The Pepys Estate, Deptford: ‘a Tale of Two Cities’

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1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Lewisham, Multi-storey, Regeneration

If you’ve been following recent posts, you will have read already about the award-winning design and prestige of the Pepys Estate in its earliest years and its subsequent reputation as a crime-ridden and racist ‘problem estate’. Today’s brings the story up to date.

After 1979, a political attack on council housing was matched by an apparently more benign concern (although with a conveniently shared language of crisis and failure) to regenerate so-called problem estates up and down the country. As such, the Pepys Estate was ripe for intervention.  This post examines the controversies surrounding its regeneration and their lessons which, in the context of some proposed solutions to London’s current housing crisis, seem as relevant than ever.

The re-clad Daubeney Tower, Pepys Park and new build along Bowditch

The first phase of the Estate’s transition was not controversial – in fact, it embodied precisely the conventional wisdom of its day.  Crime was high: 175 burglaries and 392 car crimes were reported in 1982. Fear of crime was perhaps higher: (1)

Many old people, women and children are afraid to use the lifts or stairs and will not do so unaccompanied. Nor do residents feel confident to confront noisy children, boisterous teenagers or non-resident intruders, because they cannot rely on the support of other residents.

Reflecting the fashionable theories of Oscar Newman and his British alter-ego Alice Coleman, blame for crime and antisocial behaviour was placed on the Estate’s design:

the inter-connectedness, the lack of ‘defensible space’ and opportunity for surveillance over common parts and the ease of access to and escape from the blocks.

That inter-connectedness had, of course, been one of the founding design ideals of the Estate and had once succeeded not only in the practical aim of separating pedestrians and traffic but in promoting community.  Now, by some alchemy, ‘the massive “streets-in-the-sky” catwalks separating pedestrians from traffic had become liabilities that destroyed neighbourhood connections’. (2)

Remaining walkways between Argosy House and Lanyard House

A Safe Neighbourhoods Unit Action Plan was presented in April 1982 and a series of measures to improve security followed – strengthened front doors to flats, double-entry phone systems to blocks, and CCTV.  A concierge system was trialled in Aragon Tower in a later phase of the scheme and walkways demolished between two of the medium-rise blocks, Bence and Clement Houses.  At the same time, a Neighbourhood Housing Office was established on the Estate and policing stepped up.  It was reported, as a result, that recorded crime had fallen by over half by the end of the decade though street crime less so.

If I’ve treated this initiative somewhat provocatively, perhaps I shouldn’t.  The improvement to residents’ lives was real and there’s no reason why secure entry systems and concierge schemes should be confined to middle-class developments. Crime should, of course, be ‘designed out’ where feasible.

My scepticism lies only in the tendency of some to assume design flaws were (here and elsewhere on other similar estates) the cause of crime.  We saw last week the range of social and economic challenges this previously safe and well-regarded estate faced by the 1980s and, given the demographics (just under a quarter of the Estate’s population was under 18), we might look to a far wider range of factors to explain both the rise and fall of antisocial behaviour.

A contemporary but out-of-date Lewisham Homes sign for the Estate – Merrick House is gone but the former shopping terrace is still shown

Regeneration proper began in 1992 when the Department of Environment approved the Deptford City Challenge initiative, a seven-year programme scheduled to spend almost £29m on reviving and renovating the Estate.

After extensive consultation with residents, the initial Estate Action programme which emerged proposed the demolition of just one housing block – the 44 flats of Merrick House in the centre of the Estate to be replaced by 18 new three- and four-bed houses with their own enclosed gardens.   Some walkways and the existing Community Centre and elevated shopping centre were also to be rased and replaced.

The Evelyn Community Garden

In the plethora of interventions of the time, a Pepys Community Forum secured (excuse the jargon, just for the hard-core social housing enthusiasts among you) Single Regeneration Budget Round 5 funding.  This resident-run community development trust survives to the present and among its initiatives is the Evelyn Community Garden on Windlass Road. (3)

Eddystone Tower with the new shops and community centre, occupying the former area of Merrick House, in the foreground

Merrick House and the shops came down (although the current small street-level terrace is far smaller and inferior in provision) and the refurbishment of existing blocks proceeded through the mid-1990s.  But events were to take a radically different turn from 1998 when Lewisham Council carried out a residents’ survey to review works carried out and plans for the future.

