I would like to hear more about these.
When the slums were demolished (a long time ago now) local authorities built a hell of a lot of new housing, almost always as far outside the city centre as possible (the dominant planning ideology at the time was essentially that of the Garden City and planned suburbanisaton; that ideology is back in fashion with all the Thames Gateway stuff) and became the landlord of those new estates. Today close to 20% of households live in houses rented from either the local council or some form of social housing authority (it used to be a higher % but there was a Government drive to get people to buy their council houses in the '80's).
Public housing in the U.K has only rarely followed the American model of tower blocks; the tower block phase came in the '50's and '60's due to political pressure from central government to speed up construction (tower blocks being dead cheap to construct after all). Many of the problems associated with tower blocks in the U.S have been noticed here (although not as seriously) and thankfully the era of the tower block is long gone.
Anyways, an interesting legacy of the construction of the council estates is the fact that only 8.7% of households live in houses rented from the private sector. In addition to that there are hardly any old fashioned urban tenements left; those not taken out by the Luftwaffe were demolished in the Socialist fervour of the post-War period.
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