Thamesmead — A Beautiful Thing? (1/3)
Was the development of Thamesmead a model of ambition or a testament to hubris?
Playing with fire
The bomb disposal squad knew something was wrong when they peeled back the top layer of soil and felt the earth beneath. It was hot to the touch. Warmed not by the rays of the sun, but by the raging chemical inferno in the toxic landfill site beneath their feet.
They were even more alarmed when they visited a local school as part of their site inspection. A ‘show-and-tell’ style display in a classroom included shrapnel and bullets that the pupils had collected from the surrounding playing fields. A hastily arranged weapons amnesty yielded “a pile of live ammunition the size of a bonfire.”
The era is the late 1960s and the location is Thamesmead, in South East London. As shown on the map below, the estate straddles the London borough of Greenwich and Bexley. If you haven’t been to Thamesmead, or don’t even recognise the name, there is a good chance you have seen it on screen. Iconic is a chronically over-used word in urban design and development circles. But it can be applied accurately and without hyperbole to Thamesmead.
Films including ‘A Clockwork Orange’, ‘Beautiful Thing’, and Daniel Craig’s valedictory outing as James Bond, ‘No Time to Die’, were all filmed there. It was the main setting for the TV series ‘Misfits’ and the disturbing video for Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’.
It is easy to see why the brutalist architecture offers such a singular backdrop as a film set. Yet before the tower blocks and walkways were built or, more accurately, assembled, Thamesmead was a semi-derelict weapons depot surrounded by bleak and barren marshland.
This is the first part in a short series of articles looking at the past, present, and future of Thamesmead.
Three quick notes. 1. For simplicity, I describe the area as Thamesmead throughout this article, even though this name was not officially adopted until 1966. 2. For this first article, on the history of the area, I have drawn extensively but not exclusively on Valerie G. Wigfall’s brilliant “Thamesmead: A Social History”. Later articles will use a wider array of sources and my own insights from the point at which I was commissioned to work in Thamesmead. 3. The politics, governance, and financing of Thamesmead will be fully explored more fully in forthcoming articles.
History
The background sections of my essays usually start with Britain on the verge of the Industrial Revolution. For this piece, we can go back much further.
The first major development in the area was in 1512, when King Henry VIII ordered the construction of the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich. As shown on the map, Woolwich was in the perfect location for sending ships out to sea and, in the case of invasion from Spanish or Dutch forces, defending London.
The first vessel it produced was Henry’s flagship and the largest ship in the world. From the very beginning, Thamesmead has been associated with vast scale and vaulting ambition. The military presence grew as the Crown bought up more land: in 1716, a munitions factory was established; in 1805 the site was officially designated the ‘Royal Arsenal’. Football fans may be aware that this is whence Arsenal FC derive their name.
At the peak of World War One, 73,000 people worked in hundreds of buildings on the site, straddling 1,200 acres. This was the Arsenal’s heyday. During the inter-war period, it declined rapidly in both size and significance.
The buildings were showing their age. Of the 172 buildings that contained explosives, only 15 passed Home Office safety regulations. Military planners also questioned the wisdom of concentrating so much production and storage capacity in one place. Rather than undertaking a costly rebuild, it made more sense to disperse its development, testing, and storage functions to other parts of the country. This had the additional benefit of generating economic activity and creating jobs in economically depressed parts regions outside the capital.
The Arsenal played a much diminished role in World War Two. Woolwich’s proximity to London was a core strength in the days of Henry and defensive naval warfare. In the age of offensive aerial conflict, it was a liability. After targeted German bombardments in the early part of the war, many of its workers were transferred to other munitions factories. By the end of the conflict, a mere 15,500 people worked on site; roughly one fifth of the total just a generation earlier.
Post-1945
Further decline was inevitable after 1945. The Arsenal was “under used, out of date and inefficient” and its owner, the Ministry of Supply, was actively looking for alternative uses. Patches of land were sold off and / or converted to light industrial use. This left about 700 acres free for disposal. None of the local or national inquiries into the site recommended comprehensive redevelopment of a type that might include the construction of new houses.
Until the sheer pressure of post-war housing need started to change this attitude. Attempts to build new settlements on the edge of London were repeatedly defeated. It was hard to justify building over productive farmland when the country had lived with food rationing for so long. While in cases like the proposed new development in Hook, Hampshire, the proposal for a new town-type development was defeated by well-organised local political objections.
As I’ve written elsewhere, London’s housing crisis actually got worse after the war, as the rate of demolition far out-stripped the pace of housing completion. Despite frantic building, the waiting lists were getting longer every year.
In this context of escalating need, planners were looking again at sites they had previously dismissed as too challenging.
“The Town on Stilts”
After the failure of proposals like Hook, the 1963 government White Paper ‘London — Employment: Housing: Land’ sought to re-focus attention on further development within London. This included the possibility for “further development at Woolwich Arsenal”.
