Thamesmead residents resist Peabody wrecking ball

“Peabody is a charity, okay?” said the serious young man at the top table, but he couldn’t finish his point as the room erupted into guffaws of laughter.

It was a meeting in August 2017 hosted by the newly formed Abbey Wood Homeowners Association - set up in response to Peabody’s plans for a massive regeneration scheme which would include the demolition of their homes on the Lesnes Estate.

The Peabody rep had already warmed up the crowd with such comic gems as “you are under no obligation to sell your home to us at this stage.” Which is about as reassuring as telling someone looking at an oncoming tsunami that they are under no obligation to run.

His comedy partner from the local council feigned outright confusion about why residents were in such a “panic” when no planning permission had been granted yet and she insisted that council officers had told her “ it’s too early for them to even know what’s going on because it’s still just Peabody plans”. Maybe this local ward councillor was genuinely clueless, but surely she should have known that a hybrid planning application for the entire scheme had been unanimously approved by Bexley council in 2016 - which the lead architects for the scheme even boasted is “unheard of for projects of this scale.”

Resident after resident demanded to know why Peabody would be investing all this money into these plans if they didn’t already know that it would be approved. And in a room where the vast majority of attendees were working class people from ethnic minorities, one resident cut to the heart of the issues at stake when she demanded to know from the Bexley councillor,  “What grounds will you use to accept that it's okay to drive these people away and bring better people? Who are the better people that Peabody will bring here? What grounds will you use to accept Peabody taking over our land and property? The people that they will bring here - what colour of skin will they have? What kind of jobs do they do?  What manner of people do you want in Bexley?”

Housing Associations are Big Business

Huge profits are now being generated by Housing Associations, such as Peabody, through the construction and sale of private homes at market prices, and according to SHAC, a campaign group run by residents and workers in Housing Associations, they are “losing their integrity as charitable organisations and are becoming indistinguishable from private developers entirely focused on private rents and sales”.

Jump forward to October 2022 and, as predicted, Phase 1 of the South Thamesmead regeneration is now complete and Peabody has been granted planning permission for phase 2 to 7 which includes the Lesnes Estate. Those residents who have stayed in their homes are surrounded by empty boarded up properties and piles of rubbish. Colourful hoardings have gone up, covered in welcome messages to prospective buyers and glossy computer-generated images of the new development to be built on the site of their demolished homes.

How familiar.

Time and again we see residents who raise objections at the beginning of a regeneration project being soothed and petted and patronised with earnest entreaties to engage in the consultation process and assured that it’s much too early to jump to negative conclusions about the eventual outcome. 

Residents who raise objections after the decisions have been finalised are ignored, dismissed and bullied before being literally bulldozed out of the way. 

Thankfully at every stage in this war against working class communities, there are residents who expose the reality of what is going on and organise resistance.

Dr Johnel Olabhie is one such warrior who, along with his neighbours, has vowed to resist every attempt to demolish their homes. “We came here when nobody wanted to live here,” said Johnel. But now that the Elizabeth Line links Abbey Wood to Canary Wharf in 11 minutes, this is prime real estate and people like Johnel are being forced out. The prices they will receive for their 4 bed family homes will never be enough to buy similar homes in the same area. Many who are elderly or nearing retirement are angered by suggestions of taking out a mortgage to cover the cost of a more expensive property. Downsizing is not an option with adult children still living at home, precisely because of the exorbitant cost of renting and buying in the area.

And why should they have to sell or move or downsize? The rationale for demolishing and rebuilding is always the same. Peabody claims the estate is run down; the buildings are old and hard to heat and expensive to maintain; the area needs investment. But who will really gain from their plans? 

The housing in Thamesmead was built with public money in the 1960’s to house people moving out of poor quality private housing in South London. When Thatcher shut down the Greater London Council in 1986 this public land and housing was reconstituted as a community controlled private company. Then during the great stock transfer swindles of the New Labour era, when many council estates were being transferred, gratis, to housing associations, Thamesmead was also converted to charity ownership. Housing Associations were supposed to provide the new investment and expert management that would safeguard homes as social housing in perpetuity. 

