The Chinbrook Estate, Lewisham: a ‘tremendous improvement in environment and standard of living’

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1960s, Lewisham

We’re looking at ‘Corporation suburbia’ – less eye-catching and less controversial than the high-rise which disproportionately grabs people’s attention when it comes to public housing but actually its most representative form.  A small corner of south-east London helps us tell this story.  Last week’s post looked at the Grove Park Estate, one of the best of the ubiquitous interwar cottage suburbs.  This week’s focuses on the Chinbrook Estate, planned by the London County Council from 1961 and completed by the Greater London Council after 1965, representing, in my view, one of the most attractive and thoughtfully designed post-war estates.

‘Chinbrook Estate, Grove Park: residential tenements’ (1967) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Last week, we left Lewisham and the country in 1939 about to be plunged into war.  The Borough, industrial to the north but with extensive residential districts on the bombers’ flightpaths, suffered more than most.  Of Lewisham’s 56,000 homes, 10,303 were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by enemy action; almost 9000 further were seriously damaged but judged habitable.  By November 1945, there were 11,945 families on the Council housing waiting list of whom 4541 had been rendered homeless by the Blitz. (1)

The first duty of central and local government was to alleviate the unprecedented housing crisis.  A crash programme of repairs was an immediate priority, beginning before the war’s end.  The Council reckoned that, at peak between 1944 and 1946, 6400 ‘workmen’ (and perhaps a few ‘workwomen’ at this time) were repairing the Borough’s war-damaged homes. (2)

As of March 1947, 3806 private houses had been requisitioned, providing homes now for around 5000 households.  Conservative legislation in 1955 ended councils’ requisitioning powers and required properties be returned to their owners by 1960.  Many of the almost 1400 properties held by Lewisham into the late 1950s were purchased by the Council. (3)

The housing crisis provoked less official responses too. As part of a national wave of squatting action, 30 huts on an anti-aircraft site in Blackheath were occupied by homeless families in September 1946 and 19 huts next to Ravensbourne Station, formerly in military use, shortly after. The Council laid on water and electricity and provided ‘sanitary conveniences’.  Twenty-one military huts on a site at Hilly Fields in Brockley were officially allocated to the Council.  Some 125 wooden ‘hutments’, built to last two years, were also built in the Borough.

The other major element of the emergency response were the prefabricated bungalows – factory-built, rapidly erected, planned to provide modern, well-equipped family homes for an anticipated ten-year life-span.  The 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act committed £150m to the programme which ended in March 1949 and a total of 156,623 prefab homes were erected across the country, allocated to local authorities according to housing need.

A Lewisham prefab; this one was sited on Marnock Road in Brockley (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Lewisham’s needs were pressing and a total of 1484 prefabs – 660 by the LCC and 824 by the local council – were provided across the Borough on 70 separate sites.  One of the largest – and certainly the most persistent of those – was the Excalibur Estate; 187 homes built on former parkland to the north of the LCC’s Downham Estate. Here and elsewhere in Lewisham, most were of the Uni-Seco Mark I and Mark III type, constructed of resin-bonded plywood or light timber framing clad in flat asbestos cement sheeting with a wood wool core.  A small number were of the steel-framed Arcon Mark V model.

Kingsley Wood Drive, Coldharbour Estate (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

Permanent post-war reconstruction was marked by Nye Bevan’s opening of the first new home in Woolwich’s Coldharbour Estate in July 1947, built to the east on the last remaining farmland within the LCC’s borders.  It comprised around 1700 homes on completion in the mid-1950s.

Meanwhile, the prefabs remained.  One of their largest sites – with around 209 homes – was an area of farmland between Grove Park Road and Marvels Lane acquired by the LCC.  They seem to have provided decent homes and for children – with a recreation ground, Chinbrook Meadows and the River Quaggy close to hand – a happy childhood. (4)  As they grew up, the Chinbrook pub (later the Grove Park Tavern) on the opposite corner offered more grown-up entertainment. The pub was demolished in the 1990s, replaced by retirement flats (though, confusingly for newcomers, the local bus stop retains the name).

Those prefabs were demolished in the early 1960s. In their place, the LCC projected and the GLC completed an attractive, predominantly low-rise estate – a modest, small estate at first glance but one which in its own terms was a state-of-the-art fulfilment of the latest planning and architectural thinking.  The Chinbrook Estate deserves a closer look.

‘Grove Park Youth Club: exterior’ (1966) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Firstly, the 1961 plans show sites set aside for a youth club and an old people’s clubroom.  The great criticism of the earlier (and much larger) cottage suburbs had been their lack of community facilities, their dormitory feel.  Here, a conscious attempt was made from the outset to provide social amenities which would support community and local identity. (We’ll come back to this.)

‘Chinbrook Estate: residential tenements’ (1968) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

‘Chinbrook Estate, Grove Park Road: residential tenements’ (1967) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

The estate’s pedestrianised layout wasn’t innovative – Radburn-style plans (which separated cars and pedestrians by a system of cul-de-sacs, feeder roads and walkways) had been recommended in the Ministry of Housing’s 1953 Manual.  But, on a smaller estate such as the Chinbrook, with garaging and parking spaces reasonably integrated with the housing, they seem to have worked better though they look neglected at present. Those 1961 plans which allocated parking to around half the estate’s households must also have seemed pretty forward-looking at the time in their anticipation of a more affluent and car-owning working class.

To the left: ‘Chinbrook Estate, Grove Park Road: residential tenements’ (1967) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk. To the right, a contemporary image of the same block, Kingsfield House, from the rear (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

The mixed development which Chinbrook embodies – a range of housing types and forms to suit a varied mix of households – was also an established concept by the early sixties but the estate provides an impressive cameo.  There are two eleven-storey point blocks – Merryfield House to the north next to Grove Park Road and, tucked away in the south-east corner of the estate, Kingsfield House, together comprising 177 of the estate’s 395 homes.

Homes on Lambscroft Avenue (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

These are attractive blocks in landscaped grounds, ‘in keeping’ with the wider estate and a fine fulfilment of mixed development’s aesthetic ideals.  The rest of the Estate comprised some 218 two-storey terraced houses which provided family accommodation while low-rise flats were built for couples without children and elderly people.

What was exceptional – and what is even clearer from the early photographs of the Estate before the depredations of Right to Buy – is the overall architectural and design quality of the Estate.  It’s an intimate space on a human scale with its mix of homes and its footpaths, service roads and open spaces forming an integrated whole.  In contemporary terms, placemaking is the prized ideal.  The built environment of the Estate and its cherished community facilities seem, to me, to fulfil this ideal.  As the mass rehousing drive of the sixties took off – on a scale and in a form often much criticised since – Chinbrook is a reminder of the best that might be achieved with proper investment and careful planning.

‘Chinbrook Estate: completed housing development’ (1963) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

That was certainly the belief of the Civic Trust who commended the Estate in 1967. In their words: (5):

The elevations have been consistently and simply handled in red brick and white shiplap boarding forming a pleasant and bright background to the well-proportioned pedestrian ways and squares formed by the layout. The landscaping, both hard and soft, is well detailed and has been carried through with functional simplicity. The design, heights and interrelated use of screen brick walls and railings very successfully interplay enclosure and openness as one walks through the area.

