https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/with-the-grain
Owen Hatherley
31 October 2024 Cities

When the Peabody Trust, the charitable Housing Association set up in the mid-Victorian era by the banker George Peabody as a means of escaping hellfire, took over the Greater London Council’s abortive new town at Thamesmead, south-east London, its chair was a veteran civil servant, the late Sir Bob Kerslake. As former chief executive of Sheffield City Council and director of the Homes and Communities Agency, Kerslake had overseen the demolition of thousands of council homes, in what was called ‘estate regeneration’. As Peabody assumed control of Thamesmead in 2016, Kerslake told the Architects Journal that ‘what is most striking about Thamesmead is that when you drive through, there is no building or area that has decent quality’. It could therefore be assumed that not much of the GLC’s buildings in the area would survive Peabody’s trusteeship. This, thus far, seems to be the plan. The area is designated to receive much of the new housing that London is assumed to need. Peabody will build most of it, some of it will be social, much of it will be private, and a lot of it will stand where council housing used to be.

Thamesmead is a habitually romanticised or demonised place – a vast extension plan for the south-east of London designed by the Greater London Council and its in-house architects, of which only around a third was ever completed. Conceived in the sixties and built until its abandonment in the mid-1980s, Thamesmead is best known to non-residents as a future-pastoral movie set, with sundry films and music videos set among its grey towers and ziggurats flanking artificial lakes and canals. Those who know Thamesmead know that it is not a place where you should expect to see anything much if you drive through it. Built at the height of the private car’s dominance in planning ideology, Thamesmead largely consists of several long spines of buildings screened by trees and walls from a motorway that was ploughed through the site – old Ministry of Defence land, part of the sprawling Woolwich Royal Arsenal. You can’t see any buildings except tower blocks in the distance and supermarkets up close, and you’re not meant to. The buildings can only be seen on foot, through the network of green paths, concrete skyways and canal walks that were designed to link the place together so that you’d never have to cross traffic – the sort of network that is now usually considered to be a utopian bungle, though it works just fine in central London at the Barbican, or in Hong Kong or Tokyo.

One of the buildings Kerslake wouldn’t have been able to see in his car was the Moorings Social Club, a superb, if dilapidated brick public building next to steps down to one of the canals the GLC built for reasons of aesthetics and water engineering. Most of Thamesmead’s heavily photographed first phase has been demolished. Tavy Bridge, filmed by Kubrick for A Clockwork Orange, went 20 years ago; the nearby Coraline Walk and Binsey Walk were demolished by Peabody more recently. Both were replaced with new, mostly private housing (the replacements for Tavy Bridge are particularly appalling). But the Moorings Social Club survived, and become the subject of a restoration project by the artist Verity-Jane Keefe, which she has now documented in a book, From Social to Sociable.

The Moorings Social Club was part of ‘Thamesmead Phase 3’, built in the 1970s. It consists of interlocking, strongly Brutalist concrete mid-rise blocks, with lower-rise and less megalomaniacal brick terraces below. The blocks are named after famous liberals, Labourists and philanthropists, from Tawney to Keynes; one – rather unnervingly – is named after Malthus. The Social Club is linked to the red brick mid-rise Harold Wilson House – according to the club’s architect at the GLC, the American Stephen Mooring, this was a means of ensuring it would be hard to demolish. ‘Phase 3’ is usually referred to as The Moorings, out of serendipitous coincidence, referring to the boat moorings that have existed more in the mind of the GLC’s planners than in reality along the canals that weave through Thamesmead. The buildings here are well-designed, if worn and isolated housing, but they lack the romantic lakeside vistas of the more famous parts of the new town. In one of the interviews in From Social to Sociable, Keefe tells her interlocutor – Peabody’s head of landscaping and placemaking for Thamesmead, Kate Batchelor – that the fact internet photographers, social tourists and urbex types were not going anywhere near The Moorings was part of the appeal. ‘This’, says Keefe, ‘was the most exciting and potentially urgent part of Thamesmead, because it was the only part that nothing was being done to, all these residents were going to be living through huge change as bystanders’.

Keefe’s work has often focused on the sort of places that civil servants usually just drive through, as in the Mobile Museum, an exhibition and archive in a van that she drove around the looping lanes of the London County Council’s immense, low-rise Becontree estate in Dagenham, once the largest public housing estate in the world. There is an unusual warmth and humour in how residents’ ‘voices’ and perspectives are brought into her projects, combined with a lack of preservationist sentimentality about the original buildings. Here, the changes that have happened over time are not wished away in order to create an analogue in real space of some Brutalist Boy’s monochrome Instagram account. At the Moorings Social – or, as it was renamed after a residents’ vote, Sociable – Club, which was used as a community centre mostly by the very young or very old, decorative touches were brought in: lime-green flooring interspersed with the original brown parquet, ornamental trellises were erected where grim spikes had once been, and a photographic mural of the club’s diverse users was affixed to the bare brick façade – a simple gesture, but meaningful in a city where developers’ hoardings are full of computer-rendered, usually white peopleoids drinking coffee next to shiny new buildings that nobody in that mural will be able to afford.