Within a couple of decades many smaller housing associations, after piling up debt on the open market, were easy prey for mergers and take-overs by the more successful Housing Associations. The most successful Housing Associations were those who took advantage of the new opportunities afforded by increasing deregulation under developer-funded Tory governments, allowing them to generate huge wealth by building for private sale and renting at market rent levels. So in 2014, as the Thamesmead area looked forward to the arrival of Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line), it was Peabody who took over the smaller housing associations in the area, with the express intention of razing it all to the ground and embarking on a multi-billion pound frenzy of speculative new house building.

Their partner in crime in large areas of Thamesmead is Lendlease, the global property baron responsible for the notorious Heygate disaster.

And of course they couldn’t carry out any of their plans without the enthusiastic backing of Bexley and Greenwich Councils and the generous creation of ‘opportunity areas’ by the Mayor of London, even if that does mean they have to run resident ballots to make it appear they are working in the interests of local people. 

A load of old ballots

In another familiar story of fake consultation, residents of the Lesnes Estate were asked in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, to vote on whether they would like to be part of the regeneration of the Thamesmead area. The ballot information made absolutely no mention of the word ‘demolition’ and only emphasised the gains that regeneration would provide, such as improvements to services, the public realm, green spaces and community amenities. If that didn’t sound like something everyone would want to be included in, the residents were told that if they voted 'No' then Peabody would maintain their homes “as best we can” and would just come up with a new proposal. Retrofitting and refurbishing their homes to a high standard was never up for a vote. The prospect of further ‘managed decline’ of the estate before being asked to vote again probably did not leave many residents feeling they had much alternative.

Johnel is angry that houses identical to his own in a nearby estate have been maintained and landscaped to a lovely standard while his home is surrounded by similar structurally sound properties which were boarded up after the secure tenants were moved out, and condemned as uninhabitable.

Just as we have seen the deliberate underfunding of the NHS as the necessary precursor to privatisation, the deliberate running down of social housing is a well established strategy to justify demolition and demoralise residents who would otherwise choose to stay.

The environmental cost of demolition 

The pungent smell of greenwash in the Thamesmead master plan is overpowering, but the real environmental cost of demolishing and rebuilding has clearly not even been considered in the rush to dramatically increase the density of housing in this area. Demolishing buildings which are still structurally sound wastes the embodied carbon used to build them in the first place; cycle paths and tree saplings will never make up for the vast amount of new carbon emissions generated by the steel and glass and concrete in the new buildings' construction. 

Refurbishment is by far the more environmentally sustainable option and according to the Mayor’s London Plan it should always be the first option given the hugely negative social as well as environmental impact of demolition. But there is no evidence this option has ever been explored.

We are in a housing and homelessness crisis

Maybe we could think differently about the balance of interests between existing residents or environmental considerations, and the gains of the new development, if we bought in to the idea that this new housing would help other people out of homelessness or make buying a home more accessible to people trapped in overpriced, inadequate and insecure private rentals. But we don’t.

In the first phase of the development in Southmere, which is next to the Lesnes Estate, 226 homes were demolished and replaced with 1,622 new homes. None of the new homes are offered at a social rent. 67 are called intermediate level (part-buy, part-rent) and 168 are so-called ‘affordable rent’ which is up to 80% of market rent.  The rest of the new flats are for sale at full market rate. Prices for a 2 bed flat on sale right now in Southmere start from £505,000.

If the Lesnes Estate is demolished then another 595 genuinely affordable homes will be replaced by 1,950 new properties, of which just 61 will be available at a social rent level.

Uniting to resist

Working class communities in London are sick of being shoved aside to make way for luxury apartments. And as social housing is demolished or sold off, and buying a home gets further out of reach, millions of working people are also sick of being asked to rent these properties at exorbitant rates; sick of paying off the mortgages of their investor landlords and living in constant insecurity and fear of eviction if they get sick or old or lose their jobs.

Johnel and the Abbey Wood Home Owners say they will stand their ground and they are joining forces with other residents facing demolition across London to say 'Enough is Enough!' We demand that all social landlords must stop the sell off of our land and homes, stop the destruction of our environment, and Refurbish Don’t Demolish.

RHN is linking up with other housing and climate campaigners to fight for housing justice and climate justice. See the People’s Housing Charter about our demands; join us; and follow us on social media for updates on future protest actions…