As a reminder that even the best estates need continued upkeep and investment, we might note the regret they also recorded that ‘the high standard of detailing in the landscape has been rendered widely ineffective by poor maintenance’ but the favourable comparison with the nearby and more traditional cottage estates remained.  Chinbrook illustrated:

the tremendous improvement in environment and standard of living which results through the segregated layout, open-space amenities, well-proportioned pedestrian streets and effective landscaping, compared with the front access and unsympathetic layouts of the earlier housing estates adjacent.

Kingsfield House and flats along Lambscroft Avenue (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

The Greater London Council’s justifiable pride in the Estate was shown when Chinbrook was selected – alongside two other GLC showpieces of the day, the Pepys Estate and Thamesmead – for a visit by delegates of the Housing Centre’s annual conference in 1969. (6)  The Estate was also featured in a celebration of the Council’s work, GLC Architecture 1965/70, published in 1970.  The latter reminds us too – as housing responsibilities within the capital itself were increasingly devolved to the new London boroughs – of the GLC’s housing schemes in the expanded and overspill towns of the later 1960s, many of which resembled Chinbrook in form and ethos.

The Span estate of Corner Green, Blackheath (c) Twentieth Century Society

Another significant point of comparison is with the much admired Span housing of the period.  Span was a private property development company formed in the late 1950s by Geoffrey Townsend and the architect Eric Lyons which built around 2000 homes in London and the Home Counties with some of its most notable schemes in nearby Blackheath.  These were homes intended, in the company’s own words, ‘to span the gap between the suburban monotony of the typical speculative development and the architecturally designed, individually built residence that has become (for all but a few) financially unattainable’.(7)

The genius of Span was to combine modernist design – open plan interiors, large windows, flat roofs – with traditionally more ‘suburban’ features in the use of brick, tile-hung walls and timber panelling. Of equal importance was a setting designed ‘hand-in-hand with the design of the dwelling’, integrating roads, car parks, play spaces and aspiring to create ‘an ambience and scale hitherto unknown in housing for ordinary people’. (8)

Mirror Path

That, to me, is strongly reminiscent of both the design and ambition of the Chinbrook Estate – with one key difference.  Span’s ‘ordinary people’ were aspiring professionals whereas one of the earliest residents of Chinbrook (who had moved from a post-war prefab) recalls that ‘most of [its] families were young and came from New Cross, Deptford, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Blackfriars and other inner London suburbs’ – hence, it was said, the huge support for Millwall on the Estate. (9)  I’m guessing that no-one liked Millwall on the Span estates.

Old people’s bungalows (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

I can’t trace any direct association between Span and the GLC’s schemes and, unfortunately, I can’t name the individual architects and planners directly responsible for the Chinbrook Estate.  With the public service ethos strong, the Estate is credited more collegiately to the GLC’s Department of Architecture and Civic Design; KJ Campbell, was Principal Housing Architect at the time. (10)

By the 1980s, public service had become – in the mind-set of the governing Conservative Party at least – a discredited concept.  Right to buy was a deliberate attempt to break up and shake up council estates and its legacy is plain to see on the Chinbrook Estate. The quality of Span’s middle-class housing is preserved by covenant; no such restrictions have conserved the design sensibilities and architectural consistency of Chinbrook.

The effects of Right to Buy

There’s no snobbery at all in decrying the fashion for pebbledash and other such accretions which seems to have afflicted many of the newly owner-occupied homes in the 1980s.  In fact, even in market terms, one can’t help but think that the value of that private housing would be enhanced had the overall look and ‘feel’ of the Estate been better maintained. Ironically, the fittings and fixtures in the communal areas of the tower blocks have been superbly preserved and provide a wonderful glimpse of in-situ 1960s modernism.

Images (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

We’ll give the current landlords of what we must now call the Estate’s social housing some credit for that although – from my talks with local residents – there is little affection for London and Quadrant (L & Q) in general.  A ‘large-scale voluntary transfer’ of some 1099 council properties and 350 leasehold in Chinbrook and adjoining Grove Park estates took place in 2008.  On a 55 per cent turn-out, 77 per cent of those balloted, supported the transfer from the council to the housing association.  It was, as was the way, an offer that was hard to refuse.  Decent homes upgrades were required by law, security and environmental improvements were desired by residents, and Lewisham – in common with other councils – was denied the necessary public funds to carry out the work.

L & Q, which now owns and manages around 70,000 homes in London and the South-East, is now the largest landlord in the capital.  It’s also one of the most aggressively entrepreneurial of the new breed of housing associations, self-described as ‘one of [London’s] largest residential property developers’. It’s small wonder, then, that parts of the Chinbrook Estate might look and feel somewhat neglected.  The shine of that promised investment rapidly dissipated.

‘Chinbrook Estate: exterior of clubroom’ (1968) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

Typically, given the drive to monetise assets, one of L & Q’s first actions was to demolish the old people’s clubroom.  The Estate’s ageing population now has to attend a nearby general purpose community centre.  The superb building has been replaced by two plain and undistinguished semi-detached houses which make little reference to surrounding architecture.

The youth centre today (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

The purpose built youth centre on Marvels Road was closed by Lewisham Council in 2013 and residents fear that it could be demolished and the land sold for housing.  It has been neglected since this closure but, look more closely, remember its past and imagine its future, and you will see an outstanding community facility.  It was designed for the LCC’s Education Department by some of the most distinguished public architects of its day and created as an adaptable and flexible space incorporating the ideals and practices of some of the key architectural movements of the twentieth century.

‘Grove Park Youth Club: interior’ (1966) (c) London Metropolitan Archives, collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk

With a design eye, you’ll see the influence of the Bauhaus movement and its credo ‘truth to materials’; you’ll see too the ‘people’s detailing’ of Swedish modernism.  As a local resident, you might remember the centre as a community hub – not only a valued resource for the young people of the estate but, as I was told, a regular venue for wedding receptions and many other community functions.

But, ultimately, this isn’t about architecture (though the loss of such a fine building would be criminal) and still less is it about nostalgia.  This is about a facility which is needed by local children and teens and which could, in the imaginative but highly practical plans of the community group campaigning to save it, serve the wider community in many ways. (11)

Charlesfield (c) www.robclayton.co.uk

When the Chinbrook Estate was built five decades ago, the GLC – as a progressive and innovative council – took care not only to provide good homes and a decent environment but also the amenities to support and sustain community. Such values have been eroded and the reforming role of local government disastrously curtailed.  Nowadays, it seems we must fight these battles again.

Sources

My thanks to Rob Clayton for his guided tour of the Estate and his photographs.

Thanks again to the London Metropolitan Archives for permission to use images from Collage, their wonderful on-line picture archive.

