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The Heygate: Community Life in an Inner-City Estate, 1974–2011

As a young girl growing up in South London in the 1960s, on the doorstep of the Elephant and Castle junction, Freda Nixon saw her world transformed. In a bold and ambitious piece of post-war reconstruction, this ruinous landscape of bombsites, remnants, and late-Victorian tenements was remade in the Modernist architectural aesthetic of exposed concrete and glass. All around her emerged towering office blocks, a purpose-built shopping centre and various municipal superstructures. Biggest of all was the Heygate estate, a prefabricated concrete construction assembled mere yards from her family home on the nearby Rockingham estate. In 1979, after petitioning Southwark Council for a home of her own, Mrs Nixon, then twenty-three, was handed the keys to a flat on the still-sparkling Heygate. It was a short trip across the New Kent Road, and one she made with an abundance of optimism. ‘Oh it was a posh estate. I don’t know if you can imagine it . . . but oh it was beautiful, it was lovely.’ Just twenty-eight years later, in 2007, Mrs Nixon and many of her fellow tenants made a long-expected exodus from the estate. Its chronic problems included underinvestment with accompanying material degradation, and an ever more insistent media-driven narrative of hopelessness and blight. Adopted as a backdrop for numerous films and TV series, most notably The Bill, the estate was invariably depicted as gritty, perilous and down-atheel, which fed into the wider spectacle of the sink estate – now a major trope in mainstream popular culture. In 2004 the council made the decision to demolish the Heygate, and the decant started three years later. In a seemingly easy consensus, public and professional opinion had largely written the Heygate off as a misguided experiment which had lost any practical or theoretical validity. ‘For everything that’s wrong with London’s housing and built environment, look to the Heygate’, decried one commentator. ‘Its broken lifts, broken lights, piss-soaked corridors and violent crime came to signify everything wrong with the post-war approach to social housing.’ The story of the Heygate is a familiar one in Britain’s unhappy history of mass housing. Once viewed as the essential housing form of the modern city, large flatted estates are now widely seen as symbolizing the mistakes of the post-war welfare state. Condemned in influential studies published by Oscar