Heygate Estate, The Manufactured Failure of A Utopia
More than 15 years ago, in June 2010, I visited Heygate Estate, Elephant & Castle, in south London. The housing estate had been almost empty
at the time.
I had passed by the massive buildings hundreds of times over the previous years and witnessed it slowly emptying. I used the occasion to document what was left of the estate, with most buildings already sealed off and starting to deteriorate.
Heygate Estate was less than 40 years old at the time. Designed by architect Tim Tinker, [The estate was built on ‘slum’ cleared land and completed in 1974] in the 1960s and completed in 1974, it housed more than 3000 people. In the style coined as “neo-brutalist”, heavily influenced by Le Corbusier, both architecturally and socially, it consisted of a mixture of building sizes with wide green spaces and gardens between them.
The great majority of the people living here were council tenants, with a smattering of leaseholders who exercised their right to buy from the 1980s. And while my photos only capture the state of decline, it must have been a buzzing and marvellous space to live at some point, some of which was still possible to visualize when I visited.
This decline however was not the necessary fallout of a “social experiment”, it was the consequence of deliberate political and urban planning decisions take in the 1990s, when the idea of how people would live in London started to shift dramatically.
Heygate Estate fell victim to the “regeneration” of the area called Elephant & Castle, once a working class area with a vibrant migrant community, and which has changed into an area of modern high-rises.
Its former heart, the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, closed in September 2020 to be demolished (I witnessed the last day of the shopping centre, too).
The demolition of the buildings started ten months after my visit, while the legal battle between the council and some of the remaining residents continued. (BBC, July 2013)
Some took legal action, and a few even stayed as squatters after all legal avenues had been closed. The last few residents were finally evicted by bailiffs in November 2013.
Heygate was not a “failed experiment”, it was made to fail. If we contrast Heygate to the Barbican, which was build around the same time, we see the stark differences. Against popular belief, the Barbican was not built to create affordable housing, but as a home for affluent people working in the City of London. And because of this clientele, it received constant investment for maintenance and modernization, while Heygate was starved into decline.
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It is no coincidence that Southwark Council began discussing the estate’s replacement in when the housing investment boom set in, during a time of near 0% interest rates for developers. Heygate, only 30-min walk away from London bridge, with access to several underground lines and a railway station, was in a prime location for developers. There was money to be made here.
Tim Tinker, the architect, later described Heygate’s reputation as a “farrago of half-truths and lies put together by people who should have known better.” (BBC, July 2013). “There weren’t any problems [with the estate] until relatively recently, but the council eyed it as an opportunity” he said in 2011. (The Guardian, 2011).
They should have known better. In September 2013 it emerged that Southwark Council had looked at different options for the estate in 1998: The surveyors at the time found that the buildings were structurally sound and recommended refurbishment.
As such, Heygate became “a paradigmatic example” for the “state-led gentrification and social cleansing of low income tenants from inner London” (Lees, Ferreri, 2016).
The estate is now a faint memory. It is sad what could have been done if proper investment had been made. Unlike other brutalist experiments, like the Barbican, Alexandra Road or the Brunswick Centre, Heygate does not appear in architectural table books.
The real story can only be told by the former residents. All I have to add to its history are those images of its last days.
References
Heygate compulsory flat purchase order is upheld, BBC, July 2013
The death of a housing ideal, The Guardian, March 2011
Romyn, M. (2016). The Heygate: Community Life in an Inner-City Estate, 1974–2011. History Workshop Journal, 81, 197–230. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43917365
Loretta Lees, Mara Ferreri. Resisting gentrification on its final frontiers: Learning from the Heygate Estate in London (1974–2013), Cities, Volume 57, 2016, Pages 14–24, ISSN 0264–2751
All images by Wolfgang Hauptfleisch