The paper mentioned “further” development because the London County Council (LCC) had purchased a small patch of land on the southern edge of the site and built the 9,000-home Abbey Wood estate. You can see this on the map above, developed by the Future of London using Ordnance Survey data. The LCC was keen to do more, but it ran straight into the severe site problems previewed earlier.
The surface was “about 50 per cent water” and prone to regular flooding. The ground was made up of soft layers clay, peat, silt and sand. To build on this terrain would require driving 40ft piles down through to a sub-layer of firmer gravel. The challenge of building “The Town on Stilts” was exciting to architects and developers, but the finances didn’t stack up.
Then a series of changes within government completely altered the calculation. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) decided to sell off 1,000 acres of adjoining land; part of the wind-down of the military presence in the area. Central government also abandoned plans to build a power station in the area, freeing up further land while simultaneously reducing a potential new source of pollution in an already contaminated environment.
Alert to the possibilities, the Greater London Council, the successor to the LCC bought up 1,025 acres of land, including a stretch of prime riverside territory, where the now-cancelled power station would have been built.
By 1965, the GLC had land holdings of 1,780 acres. A site so large it could accommodate 60,000 people. For comparison, the population of the entire London Borough of Bexley in the 1960s was around 210,000.
The “The Town on Stilts” idea had fallen on value-for-money grounds; it would simply cost too much for a relatively small number of new homes. By contrast, an ex-GLC employee described this much larger site as “a gift from God, there wasn’t anybody here in the first place! So every house you built was 100 per cent housing gain.”
Bullets and blancmange
GLC officials were jubilant. They finally had ownership and control of a single, large, contiguous site within London’s boundaries. No need to negotiate with NIMBY district councils. No need to destroy arable land or court controversy by demolishing historic buildings. There was virtually nothing on the site apart from old and unwanted military installations.
Demolishing the remnants of the Arsenal was the easy part. Yet the closer the GLC inspected the site, the more they realised just how challenging development would be.
As highlighted above, the MoD had buried a noxious cocktail of toxic and flammable substances in shallow landfill sites. The land was littered with shrapnel and ammunition. An engineer described the ground conditions as a “blancmange”. The GLC had to bring in a specialist Dutch firm to dredge swathes of the site, using land reclamation techniques honed over centuries in the Netherlands. The pollution was so bad that buildings could not be built higher than 200ft or 13 storeys.
Today, these factors would likely disqualify any proposed development. At the time, however, the GLC’s planners and architects seemed energised by the scale of the challenge. The Master Plan, which we will explore next, highlighted the need for “bold architectural solutions, responsive to the dramatic opportunities and constraints of the site”. It also stated that “The opportunity to accommodate 60,000 Londoners in a visionary scheme has been seized and the challenge of the desolate 1,300 acre site has been accepted.”
From the start, Thamesmead was hyped as “The Town of the 21st Century”, the finest that modern architectural practice and sophisticated urban planning could offer. In the words of one architect, “the best was what we wanted for Thamesmead…it was taken for granted that you gave the people the very best.”
Master Plan
That feeling of post-war optimism was captured in the 1967 Master Plan. We will, in a moment, explore the reality on the ground. Before that inevitable downer, we should acknowledge that the Master Plan was a visionary document that could have been written in 2007.
The ambition was to build a “balanced multi-class community” in its broadest sense. The anticipated 60,000 residents would occupy a range of housing types, including flats, maisonettes, and family homes, across a range of income levels. A third of the units would be available on the private market and the rest reserved for social rent.
Riverside apartments would be built at higher densities and marketed to younger and wealthier households, while family units would be built at lower densities with access to private gardens or communal green space.
The Master Plan envisaged distinct neighbourhoods, each with a primary school, shops and community facilities. The long, overground walkways would achieve “complete separation of vehicles and pedestrians”, as shown in the photograph below. Over time, it was hoped that extensive cycleways and local bus services would wean people away from driving altogether; very much a 21st century ambition.
To reduce the need for commuting, local jobs would also be needed, and the Plan envisaged the development of two industrial estates, a Polytechnic, office space, and a central shopping area, offering both amenity and job opportunities in retail. Thamesmead had been so vigorously promoted that, as cited in UCL’s The making, unmaking, and remaking of Thamesmead (PDF), “the GLC received over 100 applications for Thamesmead’s first 11 commercial spaces”. People and businesses were eager to move into this futuristic new settlement.
All in all, again citing UCL, “Thamesmead would have its own schools, parks, clinics, pubs, cinemas, offices, and more, ensuring sufficient possibilities for work, study, and entertainment.”
The yardstick
As with so many ambitious post-war housing developments, the eventual reality was very different from the initial ideal. To echo the Observer headline from 1979 about my hometown of Kirkby, it was another case of “New Jerusalem Goes Wrong”.
Thamesmead was built in three stages, with the design and build standards whittled down between each phase. The buildings completed in stage one bore the closest affinity to the Master Plan. As well as the new homes, in the form of tower blocks, maisonettes, and row houses, stage one also delivered two schools, shops, community facilities, a medical centre and a lake. Stage one lasted between 1967 and 1968/69.