The survey appears to have been intended to provide cover for decisions already taken. Both the Pepys Neighbourhood Committee and Pepys Regeneration Forum objected to its format, which was taken to pre-judge outcomes, and the secrecy which surrounded its findings.

The controversial Lewisham Council advert intended to ‘sell’ the changed plans for the Estate to local residents

In 1999, the Council abandoned the proposal to build new family homes in the centre of the Estate and announced, contrary to existing promises, plans to demolish five of the Estate’s low-rise blocks (Limberg, Dolben, Barfleur, Marlowe and Millard Houses) and sell off Aragon Tower.

These blocks were indistinguishable from others on the Estate, all but Barfleur had already been improved under the Estate Action scheme, and an architectural survey commissioned by tenants found them to be structurally sound.  They shared one characteristic, however:  they happened to be closest to the river – ‘the area most amenable…to gentrification’. (4)

At the same time, the Hyde Housing Association was selected by the Council as its preferred partner in the proposed redevelopment and the Association – acquiring the blocks for £6.5m and receiving £9m from the Housing Association for its own scheme – was granted planning permission to demolish and rebuild one year later. All this, despite some fairly cosmetic consultation, took place behind closed doors.  The scheme required the ‘decanting’ of existing tenants in 222 council flats who were offered no right of return.   Tenants groups and housing activists mobilised in protest.

Protestors slammed the ‘social cleansing’ of the Estate

The new scheme – five blocks of flats plus two terraces of three-storey houses in its initial phases – was designed by the bptw practice (architects don’t like capital letters apparently).  This was a mixed tenure scheme (as now deemed necessary) – of the first 169 homes, 45 were for shared ownership and 124 for social rent – but it was also, more positively, tenure blind.

Longshore, part of the new Hyde Housing scheme

The scheme won an award as the Best Public Housing Development in the 2005 Brick Awards and was selected as a (positive) case study by CABE, the Government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. (5)  To my untutored eyes, the new blocks along Foreshore, Longshore and Barfleur Lane look attractive, albeit in a generically contemporary way.  Owen Hatherley is more cynical: (6)

The new blocks are regeneration hence good, the old are council housing hence bad. Yet the council flats are much larger, and look much more robustly built, of concrete and stock brick – the newer flats are clad in the ubiquitous thin layer of brick or attached slatted wood, materials which have shown an unfortunate tendency to fall off.

Albermarle House (to the left) and the converted rum warehouses, now both managed by Hyde Housing

At least most of these homes remained more or less genuinely affordable (though presumably at higher Housing Association rents).  The sale of Aragon Tower to Berkeley Homes for £11.5m in 2002 was pure and unabashed gentrification and has resulted in the loss of 144 council flats.  Berkeley Homes added five floors to the existing 24-storey tower and 14 penthouse units.  One of the refurbished former council flats – ‘a superb two bedroom split-level flat within a fantastic modern development with concierge service, boasting a bright and contemporary living space’ – was recently sold by Foxtons for £440,000.(7)

The new Aragon Tower

To avoid any taint of council estate, a new entrance was constructed on the western side of the Tower from George Beard Road and early prospective purchasers were brought down by Thames Clipper to Greenland Pier upriver.  All this was described in a BBC documentary series in 2007, The Tower: a Tale of Two Cities.  Perhaps you’ve seen it; I haven’t and it’s not available online. There are mixed views of the series on the Estate but it does, at least, seem to have done a pretty good job exposing the stark social and economic divisions which currently shame us. (8)

Lewisham Council claimed to have run out of money and it’s true enough that the rules of the game were – and are – designed to curtail the ability of local councils to improve and expand their housing stock.  But it suited, too, a gentrifying agenda which sees some London councils only too keen to bring the middle-class and their money into their boroughs.

This was expressed honestly by Pat Hayes, the Council’s director of regeneration: (9)

The key to successful communities is a good mix of people: tenants, leaseholders and freeholders. The Pepys Estate was a monolithic concentration of public housing and it makes sense to break that up a bit and bring in a different mix of incomes and people with spending power.

