After Lesnes Estate occupants are ordered to vacate their properties, the threat of court proceedings loom large, but this residential demolition exercise has never been black or white. It is clear that it is more profitable to first let a community crumble, and then sell it as a solution.
Text and photos: Harry Allen
The transformation of Thamesmead serves as a cautionary tale.
The displacement of long-standing residents in the name of “regeneration” erases decades of community bonds, cultural heritage, and social history, no matter how much Peabody try to push positive-spin on their pseudonymic website ‘ThamesmeadNow.Org’ which dominates most Google search traffic relating to the town. This invention of a certain history blending smoothly with the new wave of gentrification is blatant ‘storywashing’, and it serves to deflect the barrage of negative press coming from many disgruntled residents, campaigners, and media outlets.
Other forms of this include artwashing: the process of bringing artists into an area to facilitate regeneration and make an area trendy for developers to then swoop in.
In Thamesmead’s case, some of the original buildings will remain, but only since they neatly fit into the marketing plan that attempts to catch outsiders interested in its quirky cinematic past.
If Peabody spent as much time trying to rehome residents with dignified reimbursements for their possibly demolished properties,, or refurbish existing residential homes, they would’ve perhaps made more progress. They’re instead more focused on demoralising the existing occupiers by leaving waste piled high outside vacated properties, only recently removing it after months of being shamed into it.
When it comes to crime, only on the 27th of September, after months of pleading are the police coming to address the mini crime wave affecting the community. As some residents have inevitably been forced to leave their homes, police resources are pulled out.
Thamesmead’s issues are not just about demolishing buildings, but about dismantling an entire way of life, and as a result, many locals, and activists, even from outside the Lesnes estate, have moved into properties not boarded up already to prevent further erasure of the iconic South London estate.
These hard-line occupants are fighting the good fight to protect other residents stuck in limbo.
Contradictions in the boardroom
John Lewis, the executive director of Peabody, and Non-Executive Director of the Creative Land Trust, embodies a glaring contradiction within London’s property and creative sectors. The Creative Land Trust is a charity that vows to protect affordable spaces for artists, championing the city’s cultural vitality.
Meanwhile, Peabody’s projects dismantle the very communities that foster this organic creativity, replacing them with developments that sound good in theory but strip away their soul.
This is not just a clash of values – it is a reflection of a property market driven by superficial ideals, like profit and glossy marketing material, to make projects look good, whilst genuine principles like community and creativity are lost.
The Creative Land Trust speaks of addressing the “serious threat to the wellbeing and prosperity of a city so reliant on creativity for its success.”
Their mission is to save artists struggling with rising rents and the instability of temporary workspaces, providing them with the security they need to thrive. When it comes to apparent threats, and rising rents, Lesnes Estate residents will tell you this is straight out of the Peabody playbook. Two declared interests, two contradicting tones.
In Ancient Greece, the ouroboros concept is where a snake is constantly devouring itself in the hope to be reborn.
Create the problem, build the solution, rinse and repeat until London is socially sanitised.
For years now Thamesmead residents service charges have been rising, social housing stripped, community facilities dismantled, and the iconic towers, at least some, left abandoned or already demolished.
The Creative Land Trust’s catchy slogans are a way to market a vision of London that papers over the real issue: a property market that prioritizes profit, risk aversion, and people last (if there’s any space to do so).
In this particular case, it is middle to upper class artists sitting in a renovated studio, completely unaware of the community breakdown that came before them.
At Lesnes Estate, this becomes painfully clear. Here, residents and activists are fighting not just against the physical destruction of their homes, but against the erasure of their community’s deep rooted, and diverse working class identity.
Gentrification is not simply a matter of improving infrastructure; it is about stripping away the “rough edges” that make a neighbourhood unique. And in a market driven by superficial values, those edges are not seen as valuable anymore.
In Thamesmead, once a setting for Stanley Kubrick’s “A clockwork orange”, the metaphor becomes reality.
Just as the “clockwork orange” symbolizes something organic stripped of its essence and mechanized, Peabody’s developments are reducing Thamesmead to something functional but lifeless.
The driving force here is not social concern or a long-term vision for a buzzing community – it is profit, and the slow sacrifice of social housing that has plagued countless other estates long before the Thamesmead debacle.
A nationwide housing epidemic
This isn’t just a tension between two organizations. It is a reflection of a broader problem in London’s asset and property market: the absence of guiding morals.
In a city that loves to talk about creativity, it seems it is only welcome if it fits neatly into a high-end development plan. But you simply can’t manufacture creativity to cleanse yourself of the contradictions.
This ongoing shift from social housing to private ownership under the guise of regeneration is symptomatic of a larger issue in London and beyond. As social housing stock dwindles, replaced by high-priced developments marketed to wealthy investors, working-class Londoners are being pushed to the fringes, both geographically and economically.
What’s happening in Thamesmead is emblematic of a city that’s rapidly losing its soul and finding it replaced by flat-packed new builds where humans are packed into boxes..
Where things stand now
You can sit in the new Thamesmead estates, and feel as though you’re in any generic redeveloped British suburb. It is not just social cleansing, but the dumbing down of an experimental architectural vision built for family homes, in favour of smaller units built for short-term city dwellers, tourists, and asset managers looking to put money into a purportedly safe property market.
The question is no longer whether regeneration is necessary – most in Thamesmead agree that improvements are needed on the Lesnes Estate, and there are multiple examples of that already where residents have refurbished their own properties.
There is also a clear need to build more housing in Bexley where the social housing waiting list sits at around 7000 people, but Peabody have no plans to cater to this enormous social housing backlog.
In a similar move of inaction, Local MP Abena Oppong Asare has so far erred on the side of caution with a 2020 covid-related report named “Leaving nobody behind in Erith and Thamesmead”, but it still fails to mention the impact of Peabody’s plans.
Fighting for a few hundred, soon to be evicted residents is obviously not worth the toil, when plenty of progressive, middle-class renters will flood the constituency and vote her back in, fresh off the buzz of ‘regeneration’.
When it comes to Thamesmead, you have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors, as the undercurrents driving this transformation are far more complicated.
It has become clear that it is more profitable to first let a community crumble, only to sell it back as a solution.
Back in April, residents on the Lesnes Estate held a sit in to protest to prevent further demolition plans, despite Peabody themselves affirming that regeneration “is the best option” for the estate. There is a clear lack of will to even address the most basic concerns. Tight-knit communities are being replaced with sterile, transient developments, and genuine creativity is swapped for artificially curated, polished spaces. The very fabric of London’s identity is being diluted, with each new project stripping away the soul of neighbourhoods like Thamesmead.
In the end, what is being sold is not progress – it is a sanitized version of what once made these imperfect places truly special.
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