Thamesmead: A Beautiful Thing (3/3)
Thamesmead was born to be different. It’s time to liberate the ‘town of tomorrow’ from the tyranny of typical expectations. Let’s give it the freedom and status it needs to be the UK’s capital of innovation.
Born this way
A typically successful place is made up of four things: a thriving economy; a clean and safe physical environment; decent public services; and a cohesive community.
Thamesmead has never had a claim to all four of these characteristics at once. The local economy has persistently lagged behind the rest of the capital. Its built environment, while eye-catching, has proven expensive to maintain and an immensely hard sell on the mainstream market.
As I explored in parts one and two of this essay, public services have often struggled to deliver in such a complex environment, leading to poor health and educational outcomes for lower-income residents. While an initially strong sense of community spirit was replaced by the “new town blues”.
As the GLA put it in 2020: “Over the years, the area has faced considerable challenges as a consequence of physical obstacles, geographical isolation, a lack of local conveniences, flood risk, extended periods of underinvestment and the absence of a consistent and shared strategic vision.”
Since 1968, when the first tenants moved in, billions of pounds have been spent by a procession of agencies charged with improving Thamesmead. In sequence, the estate has been run by regional government, local government, a commercial company, and now by Peabody, a charitable housing association.
The previous stewards of Thamesmead all failed, and all for the same reason. They sought to make the estate a success by typical standards. After half a century of trying to fit Thamesmead into a template of standard expectations, it’s time to adopt a new approach.
Setting Cinderella free
This essay sets out the broad outlines of that new approach. It proposes a radical programme of devolution and experimentation in order to make Thamesmead the UK’s capital of innovation. A laboratory for policy development and a testing ground for experimentation in emerging technologies.
The starting point for the new approach is the need to re-assess Thamesmead from a strengths-based perspective. That means instead of focusing on Thamesmead’s flaws, we should build a strategy for the future around its unique mixture of characteristics and strengths.
The focus of that strategy should be on realising Thamesmead’s potential to be the UK’s capital of innovation. The area has many assets that, with the right investment, could create a rich innovation ecosystem. It is strategically well-located, offers cheap land and affordable homes, and houses a young, diverse population looking for opportunities.
That potential won’t be realised from within Thamesmead’s current unsatisfactory governance arrangements. Thamesmead is the unloved Cinderella to the Anastasia and Drizella of Greenwich and Bexley. Technically part of the family but, to all intents and purposes, a separate entity.
It’s time to set Cinderella free by creating the first new London borough since 1965. The Free Borough of Thamesmead would be much more than just a new political entity. Its relationship with central government would be the template for a new, devolved approach to local decision-making and service delivery.
As a free borough, it would have much greater license to attract and incentivise innovation within its boundaries. Through freeport-style flexibilities and collaboration with higher education and industry.
That collaboration would be focused on creating experimental testing grounds for the development of new and emerging technologies. Thanks to its size and strategic location, Thamesmead could provide missing elements of the UK’s innovation infrastructure, including quantum foundries, factories for 3D-printed houses, and soil hospitals.
As well as advancing the UK’s overall innovation capacity, these industries would position finally position Thamesmead as the true town of tomorrow.
Before I get into the detail of the new approach for Thamesmead, let’s complete the chronological story of the estate, from the late 1990s to the present day.
“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”
This was the question that Tony Blair asked his jubilant supporters in the early hours of New Labour’s landslide election victory in May 1997. For most of the country, the answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’ For Thamesmead, always the odd one out, the answer was ‘No’.
The new millennium brought further changes to the governance and administration of Thamesmead. As I explored in part two, between 1987 and 2000 Thamesmead was run by an organisation called Thamesmead Town Limited (TTL). It was supposed to fill the vacuum created by the abolition of the Greater London Council, which had been the political champion and planning body for Thamesmead. That leadership role was never going to be provided by the London boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, which regarded Thamesmead as an alien imposition and, therefore, someone else’s rather expensive problem.