Of course, one doesn’t hear much of ‘monolithic’ middle-class suburbs, nor – although they exist (and existed once on the Pepys) – of ‘successful’ working-class communities. And wouldn’t it be better if those ‘people with spending power’ were local people treated more fairly in our unequal society?

The cover of the Hyde Group’s glossy brochure advertising their Pepys Estate development

In reality, this form of ‘regeneration’ is all too often imposed at the expense of the existing community and against council tenants’ wishes and interests.  On the Pepys Estate, it resulted in the loss of 366 secure council tenancies. (10) As areas all around the Estate are redeveloped privately, the suspicious lull in current remedial works on remaining blocks in the care of Lewisham Homes leads some to believe the process may not be over.

The £11.5m secured from the sale was promised to housing schemes elsewhere in the Borough.  Still, you can do the maths – Berkeley Homes were the real winners.  It’s a perfect illustration of the skewed values and insane economics which currently shape the UK’s housing market.

Daubeney Tower with Aragon to the rear surrounded by old and new build © Derek Harper and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Pepys Estate, let’s be fair here, has clearly benefited from much of the renewal which has taken place.  The Estate looks and feels good now; its homes are of a quality and at rents which millions of private renters dream of.  It remains a living example of the ambition and idealism of earlier generations to secure good, healthy, secure and affordable homes for ordinary people.

Ironically, the Surrey Canal – maintained as a feature in the GLC’s lay-out of the Estate but covered over during redevelopment – is now scheduled to be re-opened as a linear park. Gentrification has obviously made water features respectable again.

A penthouse apartment view from Aragon Tower as featured in the Sprunt architectural group’s flyer for the development

But if you want a stark symbol of current free-market politics and our new priorities ponder on the fact that a tower block, part of an estate built ‘for the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’, is sold off to the wealthy because it’s next to the river and too good for the working-class.

Sources

(1) The 1982 Safe Neighbourhoods Report quoted in Tim Kendrick, Housing Safe Communities: an Evaluation of Recent Initiatives – the Pepys Estate, London Safe Neighbourhoods Unit (ND)

(2) Gareth Potts, Regeneration in Deptford, London (September, 2008)

(3)  Jean Anastacio, Ben Gidley, Lorraine Hart, Michael Keith, Marjorie Mayo and Ute Kowarzik, Reflecting realities Participants’ perspectives on integrated communities and sustainable development, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (July 2000) and Malcolm Cadman, Pepys Community Forum

(4) Michael E. Stone, Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Prospects (October 2003)

(5) CABE, Case Study: Pepys Estate, Deptford, London

(6) The London Column, Pepys Estate, Deptford. Photo Tony Ray-Jones, Text Owen Hatherley (May 2011).  The blogger Single Aspect has also criticised the re-design of Aragon Tower.

(7) Foxtons, Two-bed flat for sale, Aragon Tower, Deptford SE8

(8) You can see the series being discussed by residents on the Spectacle Productions website

(9) Sarah Lonsdale, ‘Tears of a clown as his tower gets a fancy facelift‘, Daily Telegraph, November 12 2004

(10) For blow-by-blow details and analysis of the process, see the online archive created by Malcolm Cadman of the Pepys Tenants’ Action Group including his Chronology of Events and Tenants Action Group Pepys Archive.  For another highly critical account, go to Keith Parkins, ‘Scandal of Pepys Estate’, on Indymedia, February 9 2005

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The Pepys Estate, Deptford: from ‘Showcase’ to ‘Nightmare’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Lewisham, Multi-storey

We left the Pepys Estate, recently constructed and a prestige GLC scheme, in a good place last week.  It was popular and well-regarded: (1)

People were fighting to move onto [the Estate] and the lucky ones felt privileged.  They were proud to be part of a showcase – spotlessly clean and well looked after.

Completed in 1973, by the end of the decade one newspaper report on the Estate was headlined simply ‘Nightmare!’, the detail seemingly justifying that exclamation mark. The Estate, it continued: (2)

is littered with abandoned cars, graffiti splatters the walls, garages are deserted because people fear to use them and piles of rubbish clog waste disposal units.