(1) Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham, Housing: Report of the Housing Committee on the Post-War Housing Activities of the Council up to 31 March 1947

(2) The Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham: the Official Guide of Lewisham Borough Council (1948)

(3) The Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham: the Official Guide of Lewisham Borough Council (1958)

(4) Various recollections of the Mottingham prefabs can be found on the Francis Frith site here and here.

(5) Civic Trust Awards, ‘Chinbrook Estate, Lewisham/Bromley’ (log-in required)

(6) ‘Conference Study Tour, 9th July 1969, to Thamesmead, Pepys and Chinbrook Housing Estates’, Housing Review, vol 18, no 3, September-October 1969. (The Housing Centre Trust was a voluntary organisation which acted as a meeting ground for organisations and individuals engaged in housing and as an information centre on housing issues.)

(7) Quoted in Modern Architecture London, ‘Span Blackheath’

(8) Eric Lyons quoted in Barbara Simms, ‘Landscape Conservation on Span Estates’, Landscapes of the Recent Future: Conserving the 20th Century’s Landscape Design Legacy, Docomo E-proceedings April 20101

(9) ‘Paragonslate’ comment on Francis Frith, ‘Mottingham Prefabs: a Memory of Mottingham’

(10) One little known fact is that Eric Lyons adopted a lot of standardised building components for Span schemes which were originally developed by Oliver Cox for the LCC which then commissioned their manufacture by private companies. My thanks to Tom Cordell of Utopia London for this information (personal communication, 13 February 2017).

(11) You can read more of these plans in An Alternative Plan for Grove Park Youth Centre: A Community-Led Plan to Regenerate Grove Park and should visit the website of the Grove Park Youth Club Building Preservation Trust set up to save the youth club for further information on the campaign.

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The Grove Park Estate, Lewisham: ‘a real “Garden City”‘

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1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, Lewisham

In 1928, Southern Railway advised ‘there is so much open country all around Grove Park that no one need fear for the present it is going to become a part of London’. (1)  This was ironic given that its book was intended to promote the growth of suburbia (and lucrative commuterdom) on London’s fringes. It was also dishonest given that London County Council’s Downham Estate – over 6000 homes when completed in 1930 – was being built just to the west of Grove Park station.

‘The London County Council Downham Estate from the south-east, 1929’ (c) Britain from Above, EPW028496  (Grove Park station is on the bridge on the right edge of the image.)

Speculative housing built for middle-class owner-occupation did spread rapidly but the remarkable feature of this area of south-east London – for the purposes of this blog at least – is its swathe of what Martin Crookston has called ‘Corporation suburbia’. It stretches west to east, almost uninterrupted, from Downham itself to Lewisham’s interwar Grove Park Estate, to the GLC’s 1960s’ Chinbrook Estate, to the LCC’s 1930s’ Mottingham Estate, and finally Woolwich Council’s Coldharbour Estate, begun in 1947.

Beaconsfield Road, Mottingham Estate (c) Rob Clayton

A brisk 45-minute, two and a half mile walk provides a potted history of a form of housing – the garden suburbs – that, by Crookston’s reckoning, accounts for around one-sixth of English homes and some 40 per cent of the country’s current socially-owned housing stock. Here this amounts to over 11,000 homes.

This post and the next will concentrate on a smaller area and two of the smaller estates – Grove Park, a fine example of interwar planning and construction, and the unsung but remarkable Chinbrook Estate, one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished estates of the 1960s.

Lewisham Metropolitan Borough Council was securely Conservative throughout the interwar period and its housing efforts were modest. There had been short-lived plans, instigated by Deptford Borough Council and in cooperation with Bermondsey, for a jointly-owned ‘garden city’ on land owned by Lord Northbrook in Lewisham. Lewisham withdrew its support in 1920 and the plans fell through. Later the land was acquired by the LCC and would form the basis of the Downham Estate. (3)

Romborough Gardens

Lewisham’s contribution to the ‘Homes for Heroes’ drive of the immediate post-war era was limited therefore but it did build a small estate of 86 houses – solid, stripped-down neo-Georgian, two-storey terraces – under the terms of the 1919 Housing Act in Romborough Way, near Lewisham Park.  The short cul-de-sac and enclosed green of Romborough Gardens forms a particularly attractive enclave.

In February 1925, the Public Health Committee, alarmed by the Medical Officer of Health’s reports of increased overcrowding in the Borough, passed on its concerns to the Housing Committee. The latter identified a 43 acre site, east of Grove Park, as suitable for building. It had been bought speculatively by a local builder from Lord Northbrook in 1923 for £3600. In July 1926 it was acquired by the Council by Compulsory Purchase Order for an arbitrated price of £8825 – almost two and a half times what Mr Durbin had paid for it three years earlier. A reminder of how land values and the market distort our housing provision and how readily private interest profits from public need.

Grove Park Estate layout (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Building on the site, undertaken by three local contractors, began in August. Eight acres were set aside as a recreation ground and 1.5 acres for allotments. A site was provided to the LCC for a new primary school; the rest was allocated to housing.  And to its credit, the Council determined to build well; to erect ‘the best possible type of house that could be provided in a municipal undertaking’ and at the largest size permitted under the 1924 Housing Act.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

It appointed the eminent architect-planner WR Davidge – an early supporter of the Garden City movement, elected President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1926 – to design the Estate. Davidge’s pedigree is first seen in the use of existing topography – an undulating terrain which added, in the words of a Council brochure, ‘a pleasing feature to the general appearance’ of the new estate’.  Moreover: (4)

In the preservation of some of the old trees on the estate and the green in Roseveare Road, and more particularly by encouraging the cultivation and upkeep of the gardens, the Council have endeavoured to ensure that the Estate shall become a real ‘Garden City’.

An annual best-kept garden competition with a victory shield and prizes provided some of that encouragement; the rent collector’s weekly visit possibly provided some discipline. As Pauline Payne, who moved onto the Estate as a child in 1939, recalls, if he spotted an untidy garden or a hedge that needed cutting, ‘you would get a polite notice reminding you of the conditions of your tenancy agreement and a certain time limit to put things right’. (5)

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

Davidge also ensured that the housing was of pleasing and varied appearance – as many as six types on a single street, it was said.  With justifiable pride, it seems, the Council concluded that:

The completed estate has the merit of combining convenience in the planning of roads, spacious and well-appointed houses and harmony in the design and conception of the whole.  Roofed with red hand-made sandfaced tiles, the walls of the houses have generally been externally dressed with cement left rough from the plasterer’s float and treated with various shades of colour wash. Doorsteps, window sills and chimney stacks have been carried out in purple and red facing bricks, which blend with the colour of the roofs.

In terms of accommodation, two blocks of what the Council called ‘storey flats’ provided 32 of the Estate’s homes but the bulk were solid three-bedroom houses; 136 of the so-called Type B with parlours and 336 Type A, non-parlour.  Internal arrangements included, to modern eyes, perhaps some surprising mod cons.  Pauline Payne noted an ‘enormous walk-in airing cupboard on the landing’, cupboards under the stairs and, either side of front door, a walk-in cloakroom and a walk-in larder.