Unfortunately, Thamesmead Town Limited was the governance equivalent of a ‘cut and shut’; two halves of different vehicles welded together. It was half a commercially-driven company and half a tenant-run community organisation. It eventually collapsed under the weight of its contradiction.
Between 2000 and 2014, Thamesmead was run by three separate entities. Gallions Housing Association, a not-for-profit provider and manager of homes, took on responsibility for the housing stock. Tiflen Land, a private company, was responsible for commercial and industrial properties. While Trust Thamesmead led on area regeneration and community development.
This tripartite arrangement avoided the problems and inherent tension encountered by TTL, but achieved little else. By the 2000s, much of Thamesmead’s built infrastructure was showing its age and its housing stock cost much more to maintain than it generated in rent.
As well as struggling to square the circle of Thamesmead’s housing finances, Gallions was heavily criticised by government inspectors for failing to deal with residents’ complaints and for a lack of transparency over a bumper pay-off to an outgoing Chief Executive.
Thie biggest problem was the absence of strategic leadership to tackle the major problems of physical decay, social exclusion, poor transport connections, and weak public services.
Peabody Housing, one of the UK’s biggest and oldest social housing providers, arrived on the scene in 2014. Gallions, the “troubled Thamesmead housing association” according to the local press, was absorbed into Peabody, while Tilfen Land and Trust Thamesmead became subsidiaries of Peabody Group.
For the first time since the dissolution of TTL, the majority of the land, buildings, and commercial holdings in Thamesmead was under single ownership.
‘A new town on top of the new town’
Peabody has sought to use its status as the dominant landlord and overall steward for Thamesmead to good effect. Since the publication of the first new strategy for Thamesmead, published shortly after the takeover, it has talked about a ‘whole place approach’ to change and development.
This holistic approach is more sophisticated and likely to deliver positive change, compared to narrower approaches which put the sole emphasis on physical redevelopment or economic boosterism. In this spirit, the current five-year strategy describes a balanced approach to investing in skills, community spaces, and activities improve health and wellbeing, as well as building new homes.
The overall aim of the strategy is for a projected population of 100,000 people to live in high-quality, sustainable homes and be well-served by public service and community facilities. This is a sensible, mainstream aspiration.
Doubling the current population in twenty-five years will require densifying the area. As the architecture critic Rowan Moore put it, the strategy proposes to “lay a new town…on top of the new town”. In 2019, Peabody formed an £8bn joint venture with Lendlease to masterplan the riverside and build thousands of new homes. The first new residential block, built to deliver medium-rise high-density, as opposed to the high-rise low-density of the old tower blocks, was completed in 2020.
Peabody can point to other important developments since 2014. Abbey Wood is one of the terminus stations on the cross-London Elizabeth line that opened in May 2022. Previously, the stop only served a relatively infrequent Crossrail line. Peabody continues to lobby for a new Docklands Light Railway station to be built in the heart of Thamesmead.
Its investment in a dedicated culture programme has delivered a popular annual festival, new creative spaces and public artworks, and the development of community groups that reflect the area’s increasing diversity.
A new approach is needed, is it not?
What Peabody can’t point to is a fundamental change in Thamesmead’s current status or future prospects.
Despite the new Elizabeth Line connection, Thamesmead remains largely cut off in economic terms from the rest of London. Land values and house prices are lower than the rest of the capital, as reflected in the heat map below. The price of property kept low by the unusual nature of the much of the stock. Architects and landscape photographers like Thamesmead’s iconic brutalism, but many households do not.
The local education and labour market is also divergent from the rest of London. Compared to Greenwich, Bexley, and London as a whole, Thamesmead has significantly fewer people educated to degree level and more people who have no educational qualifications at all.
Unemployment is not significantly worse in Thamesmead compared to local and national averages. The problem is that many people who do work are in low-paid elementary jobs in typically low-wage sectors like storage, retail, and care work. There are very few large employers in Thamesmead and while there are quite a lot of registered business, many of micro-businesses and sole traders.