In this post, we’ll examine and assess this trajectory.

Daubeney Tower

As we saw in the last post, the Estate was planned in line with some of the most innovative design principles of its day.  Particular attention was paid to the need to re-create community. Perhaps this reflected a conscious sense of the strength of existing community in South London.  It reflected too a growing literature celebrating the tightly-knit traditional working-class communities of the capital.  Wilmott and Young were writing about East London but their lament for the terraced-street culture of family and kinship then being uprooted by wholesale redevelopment surely had strong echoes south of the river. (3)

An old photograph of Grove Street which runs through the present Estate © http://www.olddeptfordhistory.com/

According to Les Back, an academic who lived and worked on the Estate in the later eighties, it was envisaged as ‘a phoenix-like planned society that would emerge from the rubble of slum redevelopment’.  To this end, beyond the architectural qualities and social amenities noted last week, the design as a whole was intended to promote community.  Thus, the external walkways we’ve learned to hate – a strong feature connecting the various elements of the estate – and even the internal corridors – which linked the low-rise blocks – were seen as media of neighbourliness.

A contemporary image of walkways linking Harmon House and Bemberidge House with Eddystone Tower to the rear.

And it may surprise you to learn – given the obloquy that subsequently descended on these planners’ fancies – that they worked.  One resident recalls a trip to the local shops – along those walkways – taking hours to complete as she stopped to talk to everyone she met, and she knew nearly everyone.  The corridors were also a place to meet and socialise; doors left unlocked with children playing in one flat but regularly checked on by neighbours.

Daubeney Tower with Harmon House and Pelican House to the left

This was true, apparently, even of the now reviled tower blocks.  People met in lifts and on landings. Fiona, my guide to the estate, living then in Aragon Tower, remembers a close and friendly community – ‘you could knock on any door’ – and recalls too how scrupulously tenants maintained the common areas according to a rota issued by the estate caretaker.

Residents also organised their own Social Club which in turn organised what Les Back calls ‘the pinnacle of local self-help’ – the Palaver celebrations (a kind of estate carnival) held annually in the early 1970s.

A contemporary sign for Bembridge House. Its naming reflects the original Deptford location of Trinity House.

When Lord Mountbatten formally opened the Estate in 1966, ‘he suggested that each estate tenant should be given a history of the naval dockyard’. (4)  Whether this was followed through or not, the area’s naval heritage was an important part of the Estate’s consciously patriotic identity, not just in the naming of the various blocks but also in the practice of the Tenants’ Association to formally ‘adopt’ a naval frigate.  Naval officers would visit the Estate and some tenants would visit the ships when docked.

There was, of course, a context for all this – there is always a context though so often it gets forgotten in the architectural analyses of social housing.  This was a respectable working-class community, still enjoying relatively high levels of employment.  The rents of the Estate – at between £5 and £8 for the lower-rise flats from the outset – were generally higher than those of other local estates and, given that ability to pay was one of the most important criteria applied when allocating tenancies at this time, steady employment and reasonable incomes were necessary.

If you know the Pepys Estate or its sometime reputation, you’ll know there’s one other thing I haven’t mentioned – race.  The Estate was in its early years and for some time an almost exclusively white estate, this the result of a more or less formal policy operated by the GLC.  As one former council housing officer describes:

It wasn’t as simple as ‘We don’t want black people living there’.  It was more like an assumption that black and white would rather live separately from one another.  So, as you go down the Old Kent Road you can see some estates are white and others are black or mixed. It didn’t happen by accident. Housing officers just didn’t allocate black people to [the Pepys Estate].

Conversely, the Milton Court Estate, about a mile to the south on the border with New Cross, was understood as a ‘black estate’.  Sonia Herelle had rejected a move to Milton Court for this reason; it appeared to her to be becoming a ‘ghetto’. In 1973, she became one of the first black people to move to Pepys.  Looking back, she recalls a ‘painful racism, most often expressed as distasteful avoidance but which could easily erupt into overt hostility’.(5) Olaudah Equiano who was seized and returned to slavery on the steps that remain on the Pepys Estate waterfront could have hardly felt less welcome.