An early image of the Grove Park Estate (c) Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre

In the first phase of construction, gas provided lighting for both housing and streets.  In the second, electricity was used – the first streets in the Borough to be lit by electricity.  In other respects, arrangements were much more of their time although still, presumably, a vast improvement to most new residents.

Pauline Payne describes ‘a large iron pot-bellied copper in the kitchen [which] provided hot water for the whole house’. The bathroom (‘absolutely freezing in winter’) was next door to the kitchen with hot water ladled by hand from copper to bath.  The toilet stood next to the back door.

Mayeswood Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

Payne’s experience was, as she recognises, perhaps exceptional.  She was an only child (she recalls families of eight and thirteen children living either side of her new home in Cobham Street) of lower middle-class parents. The family moved to the estate when their own home was bombed and her first impressions were, perhaps for that reason, underwhelming:

Upon getting the keys for our first sight of our new home was gloomy indeed as the whole house was painted chocolate brown.  For years we had to live with that colour…and even after the war the council only varied the colour to bottle green.

This was the other side of municipal housing – the dull uniformity it could sometimes impose on its residents.

Public transport was poor in those days as well and local shopping limited but she has happier memories too – Chinbrook Meadows nearby (declared a public park in 1929) were ‘a paradise for children’; the tunnel under the nearby railway another play spot.

Leafy Oak Road, Grove Park Estate, contemporary image

By 1939, Lewisham could declare proudly that the borough was ‘notably progressive in the matter of Housing’.  In terms of numbers, the Council had provided 558 houses and 211 flats (in 1930 60 flats were built in five blocks – since demolished – along Winchfield Road in Lower Sydenham).  This was a relatively small number but, in general, the standard was high. (6)

The war which broke out in 1939 would change much.  Its destruction forced the Borough and the capital to build on unprecedented scale.  A new politics emerged too, one that – for a time at least – placed the needs of the country’s working class to the fore.  We’ll see both play out in next week’s post.

Sources

My thanks to the Grove Park Community Group and John King for generously supplying some of the historical information within this post.  John King’s history of the area provides more detail.

My thanks also to Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre for providing additional useful resources and for permission to reproduce some images from their collection.

(1) Southern Railway, Country Homes at London’s Door (2nd ed, 1928)

(2) Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow?  A New Future for the Cottage Estates (Routledge, 2016)

(3) John King, Grove Park Revisited (2011)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham, Grove Park Housing Estate (ND – probably 1929)

(5) Pauline Payne, A Council House Kid, 1939-1957: Growing Up at Grove Park (typescript manuscript, ND, Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre)

(6) The Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham: the Official Guide of Lewisham Borough Council (1939)

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

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.

The Honor Oak Estate, Lewisham: ‘the forgotten estate’

Tags

LCC, Lewisham, Regeneration

We left the Honor Oak Estate last week, perhaps as oppressed by the inequality and constraints that have marked the lives of our poorer citizens as by Nazi bombs.  1945 brought the defeat of Hitler; the struggle to achieve decent conditions for all our people would be longer-fought.  In this and for the new generation of planners, the Estate would feature as a warning of what to avoid.  The ‘neighbourhood units’ and ‘mixed developments’ favoured – in principle rather better than in practice – in the post-war years were a conscious reaction to the design failings of interwar council estates, of which Honor Oak was taken to be a prime example. (1)

Barville Close

The General Election of 1945 saw a Labour landslide and a shift, it seems, in the politics and identity of the Estate too: ‘After the war we all went voting for Labour’, largely, as remembered, through the efforts of one party activist. ‘And it was only Mr Cooper who did it.  He went round this estate, “Vote for Labour”. He got everybody out’. (2)  I hope that gives heart to some of you pounding the pavements.

In a poignant turn of phrase, another resident recalls:

They had what was called the Labour Party then.  They used to come round and collect our money each week and see what could be done.  The majority of the estate was in it and it was that man who came round collecting who got all our action otherwise we had got nobody.

How you read that particular account will depend on your politics.

More concretely, additional shops and a pub arrived in 1948 – the pub, the Golden Dragon, in the ground floor of a new housing block.  (It closed in 2009 and the building has been demolished.)

The former Golden Dragon pub just prior to demolition © Oxyman, Wikimedia Commons

There were other changes too.  The first black and ethnic minority residents, mainly of African-Caribbean origin, moved into the area in the sixties and racial tensions were strong.  Nesta Wright and her three young children moved on to the Estate in 1970.

Her son Ian, seven at the time, remembers a difficult childhood and a struggle against the racial bigotry and antagonism that sought to hold him back.  Fortunately, he met a teacher at the Estate’s Turnham Primary School – ‘my mentor and my major, main man’, he says – who made the difference (as good teachers can).  Let’s hear it for that teacher, Sidney Pigden, and Ian Wright of Arsenal and England. (3)

These tensions dissipated only slowly.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation instigated a ‘Partnership Initiatives for Communities’ (PICs) project on the Estate in 1998.  At a time when about half the residents were of black African and African Caribbean heritage, the project found little contact between them and their white neighbours and a sense that an older-established and more conservative white community monopolised community facilities.

Ironically, these ‘rival’ groups actually shared similar concerns and problems and both felt that the Estate was neglected and its people disrespected: (4)

The way the council looks at people on the estate, their perception of the people they are housing reflects the service that we are given. Most of them think we are brain dead.”

“Sometimes you go in to the council office and as soon as you say you are from Honor Oak you can see what they are thinking.

In fact, the Estate was subject to a plethora of initiatives.  Some of the flats, particularly those of the ‘modified type’ which shared bathrooms, had been rehabilitated in the early post-war period and later the railway line on the western border of the Estate was replaced by Coston Walk, a new low-rise scheme of flats and maisonettes built by the Greater London Council in 1970.

Coston Walk

But still, the Estate’s troubles and a sense of isolation continued: (5)

Hopelessly out-dated and lacking in facilities by modern standards, cramped and comfortless, the flats were fair game for vandals, their tenants discontented and demoralised.

When the Estate was transferred from the Greater London Council to Lewisham in 1971, the Borough declared it a General Improvement Area and major refurbishment followed.  In Skipton House, for example, one of the last to be renovated, forty flats were replaced by 28 with larger rooms, fitted kitchens and bathrooms and new gas heating at a cost of around £10,000 a unit.  Lifts were added and landscaping improved but the finishing touch was to invite Ideal Home to decorate a show flat.  This was the 1970s so naturally there was Laura Ashley wallpaper in the hallway.

The 1977 History I’ve quoted from, published by the Honor Oak Estate Neighbourhood Association, was another conscious attempt to support and strengthen the Estate’s community:

The writers of this book also want to let the authorities know how much better the estate was managed and serviced in the past. Thus they hope to create improvements.

Such improvements were promised and partially fulfilled when Lewisham opted to participate in the Department of Environment’s Priority Estates Project in 1980 – one of twenty across the country.  The Project brought various local management initiatives and some improvements to security and the physical environment. (6)

Sulby House

These seem to have increased residents’ satisfaction with the Estate and, though Lewisham’s bid for Estate Action funding in 1992 was unsuccessful, money was found to upgrade bathrooms and heating across the Estate.  That much remained to do is clear from the three-year PICs project mentioned earlier:

I look out of my window and I see abandoned cars, kids hanging around, dog dirt everywhere. What do I want to go out for?

