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.’¹

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-at-heel, which fed into the wider spectacle of the sink estate – now a major trope in mainstream popular culture.² 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.’³

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

Fig 1.

Map of the Heygate Estate in the late 1970s. Bernard Canavan and Anna Davin.

Newman and Alice Coleman in 1972 and 1985 respectively,⁴ the concept of large-scale social housing was increasingly rejected. Underpinned by environmental determinism and crude social stereotypes, the belief that flatted inner-city housing is inherently flawed has since then become normative. But what of the residents living in such housing? How did they experience life in the new estates? And how were they affected by the ideological rejection of the whole project?

By exploring the lived experience of former Heygate tenants through oral history interviews, this piece shows how an initially strong and stable community was eventually weakened by material neglect, turnover of residents and growing social disorder, and how ultimately it was destroyed by the forces of regeneration. But further, it illustrates community resilience in the face of such pressures and a sense of unity and belonging that, for some tenants, lasted until the very end. In doing so, it challenges official and media-generated representations of the estate, and examines the stigmatization it endured.

The article draws on the testimony of sixteen people: eleven residents; the leaders of two Heygate youth clubs; the manager of a community inclusion project which operated out of the estate; the minister of the Heygate-based church; and the estate’s chief architect. All respondents knew the Heygate intimately and had, at some point in its history, had a stake in the community. Capturing representativeness posed an obvious problem, particularly as the estate was all but empty at the time of...