Merrick House

As late as 1981, 72 per cent of the Estate’s heads of household were born in the UK (and a further six per cent in the Republic of Ireland).  Even Fiona, with her Scottish father and an Irish mother, felt she didn’t quite ‘fit in’ at the local primary school, so exclusively white and ‘local’ was it.

This would change.  It changed, belatedly, as London itself became ever more diverse but it changed principally through a technical shift in housing allocations policy.  By the late 1970s, needs-based assessment was becoming the norm and earlier criteria based on local connection and means were superseded.  It was left to Lewisham Borough Council, who took over the management of the Estate in 1979, to implement the change.

At the same time, life was getting harder for some of the older-established residents on the Estate.  Lewisham lost 10,000 jobs in the ten years from 1978 and unemployment trebled.  The rate of unemployment for all economically active males reached 13 per cent in 1981 but, while this was relatively high (the rate stood at 18 per cent in the wider area), it was far worse for the Estate’s children now growing into adulthood – over half of those aged 16 to 29 were without work.

There were also criticisms, closer to home, of the Estate’s management.  The nearest Housing Office was two miles away.  Repairs were carried out from a depot on a neighbouring estate and, although a mobile care-taking team was based at Pepys, it was responsible for an additional 1900 properties elsewhere.  All this seemed remote and inefficient.

As Right to Buy kicked in and the Borough’s housing stock fell and as central government grants fell (Lewisham suffered a 30 per cent reduction in its allocations from Whitehall in 1985), a perfect storm of housing shortage and disadvantage was emerging.  And when things go wrong, the human tendency is to seek someone to blame.  That was not Mrs Thatcher but, typically, figures closer to hand.  Many older Estate residents associated the decline of the Estate with its new arrivals, those from the black and ethnic minorities.

The youth club was a scene of racial tension but also where young people shared a musical culture. The roofs were designed to echo Kent oast houses.

It was at this point that the Estate’s reputation for racism took off.  There was, it was said, strong support for the National Front and other neo-fascist organisations.  There were many ‘racist incidents’, ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault to arson attacks on homes occupied by black and ethnic minority residents.

In this context, that strong sense of local identity and patriotism discussed earlier assumes a different, more sinister, meaning.  To Les Back, what had developed was a ‘parochialism’ and ‘nationalism’.  The ‘estate people’ (its older-established white residents) withdrew into a defensive occupation of their remaining strongholds, the Tenants’ Hall and Tenants’ Association, the bar in the community centre. Opposition to change took a racialised form in opposition to the incomers:

For the long-standing residents, their embitterment is essentially the result of what they feel is a broken promise. They were handed a residential space, which they took as their own, and now they feel as if that space is being invaded by ‘foreign’ newcomers and a council that is unsympathetic to them.

It’s ironic, really.  In writing this blog, I’ve been waiting for years for ‘community’ to come along.  Social scientists of the interwar years berated the lack of ‘community’ in the new cottage suburbs. Post-war commentators criticised its lack in the modern high-rise schemes.  And then, when a powerful sense of community does emerge on a council estate, it’s the wrong sort!

I hope you take that as the tongue-in-cheek comment intended but I’m highly suspicious of this eternal quest for community in social housing.  Put crudely, no-one bothers the residents of middle-class suburbia about their sense of community or lack of it – the middle class are never a ‘problem’.   I question the romanticisation of earlier forms of working-class community and I’ve seen plenty of examples of neighbourliness and fellow-feeling on those council estates which have so troubled some middle-class observers.

Previously a community centre run by tenants, this is now the the Borough of Lewisham’s Pepys Resource Centre. It’s located in a converted naval rum warehouse.

That said, here was a success for the planners – that ‘phoenix-like planned society’ had come about but all around it had changed and its vices had become more apparent than its virtues.  Let me be clear – this is not in any shape or form an apologia for racism but it is always working-class communities that suffer most from the shifts and stresses of capitalism.

Of those, the most significant recently have been de-industrialisation (the loss of traditional working-class jobs) and the changes brought about by immigration – not connected but sometimes perceived that way with xenophobia as a response.  UKIP is perhaps the most recent result of these dynamics and while there are comrades on the left who feel that ‘racist’ voters of UKIP should be disdained, I believe the experience of the Pepys Estate teaches something different.

