A helicopter swoops over a sun-kissed marina, the place younger {couples} stroll alongside a waterfront promenade, between the masts of crusing boats and the chiselled concrete ziggurats of dashing fashionable flats. Up above, elevated walkways carry households from their entrance doorsteps to the futuristic city centre, the place a medical facility stands on stilts above a lake, and parades of outlets line a community of glistening canals.
It appears to be like like an commercial for a luxurious resort within the south of France, however these had been the plans for Thamesmead, the brand new city drawn up within the Nineteen Sixties by the architects of the Larger London council for a 650-hectare swathe of Thames estuary marshland. As a promotional movie trumpeted on the time, it was to be a spot the place 60,000 folks would stay “in environmental situations unmatched by something that has existed earlier than”. It might be a world of unpolluted, vibrant, spacious houses constructed with modular, factory-made concrete panels, with pedestrian life safely raised above visitors, and the delights of waterside residing out there to all on this cockney Venice-on-Thames.
“The plans had been so revolutionary,” recalled Terry Gooch in 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of Thamesmead. “We thought we’d be the beginning of that revolution.” His household was the primary to maneuver in, chauffeur-driven from their cramped flat in Peckham, the place that they had an outdoor bathroom and no toilet. They had been chosen because the “pioneers”, and ended up being the one residents for a while – residing in the course of a constructing website, ready six months for nextdoor neighbours to reach.
Architects and planners visited from throughout the globe to marvel on the courageous new waterworld, the place houses had been lifted above the floodplain in lengthy rows of stacked maisonettes exuding groovy 60s fashion. Thamesmead was showered with accolades, scooping a prestigious gong in 1969 from the Parisian Union Internationale des Architectes, for its “harmonious integration of human values, aesthetic expression and fashionable strategies”. The movie director Stanley Kubrick selected to movie A Clockwork Orange right here as a result of it embodied of the form of futuristic, refined, riviera-style setting that might make his scenes of “ultraviolence”, set to classical music, appear much more stunning. He needed the most recent, most forward-looking place, and Thamesmead was it.
However, like most 60s utopias, it didn’t fairly work out as deliberate. The novel building system led to leaks and damp; the parades of outlets by no means materialised, and the multi-levelled community of streets and bridges grew to become a complicated, crime-friendly labyrinth. Most damagingly of all, the promised Jubilee tube connection to central London didn’t occur, leaving the place minimize off, a modernist experiment marooned within the marshes on the ends of the earth.
It had been imagined as a blended group, with council houses alongside penthouse flats on the market, nevertheless it grew to become a spot the place solely essentially the most determined had been funnelled. When Margaret Thatcher abolished the Larger London council (GLC) in 1986, Thamesmead started a gradual decline, its possession and administration buildings cut up, its buildings left to moulder. The next phases deserted the municipal modernism of the 60s altogether, in favour of winding drives and cul-de-sacs of suburban brick houses, the entire place turning its again on the river, as if making an attempt to make the extraordinary setting as extraordinary as may very well be. A “city centre” lastly arrived within the 90s, nevertheless it took the type of a retail park, with supermarkets stranded in a sea of automotive parking on the sting of the marsh, a superb drive from most residents’ houses. The 00s noticed housing affiliation Gallions start to demolish chunks of the 60s concrete blocks and insert its personal lacklustre additions, leaving a forlorn array of brutalist fragments, new-build houses and rubble-strewn wasteland.
It was this inauspicious scenario that Peabody, one of many nation’s oldest and largest housing associations, took over in 2014. With Crossrail extending a tunnel of supercharged property hypothesis eastwards out of London to Abbey Wooden, simply south of Thamesmead, Peabody recognized an opportunity to capitalise on the bucolic riverside setting, now simply 25 minutes from the West Finish, and started drafting plans to double the variety of houses right here over the subsequent 30 years. This may not simply be housing to “ameliorate the situation of the poor and needy of this nice metropolis”, because the American banker-philanthropist George Peabody had supposed when he established his eponymous belief in London in 1862. As a substitute, it could be an train in “regeneration”, razing swathes of the property in an effort to construct flats on the market at a lot greater densities, with 35% classed as inexpensive – on a scale not often seen earlier than. As if that’s not sufficient, Peabody has additionally begun plotting an £8bn three way partnership with Lendlease, cleansers of the Heygate Property in Elephant and Fortress in south London, on a 100-hectare waterfront website subsequent door.