As an area, Thamesmead still suffers from the lack of a town centre and a related paucity of quality public services. As part of a project to develop a skills strategy for the estate, I facilitated a series of focus groups. The participants were drawn from different parts of the community but they all had the same concerns and complaints.
To access basic services like welfare advice or skills training, they had to leave Thamesmead. Even that simple task was made more difficult by the lack of regular, quick, and affordable bus routes. Things hadn’t changed from the days when “you could not buy a stamp or collect your pension without going out of Thamesmead.”
It is not a surprise or a failure on Peabody’s part that Thamesmead has not been radically transformed in the decade since their arrival. They would argue with some justification that ten years in the life of an estate is not that long.
Look at the bigger picture, however, the longer history of Thamesmead since 1968, and we see a place that has not fundamentally changed in over half a century. Thamesmead turns 56 this year and the place today is in many ways the same as it was when the first brick was laid. By the time they were 56, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Steve Jobs had all changed the world and died.
It is time for a new approach to avoid another fifty years of stasis.
Thamesmead on its own terms
The starting point for this new approach is simple. Thamesmead is never going to be a success by typical standards.
In the last few decades, thinking and practice in the urban regeneration industry has evolved. We have moved from a deficit model of understanding a place, which focus on its needs and problems, towards a strengths-based model.
This more appreciative approach is better attuned to the unique characteristics of a place. It avoids the assumption that a place and its people are ‘lacking’ and require the intervention of enlightened outsiders.
Judged on its own terms, Thamesmead has incredible assets.
Size. Thamesmead is huge, covering a land mass as big as central London. It covers 1,300 acres or 530 hectares, including a long stretch of riverside frontage. This sheer scale is one of the reasons that so many organisation have struggled to make sense of the place.
Strategic location. Look at the global picture and Thamesmead is incredibly well located in its proximity to consumer markets, transport hubs, and trade routes. Thanks to the Elizabeth Line, it is now a short train distance from the heart of London. It is close to international transport connections including the Eurostar and City Airport. It is part of the Thames Gateway and is on the doorstep of the new Thames Freeport. We’ll look again at freeports in a moment, when we look to Thamesmead’s future. It is also very close to many universities and research centres.
Industrial infrastructure. As I noted earlier, Thamesmead’s local economy is more geared toward industrial functions compared to the service-sector focus of the capital. At the moment, that industrial capacity is being put to use in low-paying sectors like distribution and warehousing. There is no reason why those spaces could not be re-purposed to be part of a high-skill, high-pay, high valued-added innovation ecosystem.
Affordable land and houses. A conventional strategy for Thamesmead would identify ways to increase the value of houses by making Thamesmead more normal. That theory of change is logical, bit it is only a theory. In practice, multiple attempts to make Thamesmead more like an average neighbourhood have failed. A fittingly unconventional strategy would work with Thamesmead’s housing stock and market it to post-graduate students and early-career professionals .
Young and diverse population. In recent decades, Thamesmead’s population has become younger and more diverse. By the mid-2010s, the estate had “one of the youngest population profiles in London”. That trend had been partly driven by the increasing diversity of the estate. According to the sae 2015 futures discussion paper, Thamesmead’s Black African population had increased 13 fold in just ten years.
A history of innovation. A less tangible, but no less important, aspect of the area is the history of innovation in both military and civil engineering. As I explored in part 1, the first major development in the area was the royal dockyard in 1512. Out of the dockyard sailed Henry VII’s flagship, the largest vessel in the world. For centuries afterward, the royal arsenal tested new weapon technologies. The area was once again a testing ground for new planning concepts and architectural methods in the construction of the ‘Town of Tomorrow’.
The potential of these assets will never be realised from within Thamesmead’s existing governance and decision-making structures.