In any case, ‘racism’ is always a complex phenomenon (though not, of course, if you are its victim).  Longer-term black residents of the Estate were generally respected and liked.  Their children were often accepted as ‘locals’ sharing a Pepys identity by their white peers although they had to negotiate a difficult cultural terrain and accept, on occasion, racist name-calling that they could never have experienced as mere banter.  It’s a cliché, of course, that black music often provided a shared culture for these young people.

Gransden House and Daubeney Tower

The hardest-hit group appears to have been the Vietnamese migrants who arrived in the early eighties.  They were affected by the perception (which appears to have been grounded in reality rather than urban myth) that they received sought-after low-rise flats desired by longer-term residents seeking transfers.  More generally, they lacked the common culture shared in significant degree by the Estate’s black and white residents.  In these years, many Vietnamese families locked their doors at night and refused to venture out.

The remaining element to address, as so often in the analysis of council estates at this time, is crime.  Fiona, who has suffered one burglary in her time on the Estate and never any perceived personal threat, remembers it as a safe place but the statistics remain stark.  Crime – burglaries, thefts, car crime and assaults – rose fast in the early 1980s, peaking at 49.1 crimes per 100 households in 1982.  In 1985, a quarter of households reported burglaries.

Drugs played their part.  A recreational use of marijuana among young people became something darker with the arrival of ‘scag’ – relatively cheap heroin – and drug use and dealing were widespread on the Estate. Alternative lifestyles and alternative economies among young people are perhaps not so surprising when conventional society has failed them so badly.

Newspaper reports from 1977 and 1979

Many residents wanted to move.  Some were able to buy properties elsewhere but many felt trapped as the Estate became more unpopular and transfers much more difficult. In the early 1980s, around a quarter of the Estate’s households were said to be on the housing transfer list. (6)  As an unpopular estate, its now hard-to-let properties were increasingly allocated to those with least choice, typically vulnerable people housed as priority cases.

These became another ‘Other’ – seen less as victims than culprits and sometimes with disrupted or disruptive life-styles that may seem to have justified the antipathy that many felt towards them.  As one resident remarked to Les Back:

When they moved the problem families in, that’s when you got a lot trouble and that…They started off with just one block. Now it’s all around the estate.

An older resident simply observed:

It’s like [this estate] is the end of the road, the toilet of society and we get all the dregs. A place is only as good as the people who live there.

We’ve come a long way from the showpiece estate of its earliest years but its highs and lows of this suggest a more complex story than is often assumed.  The homes were mostly of good quality, the Estate’s conception and design had worked initially to create a pleasant environment and a strong community.  But the Estate was victim to wider forces.  Could those wider forces now come to its rescue?  We’ll examine the regeneration of the Estate next week.

Sources

(1) Jean, a local health worker, quoted in Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture. Racisms and multi–culture in young lives (1996) in which it is semi-anonymised as ‘Riverview’.  Much of the detail and some of the quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(2) South East London Mercury, 15 November 1979

(3) Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957)

(4) ‘Lord Mountbatten at Deptford Home of the Navy’, South London Press, 13 July 1966

(5) Jess Steele, Turning the Tide: the History of Everyday Deptford (1993)

(6) Tim Kendrick, Housing safe communities: an evaluation of recent initiatives – Pepys Estate Coordinated Estate Improvement Scheme, London Safe Neighbourhoods Unit (ND)

The Pepys Estate, Deptford: for ‘the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, GLC, Lewisham, Multi-storey

The Pepys Estate was famous, then it was infamous, now it just looks and feels like a pretty decent place to live.  It was a GLC showpiece before it became (or was portrayed as) a ‘nightmare’.  Its stories of crime and race and controversial regeneration can stand for a wider narrative of council housing over these years but a closer examination of their detail will take us far beyond the crude headlines.  This post focuses on the Estate’s origins.

