Cressingham Gardens Estate is a lovely place, leafy and green with warm, comfortable beautifully designed housing on a very human scale. A place that fosters community, and indeed, it is part of that post-war building of social housing whose architects believed in just that goal. There is a wonderful summary of how the utopian social vision of Lambeth Council and architects came together to create estates like Cressingham Gardens (built between 1967 and 1978) at the Municipal Dreams blog, so I won’t delve further into that here. I will, though, just share one of the wonderful quotes it has highlighted from Cressingham Garden’s architect Ted Hollamby:

We are not just dealing with housing as such.  We are building a community.  We don’t look at this in terms of so many houses. Rather we think in terms of the functions of a community. We don’t, you see, have club rooms for tenants but centres for a community.  We don’t have old people’s homes set aside on their own. We integrate them into other things we are planning (1).

Hollamby’s team also designed the homes beautifully both inside and out in the ways that they connect to Brockwell Park, making the most of the park’s beauty and open space for every resident of the estate (you can read more here and also at the Single Aspect blog, which has a bit more history of the site itself and design schematics). Community is what he created, and now that Cressingham Gardens is under threat of redevelopment by Lambeth Council, the community is very effectively fighting to keep their homes. We marched on Saturday from the estate to Brixton Town Hall, and you can see from the gathering here just how lovely the estate is (apologies for the phone-photos as well, I grabbed my camera without the memory card I’m afraid!)

We marched around the estate, again, it is lovely:

And then on to Lambeth Town Hall.

Why the march? I give you the words from the petition that you should sign in support of the Cressingham Gardens tenants:

Lambeth Council is considering the partial/full demolition and rebuild of Cressingham Gardens instead of simply repairing it. To fund the demolition and rebuild, they will be building extra new flats and homes on the estate that will be sold to raise cash for the council. This will destroy the existing vibrant community and affect every user of the beautiful Brockwell Park.

The tenants are awesome and organised, you can follow what’s happening at cressinghamgardens.org.uk, there’s a short film about the estate and campaign here, and you can also watch and listen to more video documenting their stories and their love of their estate at the older site savecressinghamgardens.co.uk. There’s an older article from last month’s Brixton Bugle here, but yesterday’s protest generated a lovely amount of press. More on the protest can be found again at the Single Aspect Blog, and Brixton Buzz has some more photos from the march when it reached the town hall. But the Guardian also printed an article from tenant Joanne Parkes about why they are fighting for their estate. She writes:

More than two years after Lambeth council told us our estate had been put into a regeneration programme because they couldn’t afford to repair it, we are marching to the town hall to show our opposition on Saturday.

We’re frustrated that no one from their side is listening to us, so we hope the protest will now catch their attention. The message must get through, before the borough’s cabinet committee decides our fate in December.

ITV also covered the protest, you can see that here. Hopefully this protest and its coverage will get the message through to the council. The health and safety issues and the way that the redevelopment at Myatt’s Field is pricing out previous tenants shows the pitfalls of such plans for redevelopment by Lambeth Council, and we need to stop it before the Cressingham Gardens community is similarly smashed and social housing lost to our wider community.

I went from this to the TUC march — the Cressingham Gardens protest was so much better. I think with Unison and UCU calling off strike actions this week and the TUC just being generally useless, this march was a general lesson in how together they have demobilised the labour movement. It’s quite shameful, I know we can do better, we must.

(1) Quoted in ‘Lambeth – Edward Hollamby talks to Peter Rawstorne’, RIBA Journal, July 1965

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