London’s Mayor has just announced London’s first Housing Zones, which are predicted to transform huge tracts of the city’s regeneration landscape, with £260m of new investment and 28,000 much-needed new homes fast-tracked across 9 London boroughs. Thamesmead – a large area on the outskirts of the city – is twice among the Zones announced, with the boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, and Peabody Homes, stepping forward to make a strong case for the revitalisation of this huge, and long-neglected district.
Built in the late 1960s, Thamesmead has been widely regarded as one of the UK’s biggest failed experiments in post-war social housing, with the optimism surrounding the arrival of its first residents soon overcast as the consequences of poor design and connectivity, and lack of amenities set in. Ironically, in cultural terms, Thamesmead is best known as the setting for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Channel 4’s Misfits, both of which draw upon the brutalist look of the pre-1974 system-built concrete buildings, to support their dystopian narratives.
While film companies continue to use Thamesmead for location shoots in this mould, Futurecity has developed cultural strategy provocations for the Thamesmead Futures Plan team at Peabody which, we hope, will help to open out the creative possibilities for the region as it enters a new phase.
These cover a range of areas – from the public and embedded arts, to the brokering of high-impact partnerships with the cream of London’s arts sector – so enabling Thamesmead’s 40,000+ residents to better access the city’s great cultural offer. We were able to draw Peabody’s attention to long-term, socially engaged artist residencies as a means to develop the local cultural agenda: the boundary-breaking practice of artists such as Curry Stone Design Prizewinner Jeanne Van Hesswijk (commissioned by Futurecity Cambridge), Superflux and Cascoland.
We have been heartened by Peabody’s enthusiasm for making culture and creativity a defining aspect of the terms on which Thamesmead is redeveloped and we look forward to the next phase of its life with great interest.
Image of creative residency in Thamesmead, summer 2014, by The Brick Box (c) Roxane Grant.