From the GLC brochure, ‘The Pepys Estate – a GLC Housing Project’ (1969): ‘‘In the foreground is a block of old people’s flats…sited close to the shopping centre. The 24-storey Daubeney Tower dominates the scene and eight storey blocks run parallel to the River Thames’ © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

We could start in 1513, the date when Henry VIII established the Chief Naval Dockyard (frequented by Samuel Pepys when Clerk to the Navy Board in the later 18^th century) on the south bank of the Thames in the fishing village of Deptford.  Or 1742 when it became the Naval Victualling Yard.  Or 1858 when that became the Royal Victoria Yard in honour of a royal visit.

But this story – despite the rich maritime history and local heritage celebrated in the Estate’s names – begins a century later: in 1958 when the Admiralty agreed to sell the 11 acre site to the then London County Council for housing, principally for local people being displaced by the demolition of the run-down Victorian terraces which dominated the area.  Clearance of the adjoining Grove Street and Windmill Lane areas created a 45 acre site on which eventually would be built around 1500 homes for a population of around 5000.

A residue of the GLC’s role in designing and constructing the Estate and a reminder of its original lay-out.

Construction began in 1966 with the new Greater London Council in charge and was completed in 1973.  As housing responsibilities increasingly devolved to the new London boroughs, this was one of the GLC’s largest and most prestigious projects and, as such, it combined some of the most advanced and innovative design principles of the day.

It would be, from the outset, a community – a cradle to grave exemplar of welfare state ideals from its maternity and child welfare centre and youth club to the homes and clubroom provided for elderly people.  But it represented modernity and even affluence too – both in its ‘car-free shopping centre’ and its provision for residents’ parking: one, generally below-ground, parking space to every two homes with provision for this to rise.

From the GLC brochure: ‘Many of the garages are underground or incorporated in blocks but with separate access for vehicles. Illustrated is an entrance to some garages with paved area above part of it under the block providing safe covered play areas for the use of children in wet weather’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Its cutting edge, however, is best seen in its overall design.  As the GLC brochure celebrating the new estate proudly proclaims, ‘in planning the estate, one of the main themes has been the separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic’.(1)  This was achieved by an extensive series of elevated walkways connecting many of the blocks.  Fiona, my guide around the estate, who’s lived there since 1968, remembers you could walk from Deptford Park to the river without your feet ever touching the ground.

From the GLC brochure: ‘Part of the raised walkway system connecting the eight-storey blocks at the first floor level to the paved area around Daubeney Tower’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

From the GLC Brochure: the elevated shopping centre since replaced with a smaller ground-level terrace. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Another innovation were the so-called ‘scissors maisonettes’ – split-level flats which maximised accommodation space by reducing the internal area required for access and allowed flexible dual-aspect lay-outs to best exploit varied sites and orientations. (2)  From the front door, you’d walk up (or down) one flight of stairs to the kitchen and living room and another to reach the toilet, bathroom and airing cupboard. Then, one level above or below, lay the two bedrooms and a final short flight of stairs to a fire exit.

Conversely, the Estate also reflected the emergent trend to rehabilitate, rather than demolish, older properties where they could be converted into decent homes.   On the Pepys Estate, this took a particularly ambitious and imaginative form in the conversion of two former naval rum warehouses on the waterfront.

A contemporary image of the converted rum warehouses; Aragon Tower to the rear

In all, 65 small flats were provided here but, at a construction cost of £3600 each (three foot thick walls didn’t make the job easy), these were always intended to be let at higher rents and their residents remained aloof from the wider estate.  A sailing club, intended for local youngsters and now closed, and a branch library, still open, were also incorporated into the buildings.

From the GLC brochure,a view of the Estate from the north. The three tower blocks, Daubeney, Eddystone and Aragon, can be seen from left to right, the converted rum warehouses at the front left and the since demolished Limberg House at front centre. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

As importantly, there was a real effort made to harness for the first time the advantages of the Estate’s magnificent location:

The barrier of industries and warehouses which has long separated Deptford from the river has been broken and amongst the features of the estate quayside gardens and a promenade along the riverwall are to be provided. Many of the new homes command fine views along the river from Tower Bridge to Greenwich Naval College including London’s dockland.

Other reminders of the site’s heritage were also acquired and converted:  The Terrace, a four-storey terrace of seven Georgian homes then occupied by the Naval Film Unit and The Colonnade, two-storey buildings which formed the original entrance to the Royal Victoria Yard.

