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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