Beginning in 1969, the start of stage two overlapped with the tail-end of the initial phase. During this time, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government was formulating the ‘Housing Cost Yardstick’. As the name suggests, this was a mechanism for reducing the bill to the Treasury for building new homes. In response, the LCC trimmed its plans.
Consequently, according to Wigfall, stage two “became much more regular in form, and lost some of the design features which distinguished stage [one]”. She also cites an architect working on the phase who explained that “cost reduction was achieved by simplifying everything, which lost a lot of joy of the architectural form, a lot of the excitement [of stage one] had gone.”
The yardstick impacted most severely on stage three. Biting cost restrictions, combined with a series of other complicating factors including changing tower block policy after Ronan Point, forced the GLC to find financial savings anywhere they could. This was done by further standardising the designs and minimising or erasing altogether plans for design features and facilities. According to one member of the development team, the result was an “an aesthetic disaster! They seemed to us in those days to embody all that was worst about public housing”.
From giving the people “the very best” to embodying “all that worst”. In less than a decade. Everything is big is Thamesmead; even the fall.
“Nothing could have been more disastrous.”
By the mid-1970s, as stage three was completed, the determination to build so much in such an unpropitious environment was looking naïve, if not hubristic.
Many post-war council estates experienced difficulties in the 1970s, often lasting well into the 1980s and even 1990s. Few experienced such a complicated set of interlocked issues as Thamesmead. As Wigfall puts it, tenants were exposed to the “darker side to living in the GLC’s prestige development”.
For a prestige development, home a to a growing population, there was a dearth of basic social facilities. By 1975, as many children were being taught in mobile classrooms as there were in actual school buildings.
Residents in Stage 3 developments were particularly under-served. There were virtually no public transport connections and rubbish piled up as refuse collection teams didn’t know people lived in those parts of the estate.
One of the reasons for the mismatch between population need and service provision was the failure to realise the vision of a “balanced, multi-class community”. To give one example, there were far more young families than anticipated. A quarter of the initial population was under fifteen; twice the London average.
Unsurprisingly, given the ground conditions, damp was rife. In response to complaints, however, the GLC blamed the tenants for failing to adequately ventilate their own homes. They were shamed into action when tenants staged a guerrilla protest. On the day of a VIP visit, tenants put up hundreds of A1 posters declaring “I’VE GOT DAMP!” in bright red letters.
The unusual design of the estate, especially the long unbroken concrete walkways, proved more curse than blessing. Instead of offering access to open air and the chance to mingle, as suggested in the photograph below, the walkways became instantly unpopular. They were used by children on bikes and scooters, dogs, and even horses.
Instead of being a shared space, they became “anonymous and impersonal”. Multiple and unguarded entry and exit points also made it easier for vandals to cause havoc and flee with ease. One resident described the walkways as a “muggers’ paradise”.
One population that did thrive along and underneath the long walkways was a plague of “super mice” that grew so strong they were impervious to poison and could chew through concrete.
A majority of tenants faced severe financial hardship. Rents in Thamesmead had always been higher than the council housing average. Residents were expected to pay more for the privilege of living in the “Town of the 21st Century”. They were also automatically charged for the cost of locally-generated heating and hot water as part of an ‘all-inclusive’ rental charge.
By 1975, central government changes to rent legislation, which increased average rents almost everywhere, and the shrinking national economy, pushed 66% of Thamesmead tenants into arrears. According to an Observer headline, these households were “Living in Debt in Dreamland”.
Thamesmead’s unusual governance arrangements failed to provide the necessary leadership in the face of these challenges. As set out earlier, the development straddles two London boroughs; Greenwich and Bexley. Greenwich was often Labour-held, while Bexley was usually Conservative. It was in Tory control for twenty unbroken years between 1974 and 1994. Greenwich is considered an inner-London borough, compared to Bexley’s outer-London status. Yet both were united around the idea that Thamesmead was somehow “taken care of”, despite the evidence of mounting problems.
Finally, Thamesmead began to suffer from a severe reputation problem. Thanks to the over-the-top promotion of the estate in the early days, the area was ‘famous’ from day one, nationally and internationally. In the first few years, there were more architecture students than tenants on the site on a typical day. At its peak, 10,000 visitors every year from countries across the globe came to marvel and take notes.
The estate’s high profile was already becoming a burden, as reflected in the Observer headline mentioned above. Then, in 1971, Stanley Kubrick chose Thamesmead as an outside filming location for ‘A Clockwork Orange’.
The sight of uniformed Droogs unleashing murderous violence on innocent civilians and each other, with Thamesmead as a backdrop, was seared into the collective memory. As Adam Scovell puts it for Little White Lies, “the photography renders the buildings with an unusual feeling, simultaneously representing a morbid future and a failed present.” Or, as Wigfall puts it, “nothing could have been more disastrous for the long-term reputation of Thamesmead.”.
Could Thamesmead recover from these severe blows to its physical fabric, social cohesion, and public image?
We’ll tackle that question in part 2.