A contemporary image of The Terrace; remaining walkways linking Bembridge House and Harmon House can be seen to the rear left.

Contemporary images of The Colonnade with Aragon Tower to the rear

Modern construction comprised ten interconnected eight-storey blocks and three twenty-four-storey tower blocks.  Here’s the ‘concrete jungle’ that some of you may be looking for but it’s worth reiterating the humanity and ideals which informed its building.

The blocks themselves were traditionally built and, beside some teething difficulties to be expected, experienced few of the problems associated with their system-built counterparts of the day. Old peoples’ dwellings were located conveniently close to the shopping centre.  Larger family dwellings were placed in lower blocks with ‘as few children as possible’ to be ‘accommodated in the tower blocks’.  A supervised playgroup was offered in Daubeney Tower for its children and those of the other blocks.

From the GLC Brochure: ‘For the children who do live in Daubeney Tower or nearby blocks a supervised playgroup has been organised…Even this cannot escape maritime influence’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

There was room to play elsewhere – ‘a large children’s area with ball court, paddling pool and other play facilities’ according to the brochure and ‘quiet green squares’ formed by ‘the grouping of the lower buildings’.  In all, there were 12.5 acres of open space – almost one-third of the Estate as a whole.  This was a far-cry from the densely-packed slum terraces that this scheme and others like it replaced (although it’s only fair to say that the docks nearby provided more adventurous play-space for many).

Children from the Estate playing at the nearby docks

It was a popular place to move to with homes and facilities far better than those the vast majority of its new residents had previously known.  Even the tower blocks which we’ve been taught to despise (unless we belong to the affluent middle class, of course, for whom they can provide the most prestigious addresses) were popular with most.

Fiona, living as a child in a corner flat on the tenth floor of Aragon Tower (next to the river), may have been luckier than most but she remembers the light and air and river views she enjoyed then which she misses to this day.  We romanticise those old terraces – squalid and dirty before they ever became des res’s – and forget some of the pleasures of multi-storey living.

We’re very clever and knowing about the alleged mistakes of the past but a little humbleness is called for.  We might, firstly, properly recognise the principles and care that were applied to the Estate’s planning and construction.  We should acknowledge, secondly, how much was achieved. Both were rewarded in 1967 by a Civic Trust Award granted in recognition of ‘its impeccable design’.

From the GLC brochure: ‘The grouping of the lower buildings allows quiet green squares to be formed’. © Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre and used with their permission

Finally, in twenty or thirty years’ time, we can look back on the mistakes we’re currently making.  Some may already be obvious. The design standards of many modern private homes (certainly those deemed most ‘affordable’) are often far below those of their past and present local authority equivalents.  Other apparent mistakes will reflect a changed conventional wisdom challenging that which we take for granted today.  And some will result from changing circumstances; in other words, the context and lived realities of ordinary lives which are ignored in so much of what passes as analysis of council housing.

The next post will look at what went wrong or – to be more accurate – at how far things changed and why but I’m leaving this week’s post on (no pun intended) a high note.  Back in 1966, the prestige and respectability of council housing ambitions were recognised, in Deptford, by the formal opening of the Pepys Estate by Lord Mountbatten.

This red-letter day was marred for the occupants of the flat chosen for the ceremony.  Charles Hayward couldn’t get time off work – he was dead busy at the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society where he worked as an undertaker; his brother was ill with flu but, hopefully, not about to add to his workload.  Charles’ wife, Florence, had to cope with the stream of visitors alone.(3)

Mountbatten dedicated the Estate to ‘the peaceful enjoyment and well-being of Londoners’.   Worthy but challenging ideals in hard times, we’ll see how far they were fulfilled next week.

Sources

(1) Greater London Council, The Pepys Estate – a GLC Housing Project (1969)

(2) For more on ‘scissors’ design, please go the excellent description provided by Single Aspect who’s also written informatively on the Pepys Estate and his personal experience of living on the estate.

(3) ‘Lord Mountbatten at Deptford Home of the Navy’, South London Press, 13 July 1966

I’m very grateful to the excellent Lewisham Local History and Archive Centre for their permission to use images from the GLC brochure in their possession.