The Free Borough of Thamesmead
To summarise a long and quite complicated story, the governance of Thamesmead has been placed in the hands of different organisations over the past few decades for three reasons.
The first and fundamental problem was that Thamesmead was designed and planned as a new town, but the New Towns Act passed by parliament, which enabled government to create powerful New Town Corporations, did not apply to London. From this beginning, the governance of Thamesmead has been a series of compromises and work-arounds.
Second, as we’ve already explored, Thamesmead’s great champion, the Greater London Council, was abolished in 1987. In one go, this erased a huge amount of strategic leadership capacity. Third, the two London boroughs that Thamesmead straddles have always regarded it something of alien entity. To fill that gap, we have had “failed experiment” with TTL, the unhappy arrangement with the tripartite system, and now the era of Peabody’s leadership.
I put forward a more radical solution. Instead of muddling through for another half-century, let’s make a clean break. Alexander the Great didn’t try to unpick the Gordian knot. He picked up his sword and cut through it.
The Free Borough of Thamesmead would be the capital’s first new local authority since 1965. Its elected councillors would be responsible for the strategic planning and day-to-day service delivery. In that way, it would be similar to the other boroughs.
In other ways, however, Thamesmead would be markedly different. With a population of 50,000, it would be much smaller than the typical London range of 200,000 to 300,00 residents.
The borough would need to be creative and experimental in generating jobs and growing its tax base. To enable this, Thamesmead would be London’s first ever Free Borough. This would mean applying the model of a ‘free port’ to an entire council area.
Free ports are specially designated zones in which taxes, tariffs, and regulations can be adapted or even suspended in order to stimulate economic activity. The application of that model requires some care. In their crudest form, they can become havens for tax avoidance and criminal activities like the illegal trade in wildlife.
The more sophisticated and progressive version of a freeport is a place where tax incentives and light-touch regulation can encourage innovation and knowledge transfer, without undercutting labour rights or environmental protections. They are sandboxes for experimentation, not safe-boxes for soiled money.
Thamesmead would, of course, be in this second category. The purpose of free borough status would be to create a world-leading innovation ecosystem. Companies working toward that would benefit from the typical incentives offered in freeports, such as: relief from stamp duty; enhanced capital allowances; relief from NI and employer contributions; and business rate relief.
Devolution, investment, and development deals
Thamesmead could also be the birthplace of a new power settlement between central and local government. The UK, and England in particular, is extremely over-centralised. Councils have far fewer powers and freedoms than equivalent tiers of government in comparable countries. This undermines both local democracy and local economic development.
The introduction of ‘devolution deals’ over the last decade has started to shift the balance, but local authorities remain starved of real power, especially in relation to raising and spending money. As Michael Hesseltine put it in his 2012 report No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth, government departments keep councils and communities dependent on “penny packets” of funding that are doled out with multiple strings attached.
A new power settlement between the Whitehall and Thamesmead would involve:
· A single ten-year funding settlement that gives Thamesmead the surety of being able to plan for the long term alongside greater freedoms to generate, retain, and spend money that is raised locally through taxes and tariffs.
· The creation of a single finance facility between Whitehall and the local Town Hall that would replace the bureaucratic multiplicity of “penny packet” funding streams.
· A single, light-touch audit and inspection regime.
The borough could then use the certainty offered by a ten-year funding settlement to sign a deal with investors and developers to fund and deliver a wide-ranging growth package.
That package could involve a pioneering deal with a British university of consortium of institutions. One of the constraints on the capacity of the UK’s Higher Education sector to compete globally is the difficulty of building research facilities and, in places like Oxford, the hugely expensive cost of housing.
American institutions in particular can offer doctoral students and early-careers academics access to more and better facilities as well as larger and cheaper homes. Of the 60 synchrotron particle accelerators in the world, about a quarter are in the states. Britain has one, the Diamond Light Source facility in Oxfordshire. Oxford is already Britain’s most unaffordable place to live, with high housing costs for renters and mortgagors already impacting on the ability of the universities and colleges to attract and retain staff.
