A London Housing Project With a Notoriously Bad Image Fights Back

Aylesbury Estate, a public housing complex in London, has been burdened with a bad reputation for years. A history of gang violence and its stark, brutalist architecture combined to make the estate a popular choice for British filmmakers in need of a location that suggests poverty, crime, and despair. This happened so often Aylesbury's 7,500 residents eventually pressured the Southwark council to ban filming on the property, but not before one television station produced a short clip that still irks residents 10 years later.

When the U.K.'s Channel 4 decided to shoot Aylesbury Estate in 2004 for one of its iconic station identification videos, they showed a desolate, littered scene that not only perpetuated all the worst stereotypes of social housing, it also showed something residents say wasn't even real (via, they allege, the use of props and post-production editing):