Foreword

OWEN HATHERLEY

Every Londoner has their own particular housing history, and it’s probably a complex one. Unless you’re one of the lucky people at either the top, with a house owned outright, or at the bottom, with one of the increasingly stringently means-tested council flats, you’ve probably been transient, moved from place to place, from flat to flat; in many cases, you’ll have moved further and further out from Zones 1 and 2 with every year, and not because of a preference for the outer parts of London. A lot of Londoners will have managed to live in many of the typologies discussed in this book – Victorian speculative houses, Peabody charitable tenements, Arts and Crafts semis, post-war council maisonettes whether architect-designed or standardised, Halls of Residence or ‘stunning riverside developments’, to name just some. What ‘housing’ analyses often leave out is the side-effects of housing: bedsits, subdivided houses, and – the newer typologies of contemporary London – the garages, ‘beds in sheds’ and the like. But to precede those histories, here’s mine, which I think is reasonably typical.

Like most ‘Londoners’, I wasn’t born here, but moved to the city at the age of 18, to study at a peripheral college of the University of London. The first place I lived was a Hall of Residence in New Cross, SE14. Halls of Residence have been a hugely successful type over the last 15 years, as developers like Unite and Nido have capitalised on the expansion in numbers and abdication of provision that happened after the introduction of tuition fees. This being 1999, it was somewhat more prosaic a 1960s brick box attached via a passageway to a large Victorian house. Rooms were small, containing a basin, a desk, bookshelves and a bed, with around 25 residents per floor sharing one very large kitchen and several toilets. Between the two buildings was a Victorian orangery and, curiously, a piano room. Rent was £55 a week (today, the average Unite room costs the equivalent of around five times that). It was surrounded with Victorian housing of a fairly high quality, rangy villas and Italianate terraces, and had a view of what was, at that point, the single tower of Canary Wharf.

My first actual rented accommodation was in what seems to be one of the major types for Londoners of any age – the subdivided flat above a shop, or in this case, a flat above a shop and the entryway to an MOT depot. Walls were paper-thin, as was the floor, meaning that the room shook every time a car went beneath, which was often. Rubbish left outside before council collections was moved by the owner of the depot to a huge, festering pile, so that it didn’t get in the way of the cars. I’m fairly happy to say this is the only place I’ve ever lived that has been demolished.

This was followed with the only move I made further into the centre rather than further east: to Loughborough Junction, in the un-named interzone between Brixton and Camberwell. The flat was in the sort of early nineteenth-century terrace – stucco, brick and order – that usually sells for enormous sums of money, but at this point was reasonably cheap, presumably due to the fact that there was no central heating, just ill-smelling gas heaters in each bedroom. The rent was cheap even for the time, with a single street block owned by a strange Withnail & I-like office nearby, staffed by chain-smoking, paunchy types in an office littered with papers on worn wooden furniture. You could go months without paying the rent before they would notice.

All these were brief stays. Afterwards I lived in Deptford, from 2003 to 2007, alternately studying for a Masters degree and signing on at the JobCentre, some years before it became ‘Job Centre’, a hipster cafe and bar. Deptford is echt London, littered with strange pointers to its history, ‘authentic’ and wildly faked. There was high architecture if you knew where to look – on the post-industrial wastes of Deptford Creek, Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Centre rehoused the dance school that has been here for decades in a surprising and appropriate long and low building clad in a drizzly frosted glass; further south along the river Ravensbourne, David Adjaye’s Stephen Lawrence Centre was, aptly, more harsh, with brutal volumes, a sharp steel screen and defensive gating protecting it from tiny, square and already gentrifying early Victorian terraced houses. On the riverside, the large London County Council (LCC) tenement blocks, with their long access decks, washing lines and grand archways felt almost Hanseatic, organised around extraordinary churches like Archer’s icy, English baroque St Paul’s or the freakish St Nicholas, with its pirate-ship skull and crossbones gateposts. The High Street, then as now almost devoid of both dereliction and chain stores, gives way to a side street with a junk market; the Albany Theatre, a typically mock-organic c.980 vernacular design with a parodically rustic spreading red-tiled roof; and some similarly restrained and traditional terraces designed when Nicholas Taylor was at the helm of housing in Lewisham in the 1970s. Naturally, I ascribe the fact that this is the only street in London where I’ve ever been mugged to the effects of their traditional design.