As part of its development plan, Thamesmead borough could offer access to affordable land and accommodation as well as a planning framework that encourages development. Further short-term incentives could be offered in exchange for longer-term benefits, in the form of profit-sharing agreements with beneficiary companies or equity shares in spin-out ventures that commercialise products and processes developed in Thamesmead.
Enhancing the UK’s innovation ecosystem
The opportunity for a re-developed Thamesmead is to use its assets to fill significant gaps in the UK’s innovation ecosystem.
According to one commonly cited global index, the UK is the fourth most innovative country in the world. As measured against a set of output indicators such as the number of patents and enabling factors like the quality of universities of the availability of finance.
The biggest constraint is the absence of key elements of infrastructure in the national innovation ecosystem. With the right strategy and investment, Thamesmead could fill those gaps.
One such gap is in the field of quantum computing. The UK is a world leader in quantum research. What we lack is the ability to test the applicability and commercial potential of research breakthroughs. According to a government-backed review of the UK quantum sector, we need greater capacity for “accelerating the transition from laboratory to deployment in real-world applications”.
There is a particular lack of quantum foundries. These are low-volume manufacturing facilities where prototype products can be tested and developed. This type of facility is beyond what academic institutions or commercial providers can afford without taking a major financial risk. Thamesmead could be the home for quantum foundry in which this kind of commercially focused but pre-competitive experimentation could take place.
A second significant gap in the UK’s innovation ecosystem relates to 3D-printed housing. There is huge global interest in the potential of printed houses to meet both permanent and temporary housing needs. Individually-printed homes can be completed within hours and at far lower cost than traditionally constructed units.
The first legally habitable printed house in Europe was unveiled in Eindhoven in 2021. In the UK, the not-for-profit developer Building for Humanity is working with Harcourt Technologies Limited on a 46-home printed development in Accrington.
The development challenge is that the facilities for printing components are, by necessity, large and land-hungry. Gantries and robotic arms need lots of space. As well as ample land, Thamesmead could offer its strategic location. Parts that are printed Thamesmead could be easily stored and transported to locations across the South East of England and beyond.
Leadership in the field of 3D building manufacturing would be a journey back to the future for Thamesmead. The development of the estate in the 1960s was a bold experiment with new architectural forms and construction technologies. Applying the lessons of that experiment to the development of a new technology would be a fitting legacy.
One of the reasons that construction was so fraught in the early days of Thamesmead was the poor state of the soil. Centuries of manufacturing, testing, and live-firing ammunition had left a very different legacy: toxic chemicals, shrapnel, and live bullets that local schoolchildren make a hobby of collecting.
Land remediation is a growing industry. National populations are growing but the amount of land on which we can build is shrinking, as a result of climate change effects like inland flooding and coastal erosion, and the move toward building on brownfield land.
There is particular interest in bioremediation, which is the use of natural solutions like bacteria, algae, and plants to decontaminate environments. Especially with regard to the potential for applying bio-methods to particularly complex and heavily polluted sites. Thamesmead could become a world-leading soil hospital in which technologies for remediation are tested, refined, and commercialised for use all over the world.
“Believe them the first time”
The poet Maya Angelou once observed that “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
For nearly sixty years, Thamesmead has been telling us what it is, and what it is not. It is an unusual and unconventional, surprising and sometimes challenging place that defies typical expectations. We should have believed it the first time.
The place has attracted atypical talents. Look at the movies and TV shows that were filmed there. The queer comedy drama Beautiful Thing. Channel 4’s aptly named Misfits. And of course A Clockwork Orange, directed by a man who made Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times before he was satisfied that had the right shot.
Thamesmead is the David Bowie of towns. Any attempt to make it normal by flattening its hair and rubbing off its make-up will either fail or succeed only at enormous cost to the beauty and brilliance of its soul.
Thamesmead is a beautiful thing. Let’s love it for what it is.
