Last night I watched a documentary called 'We Was All One' which shows life in Bermondsey and Walworth in the 1970s and compares it to how life was in the decades before the area lost the dockyards and gained housing estates. The documentary was made by Thames Television and is available to watch on YouTube. I remember seeing it years ago and a couple of the people interviewed were grandparents and parents of some of the people I grew up with. It is a wonderful piece of social history and the old 'Marigold Girls' were wonderful. Strong, funny, tough old girls who had lived in poverty and coped in difficult times, now enjoying the odd bottle of stout or half pint of mild in the Marigold Pub, Bermondsey Street. They are funny old girls and, as they reminisce about bringing up a family in those tough times and tell stories about going 'hopping' in Kent, you are reminded that, although there is still some way to go before child poverty is eradicated (another 10 years if you are to believe Tony Blair who said back in 2000 'Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty. It will take a generation. It is a 20-year mission, but I believe it can be done.') poverty in 2010 is very different to the poverty of the pre benefit days these women raised their families in. These feisty women brought tears of laughter to my eyes with their tales. It is worth watching if only for the subtitles on the second piece of film. Someone with a limited command of the English language has attempted to subtitle the cockney accents - with some very funny results.
In one of the segments the mum of someone I know is interviewed, you can even see the girl I know, aged about 6, on a rickety old swing in the background. The family lived in Blendon Row, a truly Dickinson slum. The women all literally hung out of their windows, which over looked a tiny courtyard and gossiped. Several families shared an outside toilet and none of the dwellings had a bath. The children all played out in this grim, ugly place and everyone shared their living space with hoards of rats. The rats were almost tame, and certainly never fled when coming into contact with a human.
Compared to Blendon Row my tower block was luxurious living. Certainly when the estate was built, consisting of five tower blocks, they were luxurious compared to the slums they were replacing. It might have been a better idea to repair and modernise the old Victoria terraces they demolished to make way for the tower blocks because although the central heating, fitted kitchens and indoor bathrooms and toilets of these 20 storey high blocks of flats were very welcome, nearly all the people housed in them missed the camaraderie of slum living. Suddenly neighbours were enclosed in tight little units, windows did not overlook other windows but were vast frames for amazing views of the city, a city were people were tiny ants moving around far below. Last week I was talking to friend who had grown up with me on the estate and we remember it fondly, the nooks and crannies, the underground car park which was full of individual lock up garages, in an age when hardly anyone had a car and were destined to become 'camps' for scores of kids, the upper level of sheds, the mazes and ramps and hiding places that made our concrete jungle an adventure playground. Although a very modern sixties building the architects had gone wild with their imagination and couldn't settle on a theme so the flats were all windows, the entrance passages and lobby was decorated to resemble Aztec caves with carvings on the walls - interspersed with 3D shapes made out of, no doubt, asbestos, and the landscaping outside was cobbled walkways and walls made out of broken stones which meant all of us kids were always sporting grazes.
On Facebook I came across pictures of the Bonamy Estate, build at around the same time as my estate but consisting of low rise blocks that sprawled from Ilderton Road to Catlin Street near the Old Kent Road. It was divided into 'ways' and each 'way' was connected by a walkway on ground level. At the Catlin Street end there was a level with several shops and a pub called the 'Apple and Pears'. The flats ranged from bedsit size to six bedroomed accommodation and were huge. The estate didn't last very long, build in the late 1960s it was demolished in the 1990s because there was a problem with the concrete used to build it. Looking at photos now it looks pretty grim but on the whole the people who lived there seemed to have loved it, or at least their children did, judging by the comments made on FB. The flats were large and airy and each 'way' had its own character. Those who have commented on FB miss it and all have very happy memories of growing up there. There are some great pictures of the Silver Jubilee on the 'Bonamy Estate' FB group and you get the feeling that there was some competition between the 'ways' over who had the best street party.
Estate living has had some very bad press and I must admit that on my travels round South London I find some of them, even the brand new ones, a bit depressing. But I loved my tower block home. Like the old Bonamy dwellers I have wonderful memories of playing out in my concrete jungle. My own children, although brought up on a very different estate to the one I grew up on, loved the freedom that estate living gave them.
Some of the slum dwellers, moved away from friends and a different way of living day to day, may have disliked their pristine, rat free, fully plumbed homes and seen them instead as prisons, but their children seem to have taken to living on estates like ducks to water.
Children, it would seem, have the ability to make a playground wherever it is they find themselves. Adults, unfortunately, can only make a home in some places. It isn't only about the accommodation and whether or not it has all the mod cons, it is about the infrastructure, the community and the need for people to feel they belong.
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