Honor Oak’s problems were far from unique, of course.  At this time, the residents’ complaints of ‘disaffected youth and out-of-control children, crime and vandalism, drugs and alcohol abuse’ were replicated in ‘problem estates’ nationwide.

And, likewise, underlying such problems were economic difficulties felt with peculiar force in council estates increasingly housing a poorer working class. Of the families that made up half the Estate, almost two thirds were headed by lone parents.  (No disrespect to single mothers of course but a group which can be assumed to be peculiarly disadvantaged.) Around one third of the Estate’s adults were on benefits.

To some that might seem all we need to know.  Poverty blights any community and, in this regard, the quality of the Estate itself – its housing and environment – could be taken as almost irrelevant.  The PICs focused on ‘soft regeneration’ – an attempt (in its fashionable jargon) ‘to build capacity and empower, and hopefully integrate, a fractured and excluded estate community’.  A ‘citizens’ workshop’ was held and from it emerged a multiracial steering group to represent the Estate and lobby for improvements.

Thomas Joseph House on St Norbert Road

This ‘soft regeneration’ was fortunate, however, in finding its aspirations backed by some hard cash. In 2000, the Borough Council promised £18.4 million to refurbish the ‘forgotten estate’.  The deputy mayor of Lewisham spoke with disarming honesty when he stated:  (7)

We’re finally going to do something about Honor Oak. It’s going to be the biggest programme of housing investment Lewisham has had for ten years.

Over the years that followed, of the blocks which remain, all have been modernised with new kitchens, bathrooms and toilets, double-glazing and central heating.  Externally, a visit to the Estate shows a green and pleasant and well-maintained environment.

Turnham House rear

Other initiatives accompanied and reinforced these physical improvements: in 2000 a £156,000 Home Office grant provided six wardens to patrol the Estate for a two-year period – ‘to reassure tenants, not act as security guards’, it was said, and wearing bomber jackets in a colour chosen by the residents.

In the following year, a Sure Start scheme opened; in 2003, a neighbourhood housing management centre and in 2005 a one-stop centre offering a range of services and support.  Honor Oak’s first neighbourhood manager was one of the three unemployed single mothers who had joined the first steering group.  The neighbourhood association is now said to be a diverse and representative organisation.  Even that security team and the local police beat officers won awards.  Either the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are brilliant self-publicists or something went right.

Honor Oak Medical Centre, Turnham Road © Malc McDonald and made available under a Creative Commons licence

We can agree that money alone is not enough – but we might also conclude that it sure does help. The longer history of the Honor Oak Estate shows that the social costs of building cheaply far outweigh any short-term financial savings.  The story is of catch-up and always, from the outset, exclusion – that buzz-word does capture something here. On the other hand, while money can’t create community, investment in its infrastructure certainly supports it. For the time being, the parting words of the residents’ history contain a plaintive truth that I can’t express better:

Why is it that housing continues to be geared more towards costs than the needs of the people?

Sources

(1) Ruth Glass and LE White, A Warning to Planners: the Story of Honor Oak Estate (1945)

(2) Maybe this was Fred Cooper of Revelon Road. He’s listed as the secretary of the local Clarion Cycling Club – a socialist organisation – in the 1930s by Hayes People’s History. Does anyone know for sure?

(3) See Rick Glanvill, The Wright Stuff (2012) and ‘Passed/failed: An education in the life of Ian Wright, footballer and broadcaster’, The Independent, 20 March 2008, from which the quotation is drawn.

(4) David Page, Respect and Renewal. A study of neighbourhood social regeneration, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2006)

(5) ‘Design for Living Honor Oak’, Ideal Home, May 1978, vol 115, no 5

(6) Anne Power, Running to Stand Still. Progress in local management on twenty unpopular housing estates, Priority Estates Project (PEP), 1991

(7) Vicky Wilkes, ‘£18.4 million package for “forgotten estate”’, Mercury, 23 February 2000

The Honor Oak Estate, Lewisham: ‘A warning for planners’

Tags

1930s, Lewisham

To some, the Honor Oak Estate is better known as Tenement Town, one of the London County Council’s largest interwar block estates and one of its worst.  Criticised for its location, its facilities (or lack of them) and for its low standard of design, it became ‘A Warning for Planners’ – an example of what to avoid as rehousing efforts redoubled after the Second World War. (1)

Greenwood House and Foreman House

The LCC acquired the 30-acre site in Brockley, divided between the Metropolitan Boroughs of Deptford and Lewisham, in 1932. Construction of what would become a 27 block, 1104 dwelling estate began shortly after.  The context – you’ll know this by now if you’ve been following the blog – was two-fold: one, the acceptance that in inner London there was little alternative but to build flats for those who needed to be near work and couldn’t afford the expense of the cottage suburbs and, two, the 1930’s drive against slums and overcrowding.

Foreman House front

Foreman House rear

In Honor Oak, 725 of the tenements were allocated to those displaced by slum clearance and 378 for those moved through overcrowding. (2)  Typically, this predominantly poorer working class could not afford council rents.  The solution for the Municipal Reform Party (the Conservatives in a London municipal guise) was to build more cheaply and thus rent more affordably.

Four of the early blocks were of the so-called ‘Modified Type B’.  These were around one fifth cheaper to build with rents reduced to match and represented, according to an LCC minute: (3)

a successful endeavour to provide suitable hygienic accommodation for the poorer classes at a substantially lower rent than that charged for accommodation of the ‘normal’ type.

‘Suitable’ in this context meant a shared washhouse (fitted with bath, copper and sink) between every three flats.  There were other economies too – stained, rather than painted, woodwork and unplastered walls in hallways and kitchens, smaller rooms, and ceilings lowered six inches to a height of 8 feet. (4)

One of the next blocks built, Turnham House, had baths in the kitchen.  A resident allocated to Turnham had the good fortune to meet the local postman on her way to inspect the flat: she took his advice to move instead to Kentwell House – nicknamed ‘the Mayfair block’ as all its flats had their own bathroom.

In 1934, Labour took control of the LCC and moved quickly to drop the so-called ‘modified’ tenements.  But Honor Oak suffered other disadvantages, not least its location – bounded on north, east and west by the Southern Railway and on the south by a cemetery – and split between two local authorities.

This isolation was compounded by the lack of community facilities.  The Estate’s harshest critic was scathing about this: (5)

Removed from all their own associations – from their neighbours and friends, their favourite pubs and cinemas, from the whole environment in which they had grown and to which they had adapted themselves – the people were left to their own resources, and had practically none.

Elsewhere, Len White wrote – with unconscious if compassionate condescension – that ‘the Honor Oak Estate, far from raising the standards and developing the capacities of its erstwhile slum tenants, has stunted their social development’. (6)

Turnham House and shops

Those tenants themselves recall ‘there was no proper road – it was all sleepers’ and, before a small terrace of shops opened on the ground floor of Turnham House, that ‘the Salvation Army used to come round with basins of soup [or] a van come round where we could buy things and pay at the end of the week’.  When those shops did open in 1936, another early resident complains ‘you couldn’t touch the prices, they were sky high.  I used to go off the estate to do my shopping’.

