The Failures of “Regeneration” Exposed on the 6th Anniversary of the Violent Eviction of the Tidemill Garden Occupation in Deptford (original) (raw)

A photo taken during the stand-off between campaigners on the one hand, and the police and bailiffs on the other, following the violent eviction of the two-month occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford on October 29, 2018. (Photo: Hat Vickers).

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

Six years ago yesterday, a bold experiment in people power — involving challenging political myopia in relation to London’s housing crisis, celebrating the provision of green space for local people, and publicizing environmental concerns regarding clean air and mitigating the worst effects of traffic pollution — came to a violent end in the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, in south east London.

On the morning of October 29, 2018, notorious union-busting bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council undertook a terrifying pre-dawn raid on the handful of campaigners camping out in the garden as part of its two-month occupation, to prevent its destruction as part of an ill-conceived and inappropriate housing development.

Throughout the rest of the day, as the bailiffs tore down trees and structures within the garden, there was a tense stand-off with campaigners, as a line of police protected a line of bailiffs, attempts to reoccupy the garden were violently repulsed, and individual incidents of violence against campaigners — and even passers-by — were widespread.

To mark the occasion, please feel free to listen to ‘Tidemill’, my heartfelt lament for the garden’s destruction, recorded with The Four Fathers in summer 2022, and with the great multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart, who also plays electric piano on it, as the producer. Available on Bandcamp to listen to, or to buy as a download, ’Tidemill’ is also featured on our new album, ’Songs of Loss and Resistance’, which is also available as a limited edition CD.

A magical green space, the garden, with its wonderful Indian bean trees and an idyllic canopy of other mature and semi-mature trees, had been laid out in concentric circles, with a pond and a small island at its centre, connected by wooden footbridges, in the late 1990s by teachers, and pupils and their parents as a visionary re-imagining of the grounds of the Victorian Tidemill primary school. As well as providing a refreshing green space in a dense urban environment, its trees, as they grew, also protected the garden from the high level of toxic air pollution recorded on the nearby A2 and the equally traffic-choked Deptford Church Street.

The garden had been earmarked for destruction for a decade, as part of the re-development of the school, which moved to a new site across the road in 2012. However, as plans for its re-development — as a mixture of private housing for sale, shared ownership deals and allegedly affordable rented social housing — stalled and were challenged by campaigners, the local community was allowed ‘meanwhile use’ of the garden, opening it up at weekends for gardening projects, and for musical and artistic events.

The council finally approved its re-development plans in September 2017, working with Peabody, the formerly philanthropic housing association that, in common with many large housing associations, had increasingly come to resemble a private developer in the market-led provision of housing under New Labour and then the Tories. When it came to handing back the keys to the garden, however, which was meant to take place on August 29, 2018, the occupation began instead, securing mainstream media coverage, and attracting widespread support from housing and environmental activists around the world.

Following the eviction, at extortionate cost, the bailiffs were then paid to guard the shattered garden for 24 hours a day for several months, intimidating local residents through their generally antagonistic attitude, and the use of bright lights and guard dogs within the garden itself, which resembled a kind of depopulated “buffer zone” in an area of armed conflict — or perhaps, more accurately, in an area of violent and contested occupation.

Eventually, the last of the garden’s trees were torn down, in February 2019, but building work didn’t begin for another 20 months, until October 2020, and, even now, four years later, is incomplete.

The dense and unattractive housing blocks of Peabody’s ‘Frankham Walk’ development, on the site of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, photographed on August 28, 2023. 2-30a Reginald Road, the block of 16 council flats also earmarked for destruction, is on the left of the photo, beyond the new builds. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

The dense and unattractive new housing blocks squatting on the former garden like a mausoleum are largely unoccupied, while the conversion of the Victorian school buildings into ‘luxury’ private flats and ‘townhouses’ for sale continues to proceed at a glacial pace. In addition, plans for the demolition of a structurally sound 1960s block of council housing, 2-30a Reginald Road, seem to have been abandoned entirely, their tenants messily dispossessed, and replaced by “temporary” tenants and property guardians.

