidestepped by recent anthropological interest in rethinking failure in terms of diversity, difference, or disobedience (Carroll, Jeevendrampillai, Parkhurst & Shackelford 2017; Howe & Takaragawa 2017).…”