The Estate’s children were also badly served.  The local school was nearby – just 200 yards away – but across a closed railway footbridge which forced a circuitous mile hike to get to the school.  When the authorities relented, the footbridge was opened for just two twenty-minute periods in morning and afternoon.

The children may not have felt that welcome on arrival.  To the school’s head teacher, they stood out ‘“like red pillar boxes”…identified every time by their inferior physique, manners, speech and dress’.

Open space comprised asphalted courtyards between the blocks and one rough-surfaced playground.  Small strips of grass in front of the blocks were railed off and ‘no longer green’.  At least the Lewisham infant welfare centre was situated within one of the blocks but neighbours in Deptford had to travel a mile to reach their centre.

Some of these deficiencies were recognised.  There were plans for a community centre as early as 1938 – an ambitious £22,000 scheme to include ‘an assembly hall, dressing rooms, canteen, lecture rooms, gym and shower baths’. (7)  But the war intervened and it wasn’t until 1981 that the Honor Oak Community Centre was finally opened.

Dereham House

The social dislocation experienced by Honor Oak’s earliest residents was real enough but for middle-class observers, the problems were compounded by the character of the tenants who, having ‘lived narrow and circumscribed lives in their old environment’, were ‘deeply conservative and ill-fitted to adapt themselves to new conditions’.  There was also, it was said in an early use of the term, ‘a considerable proportion of problem families’.

Len White, the author of this commentary, was a member of a Pacifist Service Unit drafted to the Estate in 1941.  His close engagement with the Estate and commitment to its community is undoubted and yet he remains an outsider with the sensibilities of his type.

Sayer House

What is objectively the case is that on average over one in five of tenants moved out of the Estate in the years before 1939.  Those who didn’t vote with their feet, as it were, and those in particular who remained on the Estate to reminisce forty years later bring their own set of biases, of course but it’s worthwhile to honour their experience and insights too.

To one woman, her new home ‘was like a little palace. Everything was new’.  And they remember high standards, not a ‘sink’ community:

We had rules and regulations on our landing and on our rent cards. You had to have your mat swept and cleaned by 10 o clock and your balcony cleaned.  Each person did the stairs when it came to their turn.  They had to scrub them on their hands and knees but you could eat off them.

And dignity:

If somebody was getting buried, all the washing in the Square was taken down.  All the lines were taken down, both gates were opened for the hearse to come in. It was swept up early, just before the funeral. It used to be dead quiet. And everybody used to pay their respects from the balcony.

You can find your own ‘truth’ among these competing perspectives.

It was in any case a different world after 1945 and we’ll look at that history next week.

Sources

(1) This was the title of a work jointly authored by Ruth Glass and LE White in 1945, A Warning to Planners: the Story of Honor Oak Estate

(2) London County Council, London Housing (1937)

(3) Quoted in ‘A Street Door of Our Own’:  A Short History of Life on an LCC Estate by local people from the Honor Oak Estate, London (1977)

(4) JA Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918-45 (2004)

(5) LE White, Tenement Town (1946)

(6) LE White, Honor Oak Estate, A Talk to the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction, The Architects’ Journal, March 1 1945

(7) The Times 4 May 1938

The Excalibur Estate, Catford: ‘a working-class Blackheath’

Tags

1940s, Lewisham, Regeneration

By 1944, 1 million British homes had been damaged or destroyed by German bombing.  Lewisham alone had lost over 1600 dwellings in the first wave of the Blitz in 1940 and would suffer heavily again as the V1s and V2s rained over London in June 1944.  There are those in the Excalibur Estate in the borough who feel they are the victims of enemy action once more.

Back in 1944, Churchill gave his ‘word that the soldiers, when they return from the war and those who have been bombed out …shall be restored to homes of their own at the earliest possible moment.’

Hector Murdoch’s homecoming, 1946

To fulfil this pledge, the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was passed, earmarking £150m for an emergency programme of temporary housing.  Aircraft factories which, in these closing days of the European war, might move to peacetime production were tasked with the construction of prefabricated homes.

The first prototype was proudly displayed at the Tate Gallery that same year and in the four that followed 156,623 of these ‘palaces of the people’ – there was no irony in that term as we shall see – were erected across the country. They were planned as temporary housing, to last ten years at the most.

In the event, over 10,000 prefab homes remained in use in London as late as 1975. Now only some 250 remain and the largest concentration – for the time being – is in the Excalibur Estate.

The Estate was built on 12 acres of the Forster Memorial Park – an important open space for the LCC’s interwar Downham Estate – which had been transformed into allotments for the wartime Dig for Victory campaign.  (The romantic Arthurian street names of the Excalibur echo those of Downham.)

A total of 187 homes were built by German and Italian prisoners of war between 1945 and 1946.  (The pre-fab St Mark’s Church was built in the 1950s to replace the wooden hut which had been used for services previously.) All the post-war prefabs followed a strict and nationwide Ministry of Works template – single-storey, detached bungalow homes, built around a central core of kitchen, toilet and bathroom with a living room and two bedrooms.

Those on the Excalibur, manufactured by Selection Engineering Company Ltd, were of the Uni-Seco design – one of the four major types built.   Kitchen/bathroom units were pre-assembled.  The rest arrived in flat kits of resin-bonded plywood or light timber framing clad in flat asbestos cement sheeting with a wood wool core. To assemble the pieces, loose timber tongue strips were inserted between components to form the joints and filled with mastic and covered with asbestos cement. Internal walls were of the same construction, with plaster board ceilings nailed to roof beams.  (1)

If all this sounds distinctly workaday, even a little Heath Robinson, think again – as Eddie O’Mahony did.  In 1946, recently demobilised, Eddie, his wife and two children were living in a bomb-hit home. They wanted a house but, offered one of Excalibur’s prefabs, they were persuaded to give it a look: (2)

We opened the door and my wife said, ‘What a lovely big hall!  We can get the pram in here’.  There was a toilet and a bathroom. I’d been used to a toilet in the garden. The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, ‘Start measuring for the lino.’

Fitted kitchens, running hot water, built-in storage and electric lighting and sockets, a detached home of some 600 square feet with gardens – this was good quality accommodation with mod cons that, as Eddie said, ‘ordinary people didn’t have’ back then. The only, near-universal, complaint was that the homes could get cold in the winter.

A 1947 image of a prefab home’s fitted kitchen, this one in Swindon

It’s true that few would find the outward appearance of the homes impressive though English Heritage notes their ‘modernist’ look – a contrast to the ‘Neo-Georgian’ favoured in much social housing of the day.  But the Estate’s network of footpaths and intimacy of scale gives it a homely and, to some, ‘holiday village’ feel.