It’s difficult not to see the entire Tidemill re-development project — carefully named ‘Frankham Walk’, in an effort to banish the ghosts of its destruction — as cursed, although its painfully slow arc of construction also reflects a general downturn in the viability of the whole of the hideously compromised public/private “regeneration” and housing development industry of the last 20 years, in which the “private” component — homes for private sale — have become increasingly unaffordable, while the allegedly “affordable” components providing deals for lower-paid workers have been largely swallowed up by hideous ‘shared ownership’ deals that are, largely, a toxic debt trap, and the promises of guaranteed homes at “affordable” rents for social tenants seem to have become largely spectral.

It’s a thoroughly broken system, in which what is desperately needed is investment in genuinely affordable social housing, and an end to the greed of private developers and housing associations, although that, sadly, is as far from the minds of our current crop of corporate-addled politicians as it’s possible to get, with Keir Starmer’s dismal Labour government proudly declaring its intent to not spend even a single penny of government money on housing.

As a result, Labour’s bold claims that it will build 1.5 million homes over the course of the current Parliament mean nothing, as these homes — even if developers can be persuaded to build them — will fail to address the persistent issues of unaffordability that everyone involved in politics and housing over the last 20 years — Labour governments and councils, just as much as their Tory counterparts — unwisely created, and whose failures they have done nothing to address.

As the Tidemill “regeneration” also shows, the days when the entire “regeneration” industry was able to present itself as viable are also long gone, meaning that, without a drastic overhaul, Labour’s tinkering will be pointless, simply creating more unaffordable homes that are unlikely to benefit anyone except private landlords buying properties and squeezing tenants for as much rent as they can get away with. To be blunt, private developers have swamped the market in a failing economy strangled by neoliberal greed and permanently limping from the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, just as their housing association lapdogs have done in the mixed developments where private owners, and the various categories of renters and shared ownership tenants are supposed to live side by side.

Peabody’s slow progress at Tidemill undoubtedly reflects its wider problems, as at Thamesmead, for example, where its ambitious — or, more accurately, its hubristically over-ambitious — £2bn plan to regenerate the famous Brutalist estate on the outskirts of London is an evident victim of overreach, with large parts of the existing housing pointlessly vacated and demolished, but no new homes built, while the supposed “landmark” developments that have been completed are soulless and forlorn.

Cygnet Square, the soulless centrepiece of Peabody’s “regeneration” of Thamesmead, photographed under construction on October 20, 2021. (Photo: Andy Worthington, via ‘The State of London‘).

Currently, the residents of the Lesnes Estate, part of the Thamesmead project earmarked for demolition and “regeneration”, are fighting a brave battle against their own social cleansing, which we must all hope will eventually be successful. In particular, they are demanding that their existing homes be retrofitted rather than demolished, a demand for environmental awareness amongst developers that has been growing in recent years, as the unforgivably polluting aspects of the “demolition and rebuild” industry have come under closer scrutiny, given its major role in generating greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a lesson that Lewisham Council and Peabody also ought to observe regarding the future of 2-30a Reginald Road, where all logic dictates that its demolition is environmentally unforgivable, and that it too should be upgraded rather than demolished and replaced.

Campaigners on the Lesnes Estate in Thamesmead on April 6, 2024. (Photo via Housing Rebellion).

As a microcosm of the “regeneration” scam, Tidemill — sorry, ‘Frankham Walk’ — is hardly less forlorn than Peabody’s Thamesmead “regeneration”, benefitting only, unlike Thamesmead, from the proximity of a vibrant existing community: Deptford itself, working class and multi-cultural, but also, generally, not overly impressed by efforts to “gentrify” it by the council and Peabody, who should have listened all those years ago to those who were telling them that their plans were unwelcome and inappropriate.

So much money could have been saved, and so much pointless and distressing violence averted — and we would, moreover, still have a magical green space in the centre of Deptford that those us who loved it still miss every day.

Note: For a further celebration of the campaign to save the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, please see Hat Vickers’ wonderful documentary film, ‘The Battle for Deptford’, which is available on YouTube here.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.