“We discovered ourselves within the uncommon scenario of getting accountability for a complete city,” says John Lewis, Peabody’s govt director for Thamesmead. He’s standing over a scale mannequin of the city plan within the advertising suite, a cabin erected on the rubble of the place rows of the sharply sculpted concrete terraces stood till just lately. “We’re answerable for 5,500 houses [about a third of the total in Thamesmead] throughout 750 hectares, in addition to six giant parks, 5 lakes, 7km of canals, 240 hectares of inexperienced house and 5km of riverfront. It’s the dimensions that you’d normally see a council concerned with.” Thamesmead straddles the borough boundary between Labour Greenwich and Tory Bexley, and is peripheral to each, making the councils traditionally joyful for it to be another person’s downside.
Thus far, Peabody’s try at enjoying city planner has had blended outcomes. Approaching Thamesmead from the brand new Abbey Wooden station, the very first thing you see, standing out among the many skyline of acquainted concrete kinds, is a cluster of latest towers clad in a mishmash of crimson, yellow, orange and white brick panels. The buildings’ lumpen massing and frenzied collage of colonnades, projecting home windows and totally different balcony sorts makes them look as if they’ve been cobbled collectively from a pile of leftover bits of different housing initiatives. Dubbed Southmere Village, it’s the joint work of Proctor & Matthews and the Dutch agency Mecanoo, and one thing appears to have been misplaced in translation. Of their desperation to present Thamesmead a “new identification”, the architects have created a placeless muddle, leading to what may very well be the product of an AI bot skilled on the New London Vernacular.
The blocks stand in a motley gaggle round a brand new public house, dubbed Cygnet Sq., which appears to be like on to South Mere – Thamesmead’s most important lake – the place a brand new group constructing and library, The Nest, stands on the water’s edge. This might have been a possibility to make a spectacular waterside civic sq., with proud public buildings of a calibre that lastly fulfilled Thamesmead’s goals. However the result’s a large number. The library, designed by Bisset Adams, appears to be like like a short lived gross sales workplace, consisting of a white container coated in jazzy perforated patterns, perched at a jaunty angle on high of a glass field. The sq. itself is a bleak expanse garnished with a cut-price water characteristic, the place the fountains have been out of motion for months.
“It appears like such a missed alternative,” says one resident, who has lived in Thamesmead for 25 years (and requested to stay nameless). “The brand new buildings stand out like a sore thumb – they seem like they may very well be anyplace. And the brand new sq. has created a large echo chamber. It’s only a huge empty expanse with a couple of weedy timber.” He lives in one of many refurbished towers close to the sq., the place he now has to sleep with a white noise machine at night time, because the sound reverberating across the house is so dangerous, exacerbated by what he perceives as a rise in delinquent behaviour for the reason that sq. opened.
He first moved to Thamesmead within the 90s, right into a flat on Binsey Stroll, the lakeside terrace made well-known by a watery tussle in A Clockwork Orange, which was sadly bulldozed in 2019. “I actually loved the structure,” he says. “My flat was vibrant and spacious. It wasn’t nicely insulated, so it may get chilly, nevertheless it definitely appeared to be of a better construct high quality than what we’ve received now.”
Different residents have much less fond reminiscences of their brutalist flats. “It was a bloody eyesore,” says Peter Houching, who lived on the seventh flooring of one of many 60s towers, and just lately moved into a brand new block in Southmere Village. “This feels a lot better than the place I used to be in earlier than. As soon as they’ve pulled all the things down, it will likely be an enchancment in the long term.”
Lewis insists Peabody’s strategy is pragmatic. “From a design aspect, I feel loads of the Nineteen Sixties work was fairly sensible and provoking,” he says. “However the practicalities of really making it work had been neither deliverable nor economically justifiable.” He describes problems with leaks, and dead-ends and undercrofts the place delinquent behaviour “couldn’t be designed out”. However essentially the most urgent purpose for razing the blocks, releasing tonnes of embodied carbon within the course of, appears to have been extra hard-nosed. “There’s the density difficulty,” says Lewis. “Our plans are doubling what was there.”
