The name “Housing Benefit Hill” is a reference to a line in Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Bob Dylan from the Highway 61 Revisited album. “Up on Housing Project Hill it’s either fortune or fame.” It’s one of my favourite songs.

IT’S BEEN a long time since I last saw Housing Benefit Hill. More than two years, in fact. Even then it had changed. There were new gardens in the front of the ground floor maisonettes where there used to be a walkway, and security doors on the entrances to the upstairs. New wood panelling, glossy white, on the top storeys, which gave the buildings something of the air of town houses. Also there was a new close behind, with 55 tightly packed houses owned by a Housing Association. Same old air of desperation and poverty, however. Same kids playing in the street. Same piles of rubbish near the crossing to the little stream under the stunted thorns trees. Same beat-up old cars with flat tyres and smashed windscreens, with broken glass like crystals scattered across the torn seats.

Well not quite the same. The kids I knew had grown up a little. They were no longer the ones on the street. And it was probably last year’s rubbish under the trees, and last year’s broken down cars lined up by the new fence. And the old garages had gone. Most of them had been smashed up in any case. Not many of them were used for keeping cars in. Mostly they’d become dens for the teenagers: the urban equivalent of a lover’s bower, lined with mattresses and old cider bottles.

I still remember the long drag up the slope through the rest of the estate, the cars parked by the verges, the privet hedges, the occasional trees. The place I called Housing Benefit Hill was, in fact, a cul-de-sac off a road that looped up and around a larger estate. Housing Benefit Hill was my name for it. Round about it was known as Corn Beef Island. And on the estate itself it was called Colditz. Why? Because you could never escape.

I first started writing the stories in the early months of 1993. I was unemployed, a single parent with a 13 year old son. I’d come through the break-up of a long-term relationship and was looking for something new. I was attending Job Club at the time. I guess I had always wanted to be a writer. I am one of those people with Incessant Jotting Disorder, a pathological inability to leave well alone. I have never been able to truly feel without having first written it down. It’s as if in writing it I make it real. Otherwise life tends to go by in a blur, making no sense at all.

In the past, perhaps, I had dreamed of being a novelist, but I soon realised I didn’t have the imagination. Someone lent me a copy of Post Office by Charles Bukowski. I realised that he was only writing about his own life as a down and out in the back street dives of down town Los Angeles. I thought, “I could do that. I could write about what I know and what‘s around me.” And I knew that I had to keep the stories short, to keep them manageable and within bounds. How many good stories had I killed off in the past by being over ambitious, trying to write the new Ulysses, or the new Crime & Punishment? I’m no genius, and it’s a great relief not to have to pretend to be. But I can write, I have a heart, and I like people.

The name “Housing Benefit Hill” is a reference to a line in Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Bob Dylan from the Highway 61 Revisited album. “Up on Housing Project Hill it’s either fortune or fame.” It’s one of my favourite songs. You hear the words, “Housing Project Hill” and you immediately visualise a place. You can see the buildings, and you imagine the people living there. You feel their lives passing by. Sometimes, maybe, you wonder what they are doing now. I knew that I could have the same effect. I could invent a name to give just such an impression. The name would be like a seed implanted in people’s imagination. They would visualise a backdrop to the events, drawing on all the resonances that the words conjured up. I came up with Housing Benefit Hill, and the whole tone of the stories was fixed.

The first story I wrote was Witch Way Out Of Here, followed by Still Life Behind Drawn Curtains later in the year, though they didn’t appear in that order. Still Life Behind Drawn Curtains was chosen as the opening story by the editors at the Guardian Weekend where I‘d sent it, just on the off chance. Even as I was writing it I knew that it was something special, that something special was going to happen. I knew that people would like it. As I was writing, one night in the late summer of that year, I was rocking back and forth thinking, “I’m doing it for you, I’m doing it for you.“ Meaning I was writing it for the people of Housing Benefit Hill.

I still wonder why the Weekend accepted it. It wasn’t as if I was well known. I have to thank Deborah Orr, the Independent columnist, for that. She was the editor at the time. I think she knew what I was writing about, understood it, and had sympathy. I will always owe her a debt of gratitude.

People used to imagine Housing Benefit Hill as in their own town. Very few people knew where it really was. Some thought Leeds, others London. It didn’t matter. Housing Benefit Hill was everywhere. It was every run-down council estate in the land, peopled by the forgotten generation of post-Thatcherite Britain: the poor, the ejected, the rejected, the lost.

