Thamesmead: A model Of Our Times

While I was out in the car yesterday, I found myself listening to a programme on Radio 4 about the wondrous place of Thamesmead. I have never thought much about Thamesmead before. I have only vague recollections of it being somewhere that elects an MP at every election and that it was somewhere around London. Actually, the place is on the south bank of the River Thames near Greewich and the bit they were concentrating on seemed to be the designer bit - West Thamesmead. The place is subtly located under the flight path of City Airport so noise is a continuous problem. Otherwise access to transport is very limited. You have to have a car to live here. Some of the original development has already had the bulldozers in. Walkways, tunnels, underground car parks that no one would use because of dangers of assaults as well as some of the unwanted housing; all have been converted into hardcore so that they can have another go at it.

The R4 programme seemed to bring out details of all the factors that made this place a working model of our society and all that is wrong with it. The development seems all too typical of great estates put up in the last 50 years; designed in concrete by architects who live in converted barns in Berkshire. Thamesmead looks like Cumbernauld with water. The idea had attractions in its early days; a new development on the banks of the Thames with lakes and gardens and a safe environment. It has, of course, become almost the complete opposite. It has become a centre for fraud, corruption, problem families, illegal immigrants, and so on. Mortgage fraud has been rife; there is more credit card fraud here than any place in Europe. Apartment blocks were built more to sell to amateur landlords than to people who actually wanted to live there and now these apartments are sold for half what people paid for them. The place is run down, without shops, without community facilities, without heart, a depressed wasteland. It's chief claim to fame is that it was used as the setting for the film "A Clockwork Orange", that despairing film of gangs and urban violence set to the music of Beethoven.

I am sure there are other Thamesmeads dotted around our countryside; and I am sure there will be more as planners decide on more crackpot models of where they think we ought to want to live.

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