Urban cultural theory has long posited art and culture alongside capital as drivers of gentrification. Artists have been described as the pioneers of gentrification bringing aesthetic valorisation to depressed neighbourhoods where their living habits and taste for postindustrial landscapes became a cultural model for the middle classes. Both private and public arts-led regeneration initiatives confirmed the mutual dependence between artists and frontier areas in what has been described as second and third-wave gentrification. This paper wishes to present a chronology of artists working with houses and flats in areas of London designated for regeneration – or what Alberto Duman has called “social housing as ready-made” – in order to assess how their role in the transformation of depressed areas has been variously welcomed or denounced. In 2000, Patrick Keiller’s The Dilapidated Dwelling demonstrated that in Britain, the global economy has not made house building more efficient but to the contrary raised the price of a dilapidated housing stock. The film also pointed to a revival of interest in social housing and includes a visit of Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in Kensal Green. London council housing has indeed elicited a strong fascination for artists now using it as a curatorial site, or as the work itself. The return of the domestic to replace museum or gallery spaces allows them to appropriate a given architecture bearing the traces of lives lived rather than the utopian white cube. These domestic spaces are also the new loci for public sharing in a context where the public arena of London has become privatized through BIDs and POPs. Making imaginative use of derelict premises in between tenancies is not simply cost-effective, it is also strategic: it draws attention to the visible impact of the vagaries of the economy on people’s environment. Indeed, empty houses are associated with problems of affordability, dereliction and displacement. Still, residents and former residents have also denounced some of these projects which they have perceived as systemic contributions to the process of gentrification which has outpriced or even forcibly removed them from their dwellings and neighbourhoods. This revanchist interpretation (Smith) in which capitalism gets even by allowing for the insertion of middle-class homeownership into areas of social housing is indeed a process which several such arts-led projects have encouraged. By spanning three decades of artists transforming London houses, flats, and even estates – from Rachel Whiteread’s House on Grove Street in 1993 to Elmgreen & Dragset fictionalising the gentrification of a Whitechapel neighbourhood (2018), through Roger Hiorns’ (2008) and Mike Nelson’s (2013) projects at Elephant & Castle – we will see how the aesthetisation of residential areas in need of redevelopment has progressively been resisted as gentrification undermining post-war welfarism.