The layout of the Estate; the Downham Estate occupies the bottom left corner

And long-term residents describe a close-knit community, brought together both by the Estate’s design and their recent shared histories: (3)

We had all walks of life here, as people were bombed out, so you had school teachers, park keepers and there was even a solicitor. Everyone got on with each other.

But this was, of course, temporary housing –a short-term solution to a housing crisis.  Somehow the Excalibur survived and its residents liked it.  Twenty-nine of the homes have been purchased under Right to Buy; the rest are still rented from Lewisham council.

But in 2005 the Council determined that the cost of bringing the Estate up to the new Decent Homes Standard would be prohibitive.  Subject to a tenants’ ballot, the Council proposed demolition and redevelopment.

Working with its preferred partner, London & Quadrant, the Council began negotiations with residents in 2007 but met with significant opposition.  Tenants acknowledged the need for updating and refurbishment but were critical of the council neglect which, they felt, had led to current problems.

Many had spent their own money on their homes: (4)

I have spent thousands on this place. ­People ask why I bother, since I’m a council tenant, but I’m proud of this place. It’s like a country village in the summer. No one overlooks you and there’s no trouble. I call this a ­working-class Blackheath

While, to its residents, the Estate was home, to heritage specialists and architectural groups such as the Twentieth Century Society it possessed unique historical value.  These interests coalesced and won a partial victory in March 2009 when six homes on Persant Road – the least altered of the prefabs – were Grade II listed.

Defenders of the Exacalibur campaigned for the Estate as a whole to be listed.  In February 2010, a letter, said to be signed by 93 per cent of residents, was sent to the Council with this request. (5)

On the other side stood the Council and Mayor of Lewisham Steve Bullock: (6)

The listing by English Heritage was perverse…These are temporary prefabricated buildings, not architectural gems…The residents of this estate have pleaded with me and other councillors to get them out of their cold, damp, asbestos-ridden homes…I promised them I would help and that is what I have been endeavouring to do.

By June 2010, it looked as though a majority agreed.  In a ballot organised by Lewisham Council, 56 per cent of residents voted for redevelopment and 44 per cent opposed.  To critics, the result smacked of Council bullying – the veiled threat that a ‘No’ vote would lead to a policy of neglect and a restricted choice of alternative accommodation if and when the time came.

Even without the negative spin, it’s fair to say that this vote – like all ballots on ‘regeneration’ – wasn’t a free choice but a choice between unsatisfactory alternatives and, for many, an attempt to minimise the disruption that such proposals inevitably bring.

In April 2011 Lewisham Council gave final approval for demolition (save for the six listed properties) and the Greater London Authority approved the planning application for the scheme in June. By the end of the year – ‘a very successful year!’ according to the L&Q team working on the redevelopment – 11 tenants had been rehoused. (7)

As of June 2013, 28 of the prefabs were standing empty.  Currently, as some tenants resist being moved, a court case looms, no rebuilding has begun and the scheme as a whole isn’t slated to be completed until 2020.

A computer generated image of the proposed redevelopment scheme

It will comprise 371 houses and flats – in the modern way, ‘a mixture of affordable homes and additional flats and houses for sale, shared ownership and equity ownership’, and, of course, a much higher density development.

Meanwhile, the redevelopment process itself and the uncertainty it has engendered has had a desperately sad effect on the Estate: (8)

The Excalibur has a strange feel today.  The community spirit has gone, there is a feeling of animosity, people look at each other through scowling eyes. The estate has split into two irrevocable camps, with very different ideas of that they want.  The idea of saving their homes with a pot of paint and green fingers has begun to disappear.  Many residents’ homes have become dilapidated and their gardens overgrown.  For the nigh on half wanting to stay they have battened down the hatches, there is a fierce resolve to defend their homes from disagreeing neighbours, rising local crime and a council wanting to demolish their homes.

While some of the residents have dug their heels in, others are keen for the saga to be resolved and others still want to move into what should, frankly, be better quality accommodation.

Visit it while you can and make your own mind up about the pros and cons of redevelopment.  It’s hard to resist the story of the ‘little man’ (and woman) standing up for their home against bureaucracy and the state (and both the Telegraph and the Mail have featured sympathetic coverage of the saga).  And it’s undeniable that the Excalibur Estate has worked when much larger and more exciting schemes have failed.

But while there’s less romance to the planners’ arguments, their case does, nevertheless, have some merit: (9)

The proposed development would provide much needed housing and affordable accommodation and would substantially improve the living conditions of the current occupiers, whilst achieving a density which utilises the sizeable piece of land more efficiently and in line with current local and national policies and guidance.

The Prefab Museum, 17 Meliot Road

Side view

The story of Britain’s post-war prefabs is celebrated in a temporary exhibition, curated by Elisabeth Blanchet, at 17 Meliot Road on the Estate until the end of May, 2014. It records the homes of the Excalibur and others, scattered around the country – from the Isle of Lewis to Bristol and the south-west and points in-between.  The largest number – around 700 – survive in the Bristol area, 300 remain in Newport, South Wales.  Thirteen have been listed along Wake Green Road in Moseley, Birmingham. (10)

Neil Kinnock was brought up in a prefab home and can have the last word:

It was a remarkable dwelling and a piece of wonderful engineering. In order to move in, my parents had to buy new furniture and a lasting impression was cleanliness and newness. And in a sense the prefabs have never lost that feeling. With our inside bathroom and our inside toilet, and our fitted kitchen with our refrigerator, this was 1948, a fitted electric stove, fold-down table, it was a place of wonder. We used to get visitors from all over the place just to come see this amazing house.

Sources

(1) Details taken from the English Heritage listing

(2) Quoted in Ros Anderson, ‘This is my home, my little castle‘, The Guardian, 28 December 2012

(3) Quoted in Sonia Zhuravlyova, ‘Lasting memories’, Inside Housing, 21 June 2013

(4) Quoted in Robert Hardman, ‘Absolutely Prefabulous: Residents of Britain’s last prefab estate battle to save homes that were built to last only ten years’, Daily Mail, 15 January 2011

(5) As stated in the website of Jim Blackender, a leader of the residents’ campaign to preserve the Estate.

(6) Quoted in Will Storr, ‘Bulldozers home in on historic prefab estate’, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2011

(7) Newsletter for the residents of the Excalibur Estate, December 2011

(8) Nick Davis, The Last Days of Excalibur, 2011

(9) Lewisham Council Planning Committee, Report on the Excalibur Estate Regeneration Area, London SE6, 21 April 2011

(10) Elisabeth Blanchet, Prefabs: Palaces for the People Education Pack.  The quotation which follows from Neil Kinnock in conversation with Elizabeth Blanchet is taken from the same source.

Elisabeth Blanchet has been the major chronicler of Britain’s prefabs so follow the link above for more information and images.  The temporary museum has a Facebook page.

Nick Davis’ Prefab Archive is another wonderful source on the Excalibur and Wake Green Estates.

Go to Jim Blackender’s blog for the perspective of a resident fighting to save the Estate.

The Downham Estate, Lewisham: ‘the joy of having your own patch’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Cottage suburbs, LCC, Lewisham

The Downham Estate is another interwar London County Council housing estate – not the biggest or the best of its type, nor the first or the last though at least one of its early residents believed ‘it was paradise’. Maybe that’s why someone thought they should build a wall to separate it from the adjacent private development.  Maybe not.

