When I used to live in Paris, I took the Metro to the end of the line one day and spent an afternoon wandering between Ivry and Villejuif. The area may not be as picturesque as the tourist zones of central Paris, but it has its own memorable spots, like the Yuri Gagarin Aquatic Stadium with its Olympic-length pool, perched at the intersection between Karl Marx Avenue and Yuri Gagarin Street.

Ivry-sur-Seine, a Communist stronghold since the 1920s, was then also the location of a housing complex called Cité Gagarine, inaugurated by the man himself during a visit to France in 1963. The municipal government knocked it down in 2019, having put up posters for the demolition that bore the message “Good Bye Gagarine” in English with Soviet-style lettering. You could hardly blame the New York Times for laying it on rather thickly in their report: “French Housing Project, Once a Symbol of the Future, Is Now a Tale of the Past.”

That still leaves at least one block of flats named in the cosmonaut’s honor: Gagarin House in London’s Battersea district, part of the Winstanley Estate. I spotted it while out canvassing for Labour in the 2017 election. But Gagarin House may not be long for this world either. The Labour MP elected that year, Marsha de Cordova, has attacked the local council’s “regeneration” plan that really amounts to social engineering: “At present, nearly 70 percent of the estate is made up of social housing tenants; when the project is complete less than 20 percent of the estate will be for social rent.”