Thamesmead

I'd been to Thamesmead once before, a flying visit, safely in the car with the doors locked.  I remembered the road running between blank concrete walls, like the Death Star trench, and the simply huge flyovers that appear to go from and to nowhere.  But at that youthful time (2003, on the way back from France in a friend's mum's BMW which fascinated HM Customs), I was less sensitised to the esoteric delights of concrete housing blocks.  

But, excited by Owen Hatherley's 'New Ruins of Great Britain', and engorged by a recent viewing of Clockwork Orange (which has a slow-motion ultraviolence fight scene filmed along the concrete lake there), I set off again to view the massive 'town of the 21st century'.

Thamesmead is a late 60s New Town, the only one built in London.  It sits in a largely inaccessible part of Zone 4, just south of the East-widening river.  The nearest Tube or DLR station is Gallions Reach.  But getting there involves swimming the Thames.  For a bit of August tailwind fun, I cycled there.

Thamesmead is, by the way, huge.  I'd love to see an oblique aerial shot.  Aparallel row and angle after row and angle, slight shifts in style like a lucky dip selection of English Brutalist leitmotifs.  I saw a sign for garages numbered 2005-2018.  So, unless the numbering system is whimsically perverse, there are shed loads of flats.    Wikipedia suggest the population is 50,000.  The parts around the lake are easily the best, even if the lake is now largely clogged with pondweed and trolleys and other urban jetsam.

The highish rise blocks.  

And some swans wondering where Greenwich is.

Near the bit where Alex's droogs get cinematically beaten up.

Have those clothes been hung out to dry?  In a lake?

Thamesmead is enduring some scorched-earth gentrification, with boxy old concrete blocks being replaced by, um, boxy new concrete blocks with render. 

 Replacing crap old with crap new.

Almost acknowledging that the new bits aren't actually any better (just not blighted by our cultural association of exposed concrete with poverty and violence), a few of the highish rise concrete blocks have been given a whitewash facelift.  They really look just like the brand new bits.

Stunning (re)development.

In places, the redevelopment appears to have taken the form of a dab of blue paint (reminding me of the bright yellow staircase from another baffling and unfriendly concrete megastructure, Lasdun's South Bank Centre).

Happy now?

As all good psychologists, and no architects, know, the repetitive uniformity of concrete estates does not appeal to the Englishman [apologies for the sexism], whose home, albeit one built on the Thames floodplain, is his castle.  Said Englishman will therefore gleefully etch a little of his character on his home.  There are lots and lots of foul personal touches, like those naff novelty phone cases that you can buy to keep your HTC Rumba free of grease from your Gregg's pasty.

Because my concrete home is half timber-beam 

Tudorbethan and half Georgian.

Because my concrete house is a gated country estate

(and / or prison).

Because my concrete house is a foul Thatcherite Plexiglass Portal 

(cf Surrey Quays Shopping Centre).

I suppose Thamesmead hoped to emulate the success of the City's Barbican.  Whilst it fails at this, it has managed to emulate the some of the Barbican's 'I can see where I want to go, but I have no idea how to get there' / 'Oh, this walkway goes nowhere' hilarity.

A Thamesmead flying walkway.  By MC Escher.

'Aborted walkway (always seem that hardest words to say)'

Thamesmead's failure is attributed in some part to the crap public transport thereabouts (it might once've had a bridge over the Thames or a Fleet Line tube station), which knackered the place's ability to appeal to commuters or basically anyone with a job outside a Thamesmead corner shop.  I couldn't even find the nearest train station, Abbey Wood, because some wag / prick had turned the signs round.  Incidentally, if approaching by bike, strictly the road signs that will send you pedalling wildly past HMP Belmarsh (which scares the hell out of me) along a whopping dual carriageway before suddenly depositing you at the massive flying roundabout above and just to the north of the lake-and-towers part of Thamesmead.  It is a perhaps unintentional, but utterly appropriate, vista.

I love dated versions of the future.

Failed and unloved as it may be, Thamesmead interests me far more than the smug Georgiana of windswept and paranoid Blackheath.  #personalvendetta