The positioning of Binsey Stroll is about to be occupied by a collection of seven-storey redbrick mansion blocks and a 16-storey tower of considerable girth, designed by Karakusevic Carson architects. It’s extra sober than the primary part however, as soon as once more, there may be little try and relate to the context of Thamesmead. Simply 59 of the 329 houses will probably be set at inexpensive lease, with 78 for shared possession.
Subsequent within the path of the demolition ball is the Lesnes property, to the south, the place the standard Thamesmead grid of three-storey homes organized round courtyards, threaded with ginnels and bordered by a row of 13-storey towers, will make means for an additional cookie cutter chunk of could-be-anywhereism. Of 1,950 houses, 279 will probably be shared possession, 307 inexpensive lease and simply 61 social lease – representing a lack of 43 such houses. Peabody says that the models are bigger, so there will probably be an total improve within the whole flooring space of social-rented houses.
The architects are Maccreanor Lavington and Gort Scott, and, as soon as once more, they seem to have little curiosity in partaking with the character of what’s already there. Their planning utility, just lately permitted by Bexley council, talks of making “a powerful sense of place” – but, the locations they cite as inspiration embody the stately Georgian townhouses of Fitzroy Sq., Marylebone Excessive Avenue and the Kreuzberg space of Berlin. They describe the present structure as “alien” and “unhomely”. In additional delicate palms, with a shopper that wasn’t so fixated on demolition, it’s potential to think about how the courtyard houses may very well be thermally upgraded and pedestrian legibility improved. Simply think about what Lacaton & Vassal may do with Thamesmead.
Lewis, who joined Peabody in 2016, after the preliminary path had been set, hints that the strategy would possibly slowly be shifting. “The carbon agenda has turn out to be a lot extra understood, even in the previous couple of years,” he admits. In future phases, “there may be extra elbow room to attain a long-term enchancment and enhancement plan, fairly than regeneration by means of demolition.” The Parkview property, to the east, is now earmarked for refurbishment fairly than rubble, and what stays of the Southmere property, subsequent to the lake, will probably be stored as a “heritage island”.
In Southmere, it’s potential to glimpse what an alternate strategy may need appeared like, notably within the new landscaping. The courtyards and alleyways have been improved with new planting, whereas the lake has been enhanced with reed beds and fishing platforms – led by Phil Askew, the panorama guru behind the 2012 Olympic Park. A shimmering boat home is on the way in which, designed by Structure 00, which led the conversion of the Lakeside Centre subsequent door into artists’ studios and a restaurant, run by the YMCA. The general public realm apply muf structure/artwork has additionally been engaged to remodel an extended, raised inexperienced house, often known as Abbey Means, in a collaborative “co-clienting” course of, which has seen a bunch of residents skilled in design. The plans embody a collection of curious “out of doors rooms”, with a lakeside chook disguise, a dancefloor in an orchard and the conversion of outdated pumping infrastructure right into a backyard, full with a dinosaur foot – a playful nod to the close by fossil park. Their designs channel the bizarre, singular histories of the place and, crucially, have interaction with the present group in an try and keep away from the sense that “it all the time feels as if cash is simply spent to draw individuals who don’t stay right here now”, as one resident put it.
A equally sympathetic angle could be discovered within the current rebirth of the 70s Moorings Sociable Membership, to the north-west, led by the artist Verity-Jane Keefe and the architects Venture Orange. Relatively than knock it down and change it with low cost tat, they launched into a programme of “care and restore”. Broken parquet flooring have been lovingly patched with vibrant swatches of inexperienced wood-chip terrazzo, new home windows have been put in, and the doorway has been jollied up with vibrant chequerboard tiles and a “Made in Thamesmead” vitrine of native merchandise, starting from beer and metallic angles, to Easter eggs and attire. A mini museum alcove contains the unique drawings of the constructing, a chunk of the outdated carpet and a few snooker balls, alongside a clutch of “no ballgames” indicators that Keefe stridently faraway from partitions throughout the property. “It was necessary that it didn’t really feel like a totally new house,” she says. “This was a spot that had hosted a long time of birthday events, weddings and group conferences, after which been left derelict for years. Why would you demolish one thing like that when you’ll be able to breathe life again into it?”
It’s a query that Peabody’s growth staff would do nicely to rethink extra broadly – whereas there’s among the spirit of Thamesmead nonetheless left.