Circa 2000, new developments in Deptford turned their back on this dense and odd area, creating instead new spaces – first some closes of introverted semis around cul-de-sacs, then a development of tall, gated flats around a hilarious, Russian-designed statue of one-time resident Peter the Great, Tsar of all the Russias. Only a decade after this did the Big Bang come, with several new complexes of luxury flats, often claiming to be in Greenwich, the other side of the Creek. Some RBS-sponsored abstract volumes grew around the Laban Centre, clumsily approximating its drizzly glass; by the Stephen Lawrence Centre rose OneSE8, a gross and heavily gated development of flimsy tenements and towers. In both cases, it was hard not to assume that Herzog & de Meuron and Adjaye’s original, cranky public buildings had become unwitting Trojan horses for private property development. In Greenwich itself, half-a-dozen new towers rose on the site of a demolished 1960s LCC estate, all with their percentages of ‘affordable’ housing but with few if any social tenants. Along Resolution Way, this drew closer and closer to Deptford High Street and the housing estates, until council tenants and residents of the likes of OneSE8 were walking the exact same streets, shopping in the same supermarkets. The council flats themselves, when they were bought, could easily be sold to the sort of young professionals to whom OneSE8 was marketed – perhaps more easily, given that these flats were more handsome, better built, and often more spacious.

It is at the nearby Pepys Estate where Deptford’s housing complexities become almost obscene. A once highly praised LCC estate combining three tower blocks, several jaggedly articulated maisonette blocks and a few rehabilitated Georgian buildings, it was ‘regenerated’ in the early 2000s through selective demolition, the building of new speculative and Housing Association blocks on the allegedly ‘useless’ open spaces of the estate, and the total clearance of the riverside by Aragon Tower, which was refurbished and opened to private tenants at silly money for a one-bedroom flat. At the time, I was living on the High Street in a bedsit, paying out to a private landlord for a rodent-infested room (the skirting boards had been chewed straight through and all along), and sharing with, at one time or another, two security guards, two dance students, a small Polish family, a Slovak security guard, a German-Nigerian couple and a Liverpudlian pensioner; the bedsit had what the latter called ‘the smallest kitchen in Christendom’ and a single tiny bathroom, not easy given that I have an unpleasant gastroenterological condition. Naturally, I applied for a council tenancy. The local Housing Office was on the Pepys Estate. At the interview, the officer told me that if it was their choice, I’d get on the priority list, but rules were rules, and I could expect it to be nearly ten years before a flat would be available. As I looked up at the reclad, decanted, regenerated and socially cleansed Aragon Tower, it was hard not to think ‘No shit’.

Instead, I moved into another shared flat above a shop, this one in Greenwich and this time with people I actually knew. It says something about them that it was quite an enjoyable experience, given the staggering awfulness of the flat. My room had a slit-like window which never wholly closed and was almost hidden at the back of a built-in, open wardrobe. The bathroom featured a steep slope, and a ceiling crawling with mould and attendant creatures. At one point, the landlord constructed an extension on top of our flat. Builders crashed through the ceiling one morning, in Looney Tunes fashion. So oddly enough, the best place I’ve ever lived in London is where I live now: a council flat in SE18, although rented not from the council, but at several removes from the person who bought it in Right to Buy.

Woolwich is, in the parlance, ‘up and coming’ – particularly as it has such a huge amount of public land, currently used for public housing, ready to be re-classified as ‘brownfield’. This has already happened with the Connaught Estate, and is on the way for Morris Walk, the LCC’s flagship experiment in system-building (see this book’s cover). I suspect my estate is fairly safe, but as I look out of my window, I can see cranes constructing sober brick-clad tenements for developers, and green spaces just itching to be built on. Soon enough, it’ll be an area of ‘high value’, and the council will be legally pressured to sell the land. The place will look much the same – some of the council flats are even listable, and the Twentieth Century Society might get interested – but it will have been finally transformed. In all of this, the absence from my life, and from that of most Londoners, of the sort of housing that once defined London – publicly owned, with controlled rents – is so obvious it hardly even seems worth commenting upon. London is ‘housed’ today by landlords and estate agents, and the public actors who make up much of this book are going, going...