Synopsis

Set against the housing struggles of the late 1970s, this Open Door black-and-white video examines “prior demolition”: the practice by which local councils forced residents from their homes, vandalised or demolished properties, and effectively pre-empted public inquiries into redevelopment plans. Focusing on Portsmouth and Redbridge in 1978–79, while tracing redevelopment schemes back to the 1960s, the film shows how communities were destabilised by council-led planning: in Portsmouth, homes in Southsea were blighted and demolished to make way for a proposed eight-lane highway, while in Redbridge, residential streets were cleared for commercial redevelopment. The video presents these public inquiries as deeply compromised processes: residents technically have the right to object, but councils undermine that right by vandalising houses, displacing objectors, and manipulating the evidence before any independent judgement can be made. The result is a critique of planning law as a hollow democratic ritual, where consultation and objection exist in theory but are neutralised in practice by local authority power.

The video further foregrounds squatting and community housing as practical forms of resistance to council neglect and housing scarcity. The Redbridge Self-Help Housing Association, formed to make use of short-life properties, renovates empty council-owned houses at its own expense and using its own labour before letting them to people in desperate need of housing. This model directly challenges the council’s logic of abandonment and demolition by proving that supposedly obsolete properties can be made habitable through collective work. Alongside roof-sits, public objections, occupations, lobbying, and campaigns such as the Campaign for Demolition Control, the video presents grassroots organising as a way for residents to defend housing rights, expose corruption, and reclaim control over homes that authorities have chosen to destroy.

The video finally broadens its critique to the wider political climate of the period, linking local housing struggles to Thatcher-era public spending cuts affecting council housing, health services, nurseries, and social care. Testimonies from tenants, nurses, pensioners, parents, and community organisers show how these cuts intensified existing inequalities and placed the heaviest burden on working-class communities, elderly people, single parents, and those dependent on public services.