Downham was conceived when the nation’s ambition to house its people was at its height at the end of the First World War – ‘homes for heroes’ who might otherwise, it was feared, turn a little ‘bolshie’.

A 1920 survey had found half a million Londoners living in insanitary or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation.  The LCC responded with a five-year plan to rehouse 145,000 people in 29,000 dwellings on out-of-town, cottage estates.

Under construction, 1926 © Lewisham Local History and Archives, made available under the Creative Commons licence

In the same year the LCC purchased 572 acres of land along its south-eastern border, mostly in Lewisham but including 61 acres in Bromley, then in Kent.  Construction began in 1924.  The original estate was complete by the summer of 1930.  King George V no less ceremonially opened one of the first houses to be let in 1927.

Downham estate, aerial view, 1929 © English Heritage, http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk, EPW028491

Whilst not everyone could cope with what was then a semi-rural locale, many on Downham loved their ‘place in the country’ (1):

It was paradise, we could just look out of my bedroom onto the fields.  You could see the flowers growing and there were cows and horses.

We moved to a house opposite a farm…Compared to the closeness of the East End it was country, you know, the spaciousness of Downham, it was absolutely beautiful.

And, though Downham wasn’t a showpiece like the Wythenshawe estate in Manchester, some attempts were made to conform to garden-city ideals.  Houses were generally sited in tree-lined cul-de-sacs or placed around ‘greens’ and open spaces.  Roads varied in width and length, some were curved. Living rooms were situated to make the most of the available sunlight.

Keedonwood Road © Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

All the new houses had gardens too  Whilst these are now tainted with suburbanism, seeming somehow insufficiently proletarian to some sociologists of the working class, then they were cherished for the colour and greenery they brought to lives previously lived in urban monochrome:

All the gardens on the estate were nicely tended and some were excellent…The well-tended gardens were all part of the scene and in the summer were an absolute blaze of colour.  No one moaned about the grass cutting…It was all part of the joy of having your own patch.

© Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

The new estate comprised 6071 dwellings – some 400 flats but the large majority two-storey brick houses of solid but not expansive quality. To one later critic, ‘strung together in rows, little street leading into little street, dun-coloured, mouse-like, humble, the estate is the most colourless collection of box dwellings that one could find’.(2)   But that seems a little harsh. 

Downham, 2011 © diamond geezer

Perhaps the estate does look a little dull.  It certainly wasn’t luxury housing in utopian surrounds.  It lacks the Arts and Craft touches of the real garden cities or the ‘cottagey’ feel of even some other council developments   But it was accommodation of a far higher standard than previously enjoyed by the vast majority of its residents and they usually took pride in it:

…each kitchen was complete with an airy larder, a coal-fired copper for the washing, and a large white earthenware sink with a cold water tap.  All the kitchens were furnished with a black cast iron gas stove with brass taps, in fact there was quite a lot of brass around.  The door handles, pump joints and taps were all kept gleaming with ‘Bluebell’ at least once a week.

For tenants less enamoured of ‘Bluebell’, the LCC was keen to encourage – not to say, enforce – respectability:

When we first moved to Downham we had inspectors every so often to see if you were keeping the place clean. The word would go round, the inspectors are coming!…When you moved you had loads of rules to keep. The windows had to be washed every fortnight and the front step cleaned once a week…If you didn’t abide by the rules in the rent book, you’d get a real severe letter from the council.  They didn’t give you many warnings and they’d take action against you.

Such measures didn’t convince all of the respectability of these working-class incomers.  In 1926, a seven-foot high wall capped with broken glass was built across the street to the adjacent private estate, intended to prevent Downham’s residents using the street as a short-cut to Bromley town centre.   The wall remained till 1950.(3)

The wall across Valeswood Road at its junction with owner-occupied Alexandra Crescent

In fact, there was nothing too frightening about Downham’s new population. They generally belonged to the better-off working class – those who could afford rents reaching 21s 5d (£1.07) for the largest five-roomed houses.  Still, it was this same stratum which gave the most solid support to the emergent Labour Party so perhaps there was some underlying sense to the fears of their middle-class neighbours.

One now elderly resident recalls how her mother (‘mad on flowers…a real garden lover’, incidentally):

used to go to a community centre on the estate at Valeswood Road where she belonged to the Cooperative Women’s Guild, the Tenants League, the Gramophone Society and the Women’s Labour Party…No self-respecting inhabitant of Downham would support anything but the Labour Party then.

The reality was that this was an aspirational class – you could almost call them ‘strivers’ – but self-improvement was understood as a collective enterprise achieved through collective means.  A council house reflected both their aspiration and their belief in the role and duty of the state to support that aspiration.

A library and a swimming pool, both opened in 1937, reflect this quest for self-improvement as does the fact perhaps that the entire estate boasted just one pub – built by the LCC and opened for business in 1930 – to serve its population of 29,000.  It was, however, the world’s largest pub – the Downham Tavern boasted a dance hall, beer garden, two saloon bars, a public lounge and ‘lunchroom’.

Later years did not maintain this momentum.  Downham came to feel dowdy and unloved; its amenities declined and seemed – in the context of contemporary expectations – inadequate.

Shopping parade, Downham Way © Malc McDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence

In 2000, as part of a regeneration drive that did much to revive council estates across the country, Downham received a £10m grant to ‘restore focus and pride to the entire Downham area’ in a project named ‘Downham Lifestyles’.  If the names seem a little voguish, the ‘lifestyle centre’ which opened in 2006 – comprising swimming pool, fitness studio, gym, library, community room, music and drama studio, crèche and two GP surgeries – seems entirely commendable.

Downham Health and Leisure Centre

This was a Private Finance Initiative, the leisure centre is run by a private company and the estate itself has been managed since 2007 by Phoenix Community Housing, a not-for-profit, resident-led Housing Association.

We are not living in an age of municipal dreams but the dreams Downham has fulfilled should not be forgotten – even if it wasn’t paradise.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Age Exchange, Just Like the Country: Memories of London families who settled in the new cottage estates, 1919-1939 (1991).  The residents’ quotes which follow are also taken from this source.

(2) An unnamed critic quoted in Alistair Black, Downham Estate: Its Origins and Early History from Ideal Homes: A History of South-East London Suburbs

(3) Michael Nelson, ‘Gated Communities: Class Walls‘, History Today, vol 61, issue 11, 2011.  The image is taken from this source.  Other sources refer to the wall coming down during the war to allow access to emergency services.

Alistair Black’s article, referenced above, provides a comprehensive history of the estate.  Additional photographs may be found on the Ideal Homes website.

Matthew Hollow, ’Suburban ideals on England’s interwar council estates’, Journal of the Garden History Society, 39 (2), 2011, looks at Downham and the Wythenshawe Estate.

My thanks to the Lewisham Local History and Archives Centre for sharing Downham images online and to diamond geezer for making images available from his flikr photostream.