Thatcher’s Britain was only a little older than my son. A whole generation were growing up thinking that this was all there was, that this was how it was meant to be. Some people were doing very well out of it, thank you very much. Many more - those with half a conscience - were struggling to get by. But for the people of Housing Benefit Hill - every Housing Benefit Hill throughout the land - for single parents, for the elderly, the sick and the unemployed, life was very hard indeed. It was this kind of poverty that I was seeing every day of my life on the little estate where I lived: grinding, relentless, unforgiving poverty, a constant trade-off between the necessities of life, and the mounting debts. I saw it. I knew it was real. People who took out loans for Christmas, and spent the next year paying them back. People who did without carpets in order to pay for the heating. People who never had holidays, and who’s idea of a good time was a cigarette and a cup of tea in front of the incessant witterings of day-time TV. Cultural as well as material poverty. The two go together.

I saw these people and I spoke to them. They were my friends. I was invited into their houses. I saw the way they lived. Indeed, I was not so different. There was something deeply depressing about the estate, something about the way it was built, the layout of the buildings, that made you both suspicious and careless at the same time. It made you care less.

In those days there were no front or rear gardens. There was a sunken walkway at the front, and a footpath at the back. People would look into your windows as they passed by. There was never a moment when you didn’t feel like you were being observed. Also the buildings were back-to-front, strangely designed, with the kitchen windows looking forward (or what seemed like forward) onto the road, and the living room windows looking out on the fields behind. They were maisonettes; the equivalent of two, two storey houses on top of each other. So your bedroom was immediately below someone’s living room, and next door to someone else’s bedroom. It was strangely claustrophobic, to be boxed in like this. And if your next door neighbour got up early while your upstairs neighbour stayed up late, you got no sleep. You could hear them upstairs treading the creaking floorboards above your head, across the room and back, to turn the TV over perhaps, or to go to the kitchen to make tea and toast to whittle the long night away. I never could work out what they were doing up there.

Who designs these places? Whoever it is should be made to live in them.

In all the time I lived on Housing Benefit Hill I never decorated. I decorated the once, before I moved in, but never again. No one I knew up there decorated. No one was in the slightest bit house-proud. What was there to be house-proud of?

I’d moved in there sometime in 1991. Prior to that I’d had a single room in a multiple occupation house which I shared with my son. When I heard I’d been offered a council house I was excited. A place of my own, at last. It seemed like a dream come true. It took looking at it to know how much of a mistake I‘d made. When I’d filled in the form I’d been given a number of options: house, flat, maisonette. I’d been so desperate that I’d ticked all the boxes. But maisonettes are the worst form of housing, and only the really desperate, the really stupid, or the really bad-tempered end up in them. Housing Benefit Hill, I learned, was a sink estate: the kind of place where the council put all their problem tenants, the kind of place no one wants to live. You weren’t given the option to refuse.

Councils had been busy selling off their housing stock for years, and had literally millions in the bank from the sales, but they weren’t allowed to build any more. Of all the policies of that era, this was one of the most vindictive, one of the most uncaring. Government was against council housing, as a matter of principle. Council house tenants tended to be opposition supporters.

Social housing, who needs it?

There was a workman inside when I came to view it for the first time. I knocked on the door and called in, “I’m the new tenant. I’ve just come to look around.”

“Best of luck, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t live here if they paid me. You know what I had to clear up off your doorstep this morning? Shit.”

“There are a few dogs around, I suppose,” I said, trying to remain optimistic.

“Not dog shit. Human shit,” he said. “These people are animals.”

OF COURSE they weren’t animals. They were just people. A whole variety of people, from all sorts of backgrounds. Many of them were travellers, this being hop country, a place where itinerant workers traditionally came for seasonal work. It was a line I often heard: “when I lived in my trailer I didn’t have mould growing on the windows, I didn’t have dust coming down from the ceiling, we were always warm, and we could move on whenever we liked.” That was the problem with Housing Benefit Hill. Once there you could never get away. No one was willing to swap.

Many of the people you will meet in these pages are still living on the estate. Ted and Sall are both there, though they have a different maisonette and central heating and double glazing these days. All of the houses have central heating and double glazing. But Ted refuses to switch the central heating on. It makes him too hot, he says. I think he’s thinking about the cost.

Stewart, the young poet, only moved out a couple of months ago. He’d gone back to live with Ted and Sall after he’d lost his flat in the town. He said it would only be for a couple of weeks. Two years later he was still there.

