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'As modernist as the buildings were, I believe he saw in them a dystopia.' (A Clockwork Orange)
Maybe the best-known fact about Thamesmead is that, in 1971, it provided the setting for one of the most memorable scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange. Alex DeLarge (played by Malcolm McDowell) is shown walking along Binsey Walk and then suddenly attacking his fellow gang members. Southmere Lake and its Brutalist towers are the backdrop while the strains of Rossini’s overture La gazza ladra [The Thieving Magpie] play in the background. In 2022, speaking to Property Week, Kubrick’s American filmographer Alison Castle offered what is probably the most common contemporary understanding of that scene: “Kubrick’s choice of Thamesmead showed a very prescient instinct for how this architecture was deeply misguided and even hostile, doomed to fail as a model for living. As modernist as the buildings were, I believe he saw in them a dystopia.”
She was reiterating an all-too-common contempt for other Sixties estates. But John Grindrod, Britain’s foremost chronicler of post-war modernism, saw something very different in that scene: “The town’s formal beauty, lakes and crisp white architecture were enhanced by his use of classical music to make the scenes of sudden violence even more shocking and incongruous.” In the early Seventies, Thamesmead still seemed futuristic, utopian even — “the town of tomorrow”, as it was dubbed when the Greater London Council embarked upon the “Woolwich-Erith Project” in 1966. The practical intention, in the Council’s words, was to “create a reservoir of housing for decanting population from the hard-pressed inner area”. In an era of mass slum clearance, the form of its early implementation was exhilarating.
These two senses of Thamesmead — coexisting interpretations of it as dystopian and utopian — are now in open warfare against each other. The social housing provider Peabody has unveiled a proposal to demolish the Lesnes Estate, an area of almost 600 homes located just to the south of Southmere Lake. However, residents are fighting to save the estate, protesting against both the loss of their own homes and the nature of their proposed replacement. Beyond this David-and-Goliath struggle, though, their conflict is a microcosm of a broader battle in British social housing: one which pits developers’ ambitions to radically redevelop estates against both the interests of those who live in them and the model of communal living they symbolise.
Here, the chief protagonist — they certainly wouldn’t consider themselves the villain of the piece — is Peabody, one of our largest social housing providers and the organisation that was seen to be coming to the rescue of Thamesmead when it took over its management back in 2014. By then, the Thamesmead project was widely judged to have failed. Its population stood at 32,000, around half of the 60,000 originally planned. The new town seemed remote and forlorn; to some, most pejoratively, even a kind of giant “sink estate” inhabited by people housed from waiting lists lacking the choice or opportunity to live somewhere better.
This was a sad betrayal of the visionary planning that had inspired Thamesmead’s early construction. The difficult site prone to flooding was treated as a chance to create water features; Southmere Lake, for example, provided drainage as well as recreation. There was even talk of “being able to travel by punt right across the site along four and a half miles of canals”. The first-floor walkways, “streets in the sky”, and ground-floor garaging of the Lesnes Estate blocks in the first phase South Thamesmead’s development reflected this location too, but also the contemporary planning ideal that cars and people should be separated for what seemed obvious reasons of health and safety.
What still excites, however, is the form of the 1,500 homes built around Southmere Lake in this phase of construction. Four 13-storey towers line the southern edge of the lake adjacent to a (since demolished) ziggurat-style, half-mile long spinal block along Binsey Walk and Coralline Walk, forming a barrier between its eastern shore and the arterial A2401, all constructed in the gleaming white concrete panels of the Balency system of prefabrication. The artists’ impressions and early photographs of Thamesmead would surely turn the head of even the most hardened traditionalist. So, what went wrong?
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SubscribeEvery government housing development in the West ends in a disaster, just like every other attempt at centrally planned economies. Communities need to be allowed to grow organically. Loosen zoning, build infrastructure, provide subsidies, but for God’s sake don’t let the Gov’t or some high-brow architects plan anything.
Hmmmmn, there are lots of good public housing schemes. But then these were the ones people bought.
I used to live in an excellent maisonette in Wimbledon. Ex council. It was built to withstand nuclear attack.
Obviously the former tenant bought it for loose change and he retired to Ireland and our rent topped up his pension.
Mr O’Leary. We never met him. Absentee IRISH landlord!
The place was nice though, as was the whole road.
There are several truisms that simply explain the failures of centrally planned social housing.
The architects and planners will never live in the units they design and therefore they safely apply more theory and less empericism to their grand plans. Quite literally these are academic projects and academia rarely survives contact with reality. Dehumanising architecture results.
Milton Friedman correctly observed that people spending other people’s money on behalf of someone else will care neither for cost nor quality. Shoddy built housing results.
And if you don’t own it, if you suffer no loss from abusing it, you won’t treat it very well at all. Neglect results.
‘We’ don’t need more homes, the English populaton is gently declining. New social housing is entirely for the benefit of the 10 million foreign immigrants we have accrued over the last 20 years.
Grow up. We are children of immigrants, it’s just that recent immigrants tend to be more hard-working, more entrepreneurial, and more family orientated.
Both my grandfathers fought in the war, one thankfully still alive. They contributed the taxes and labour that built the social housing, hospitals and schools we used to enjoy. Both were driven to despair that their country, towns and streets were now filled with foreign tongues, clothes and manners. Prehaps they were too lazy, selfish and narrow-minded, i’ll ask.
I’m sure they were brave and hardworking men. And hopefully having seen foreign lands accepted that we are all human, and different languages, clothes, and manners are not important.
Is it extraordinary how so many progressive liberals simply do not see the culture matters enormously. We end up with the absurd contradictions of “decolonisation” while at the same time trying to impose western progressive values, such as for example the acceptance of homosexuality (by the way I’m a gay man) on our former colonies or Muslim States.
50% of British Muslims believe that gay sex should be illegal note not disapprove of homosexuality – that would be about 95% – but believe it should be made illegal.
Whichever way you look at it, and whatever view you take on the substantive issues, there is simply a huge difference between that and the views of the white population, even the supposedly “socially conservative” voters of the Red Wall seats.
The demographic point made was absolutely correct. You repeat the absurd nonsense that Britain historically was a mass immigration society. It was not.
Also it’s undoubtedly true that many migrants work hard, but when we talk about the (vast) levels of net migration happening at the moment, only a minority are coming here to work; most are NOT workers. They bring their families with them who are mostly not working and entitled to all the benefits the state provides
Well, people live longer and families more likely to divorce.
My own set up has my ex and kids in a house, me in a two bed flat and my partner by herself in a large 3 bed house. My Mum in a 4 bed house.
I expect a lot of migrant families and folk live with increased… Efficiency… Nay over-crowding
Social housing and social mobility are in direct conflict. I learnt with some surprise, a few years ago, that council house tenants have the right to pass their tenancy on to their children. So a new council house could easily be occupied by one family for, say, 80 years without any reassessment of whether the tenant needs taxpayer support for their housing needs.