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LONDON - A top public relations firm has been hired to give a good name to one of Britain's most notorious housing estates.
The 7500 residents of the Aylesbury Estate in South London are well aware that their home has become a byword for all that is worst about the concrete jungles built in haste during the 1960s.
The local council has hired Hill & Knowlton, one of the five biggest public relations firms in the world, to help it tell the outside world that a more attractive new estate is going to rise from the rubble of the old one.
The Daily Mail called the estate "Hell's waiting room".
On Boxing Day last year, a 20-year-old man was shot dead on the estate. His body lay in a communal garden, unreported to police, for 24 hours. This month, a woman jumped to her death after her 10th-storey flat on the estate caught fire.
- INDEPENDENT