Tavy Bridge, Thamesmead: In October and November 1994 I returned to Thamesmead, a New Town which I had first photographed nine years earlier and spent a few days wandering around the area, developed largely from the end of the 1960s by the GLC under architect Robert Rigg to house families from poor and overcrowded Victorian working-class terraces, particularly those in East London.
The planners hoped to grow some of the community that had existed in those working class areas by giving the families of the initial residents priority for new housing, and had s strong belief that the water in lakes and canals as a calming influence of those who lived among them. Neither policies were as effective as had been hoped.
Thamesmead is on low-lying land on the bank of the River Thames and had been flooded in 1953, so the living accommodation on much of the housing began at first floor level, with walkways there where people would meet and children play as they had done on the streets back in their old homes. The ground level was for cars, with roads and garages.
It didn’t work out too well in practice, partly because of a huge increase in car use, in part driven by the isolation of Thamesmead and poor public transport as well as increasing affluence. Shops, schools, pubs and more which might have been at the corner of the old streets were now much further away, and people increasingly got into cars, leaving the walkways deserted. And for those who did walk, there were almost always shorter routes at ground level across the streets and grassy areas than on the walkways.
As I think my pictures show, at least in part the result was an empty and rather alienating landscape, much used in films, notably Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian 1973 ‘A Clockwork Orange’, based on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel. And in real life it seemed also to encourage high levels of drug-related crime and violence with often racist gangs.
Thamesmead lies across the boundary of two London boroughs, Greenwich and Bexley, and the abolition of the GLC in 1985-6 was also a disaster for the development of the town, with ownership first being transferred to a new body, Thamesmead Town Limited (TTL) and later in 2000 the housing to Gallions Housing Association with Tilfen Land taking over the undeveloped land.
The Tavy Bridge area where this first section of pictures was taken was redeveloped by Gallions together with Wates Group – and new homes were then built with living accommodation at ground level, so almost certain to flood.
Along with these photographs (and more in black and white on Flickr) I also made a number of panoramic images around Tavy Bridge which will feature in a later post.
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