Claire is still there, though with a new feller, as are Slammer and Kerry. Kerry has one of the new houses they built in the field behind. She says that the walls are so thin that you can hear the next door neighbours fart. Slammer was working for a time, but then his knee was crushed in an accident. He has a metal plate in his leg, and it’s taken him some years to learn to walk properly again. He’s no longer capable of heavy lifting, and no longer works.

Fred and Vera, the witches, are still there too. Still practicing witch craft. Still unable to find a spell to help them escape.

Martin and Sue, my next door neighbours, moved away before I did. They got a new flat in a nearby town. Bran, and Peter-Boy: they‘ve gone. Peter-Boy was a Brummie who’d married into a traveller family. He’d shared his two bedroom maisonette with a wife and four kids for a number of years before the council eventually moved him. And Tamsin, the woman who’d lost her child, she‘d been moved out on compassionate grounds. I only hope she‘s somewhere safe. And there are a number of others I never wrote about who are still, as far as I know, living there. Why didn’t I do stories on these people too?

That’s easy. Because they didn’t want me to.

It’s been my biggest regret that having had the stories accepted I told anyone. My second regret is that I didn’t use a false name. I was excited, of course. When the letter came back from the Guardian I whooped and jumped and nearly punched a hole in the ceiling, and then went round telling everyone. If I hadn’t, I might still be writing the stories now. But, obviously - obvious now, though it wasn’t then - writing stories about people and then getting them published in a national newspaper tends to change your relationship with them. People are shy of seeing themselves described. They become shy of inviting you round. You can’t blame them really. It was like I was holding them up as exhibits, when they only wanted to be friends. I lost a lot of friends in the first few months after the first story came out. I came in for a lot of criticism. Everyone in the town got to know I was writing. People read the stories, not for entertainment, or the writing style, or because they believed in the sentiment, but because they wanted to see who I was writing about this time.

You’ll notice a change very early on. They go from stories about people who are the victims of poverty, to stories about people who, though poor, still lead bright and fulfilling lives. They go from stories about people who don’t want to be written about, to stories about people who do. In the latter pages (in fact within a few months) you have less of Housing Benefit Hill, and more of the rest of the country. I justified it to myself by saying that Housing Benefit Hill was less a place, more a state of being. And anyway, I’d made the name up. It could exist anywhere.

And so it did.

Housing Benefit Hill columns came from Ely in Cardiff. They came from Renfrew in Scotland. From mid-Wales, from Birmingham, from London from Bristol, from Wiltshire, from Leeds. From anywhere in fact.

New characters began to appear. Fen, Steve, Kodan, various other people I met in my travels. These were people who enjoyed me writing about them, who loved to feed me stories so that they could see them in the paper. I went on a lot of journeys. It was John Major’s Britain I was writing about. And there was one piece of legislation that I became more concerned about than anything else: the notorious Criminal Justice Act. You’ll find a lot about the Criminal Justice Act in these pages. This was the law that criminalized people for their lifestyle. It was squatters, ravers, road protesters, New Age Travellers it was against: people who did not fit into the normal categories, or who challenged the normal categories, who wanted to live lives that were open to the imagination, rather than lives where the imagination had to be closed off in order to survive.

Yet another vindictive piece of legislation.

Thank God we have a Labour government now. A Labour government who have not only failed to repeal the Criminal Justice Act, but who have added to it. Take a look at the new Terrorism Bill, where protest has been redefined as a terrorist act. I always thought that terrorists were out to kill people. Not so. People merely have to damage a blade of grass by treading on it to be called terrorists these days.

Haven’t things improved?

Many of the stories you will find in these pages were never published at all. Some of them appeared either in the pages of Mixmag, or in the Big Issue. Three of them appeared in the New Statesman. There’s a slight shift of emphasis, depending on the magazine. The New Statesman pieces are more polemical. The Mixmag pieces more dance orientated. Some of the Big Issue pieces were originally intended for the Guardian, but had to be moved, for practical and judicious reasons. In one case I was threatened with being beaten up if I published. Others were stories I prepared towards the end of my tenure at the Guardian, and which I never got round to sending. One of them is an extract from a much longer piece which I’ve cut down especially for this book. In any case, if you remember Housing Benefit Hill (and I find that a lot of people still do) then you’ll find there’s plenty of new material here for you to enjoy.

CJ Stone 2000