Keefe’s project is not, however, in the tradition of giving a post-war building a drastic makeover. The redesigns emphasise the quality of the original building, with some input from Stephen Mooring himself, who died midway through the project. Partitions have been removed inside and the original fully glazed windows and walkways, boarded up for decades, have been restored, bringing back all the light that the architects envisaged. Crucially, the original public outdoor spaces, such as the roof terraces, long screened off and derelict, are now in full use. NO BALL GAMES signs have been removed. Inside, a mix of Moorings’ Aaltoesque wood fittings and new furniture create a space which is obviously modernist, but also ordinary and attractive. This isn’t Brutalism as something Cronenberg-film moody, but, as its architects intended and as its working-class users want, friendly – Sociable. It’s a major achievement, joining the recent repair job on Preston Bus Station as one of the astoundingly few Brutalist buildings to have been restored as a social project, as badly needed community infrastructure.

At least, that’s the case within The Moorings itself. Outside, around half of Thamesmead as it existed in 2016 has either been demolished or is scheduled for demolition. Peabody have brought artists’ studios to the area and built a new – rather boring – library, surrounded by dull, if inoffensive new blocks in the current ‘New London Vernacular’. Accordingly, it has, rather improbably, begun slowly to gentrify (I am told that there is now a place in Thamesmead that sells ‘skin-contact wine’). So it is easy – perhaps too easy – to criticise Keefe’s project as being morally compromised for its link-up with Peabody. That line of criticism should, up to a point, be resisted: it is so rare today for a working-class space in the capital to be properly invested in, celebrated and made better for its users that it stands as a counter-example to ‘estate regeneration’ more generally. Rather than there being no alternative to clearance and demolition, it shows what can be done: sophisticated, community-driven rebuilding and repair (something more common in other countries, as for instance in the housing work of Lacaton and Vassal in France – though Keefe’s pop art approach is at variance with their grayscale chic). The Moorings Sociable Club suggests the practical options are not destruction versus dereliction versus museumification. There could be dozens, hundreds of similar projects that work with the grain of proletarian spaces, with their existing users. But since any break with Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Johnson-Sunak housing policies remains unlikely, it is most plausible that they will emerge, if they do at all, in the way the Moorings Sociable Club has – as small salvage interventions within wider projects of social cleansing.

It isn’t necessary to subscribe to the alarmist claims that have been made about the place over the years – from the simple-minded notion that A Clockwork Orange was an accurate representation, to the BBC’s more recent suggestion that the area is a centre for Nigerian online fraudsters – to see that Thamesmead couldn’t have been left wholly as it was in the 2000s and 2010s, cut off from public transport, devoid of investment, with a density of boarded-up shops more common in stricken mining communities than in the capital. Thamesmead is a somewhat different proposition to other large estates that have been forcibly privatised and socially cleansed through ‘estate regeneration’. Unlike alleged ‘sink estates’ surrounded by public transport and places of employment, and easy walking distance from city centres, such as Sheffield’s Park Hill or the Heygate or Robin Hood Gardens estates in London, Thamesmead is still, especially by London standards, remote. The southernmost areas of Thamesmead are close to the new Crossrail station at Abbey Wood, but after getting home from work, you’d still have to take a bus to The Moorings. Which is, of course, what helped save its buildings and people from destruction and dispersal.

This is how such drastic changes have usually proceeded – a place is starved of investment to the point where its residents will accept anything as an alternative to endless decline. When Kerslake was at Sheffield, the privatisation of Park Hill proceeded with remarkably little public resistance; similarly, it took years for opposition to coalesce at the Heygate and the nearby Aylesbury estates in London. The reason it eventually did emerge – to the extent that the Greater London Authority now officially discourages ‘estate regeneration’ schemes that include widespread demolition – is the intensity of the housing crisis, and the evidence in front of many people’s eyes that the estates that have been rebuilt and renovated in the past couple of decades have been largely denuded of working-class people. In Thamesmead, protests in the last couple of years have centred on the Lesnes Estate, the original ‘Phase 2’. It’s a strip of low-rise housing blocks similar to those Camden Council were constructing in the late 1960s, along an elevated park leading to the ruins of Lesnes Abbey. Along with The Moorings, it is the only architecturally intact part of the original plan, but unlike its counterpart in Thamesmead, Lesnes is right next to the Elizabeth Line station. Protesters have pointed out that the Mayor of London’s own report argues that Peabody’s plans to raze it to the ground and more than double the density will involve a loss of social housing on a unit-by-unit basis, not to mention a ruinously carbon-intensive waste of completely sound, well-built, lived-in housing. Earlier this year, a campaign group of residents organised a sit-in, demanding refurbishment rather than demolition. They can, of course, point to what Peabody funded up the road at the Moorings as an example .