The Netflix series “The Crown” Series 4 Episode 5. The camera pans across what appear to be desolate tower blocks and an inner-city, high-rise wasteland with little hope. It’s the home of Michael Fagan, the intruder who so famously gained entry to Buckingham Palace and sat on the Queen’s bed.

In the episode in question the Queen (Olivia Colman) gathers herself after the shock of the appearance of Fagan (Tom Brooke) in her bedroom. She rallies her famous small talk and asks: “and where do you live?” answer: “King’s Cross.” “Is it nice?” “Not really.”

But the setting is not King’s Cross. In fact, the glimpses we see of Fagan’s world are South of the river. It’s the Aylesbury estate in Walworth, Southwark. The Aylesbury, home to Wendover, the longest tower block in Europe and part of Faraday ward, at one time one of the most deprived wards in the UK.

I knew it well as one of the Lib Dem councillors for the estate in the nineties and noughties.

The Aylesbury is the edgy setting for many a TV show. The towers feature on a Madonna video and countless episodes of the Bill. As a young woman I experienced plenty of frightening times on the estate. Walking back from a meeting on Wendover late at night I was followed by two men in a car which sped off once the occupants had had the fun of seeing my terror close up.

But that wasn’t the whole story. The Aylesbury estate was a village and the Wendover block itself was a village within a village. A survey showed an astonishing 81% of residents said they received help from a neighbour – everything from babysitting to taking in a parcel.

Though it was built by his own party in the late 60s, in 1997 Tony Blair turned up for a photo opportunity on the estate (as the Lib Dem ward councillors my colleagues Alf Langley, Donnachadh McCarthy and I were not invited!) and announced things had to change. He later vetoed the massive refurbishment voted for by tenants. The Aylesbury had to go.

A recent academic oral history of the estate has pretty much airbrushed the Liberal Democrats out of the story. No mention of the influential Lib Dem crime survey of 2,700 flats revealing crimes against women which had not even been reported before. We successfully campaigned alongside tenants to bring down the link bridges between the towers as they were a magnet for crime.

But the sadness is not our erasure, galling though it is, but the folly in the first place of a post-war generation being consigned to the “streets in the sky” from the Elephant and Castle to the Old Kent Road

Soon there will only be old footage like the Netflix show to show for it and an exchange about a fake Aylesbury with a fake Fagan and a fake queen: “Is it nice?” “Not really”.

Written in honour of Paddy Ashdown who came to the Aylesbury before it was fashionable and, in his book, “Beyond Westminster” highlighted the menace of tower block fires long before the horrors of Grenfell.

* Ruth Bright has been a councillor in Southwark and Parliamentary Candidate for Hampshire East