The 2025 Netflix mini-series Too Much sees Jessica, played by Morgan Slater, relocate to London. To her surprise, the salubrious-sounding ‘Hoxton Grove Estate’ with hoped-for ‘estate grounds, verdant gardens, archways, some real Merchant Ivory-type shit’ turns out to be (irl) the St Peter’s Estate, Hackney Road, London, commissioned in 1962 and completed in 1967 for Tower Hamlets Borough Council.

Was Jessica’s mix-up simply a lexical ambiguity, or do common etymological roots exist for the range of territories we call ‘estates’

I have been examining this question, initially by tracing the history of the ‘estate’ as a term to describe the inherited wealth and territory of landed families through to its use in colonial ventures and then in the 19th century for speculative and social housing development.

From this genealogy, I have been examining the underlying practices that create and sustain the estate as a model for land, and later housing development. My paper focuses on the use of map depictions to both celebrate the physical extent of an estate and also to represent it as a distinct, self-contained entity. Works examined include estate maps of the 17th and 18th centuries, and mid-twentieth-century maps used by the London County Council to promote their public housing programmes. The paper also examines how estate design in the twentieth century drew upon an idealisation of community from earlier village settlement forms.

Informing the research approach, I have drawn on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the concept of geo-body from the writings of Thongchai Winichakul and the idea of the adapted stereotype from the work of art historian Ernst Gombrich.

My interest in estates stems from my time as a project architect working with Muf architecture/art in the 2000s on urban realm projects that included housing estates. Through this, I became aware of the difference between estates and the wider public realm in cities in terms of their unified management of estate elements such as housing, play spaces and estate streets. Estates are run as distinct entities, often with provision of play spaces and parks and occasionally social spaces and community provision. This, together with tenure and estate design, has engendered a strong culture of belonging.

Current pressures to redevelop estates have exposed the underlying tension between the ‘belonging on’ that characterises the experience of estate residents, with that of ‘belonging to’ that frames many local councils’ and social landlords’ attitudes towards their estates as a source of capital in the form of territory.

Publishing in AMPS has allowed me space to explore the interdisciplinary nature of my work, and to open the necessary broader theoretical basis on which to ground it. Thank you to the editors Robert Amato Lastman and Jonas E. Andersson, and to Professor Graham Cairns for encouraging me to put forward my contribution.

Estates: the history of an idea by Julian Williams (University of Westminster, UK) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 31.

Julian Williams is an architect and lecturer at the School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster. He is currently the Director of Teaching, Learning and Quality for the School and teaches design and professional practice. His research is focused on the historical geography of the housing estate, examining the role of maps in demarcating territory. His current projects include the tradition of estate tours made by visiting politicians and dignitaries, the estate signboard, and the study of ‘belonging on’.

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