Guerrilla gardening in Lambeth

Liam Cooper writes on how Lambeth Left Unity is supporting a project to help residents of a threatened sheltered housing estate.

On Saturday, around 18 volunteers including members of Lambeth Housing Activists and Lambeth Left Unity gathered at Leigham Court Road’s historic sheltered housing estate. The purpose of our visit was ‘guerrilla gardening’; performing maintenance works such as litter-picking, raking leaves and planting flowers. This kind of work should be routine but Lambeth Council, which is intent on demolishing the estate to make way for a new private development, no longer sees fit to provide it. As one of the estate’s residents, Valentine, told me, ‘this is really about getting our garden in a fit state. Lambeth council have neglected it for a while’.

Designed by Kate MacIntosh in the early 1970s, the estate was celebrated as an innovative example of sheltered housing. Its structure, consisting of low-rise dwellings connected by paths through the surrounding gardens, and ending with a common room block that has to be passed through to reach the exit, creates a unique balance of private and communal space. Valentine, who gave us a tour of the estate between spates of leaf raking and litter-picking, explained to me ‘we feel it is a unique building that is suited to our needs’. Walking through the estate it is hard to imagine an environment better suited to dignified elderly living.

The notion of housing designed on the basis of meeting human need is alien to the private developers that Lambeth Council is all too eager to shed its housing stock to. As we are seeing with Lambeth’s plans for the Cressingham Gardens estate, social housing is sold and replaced by private developments in which only a minority of the new homes are left ‘affordable’, an increasingly meaningless term as even those homes are closely pegged to market rents. Rarely is the new accommodation as spacious or communally oriented as 269 Leigham Court. The likelihood is that, in the event of demolition, the community will be dispersed and moved into tower blocks, with sheltered housing disappearing altogether as the council only seeks to create new extra-care accommodation.

However, the residents are not giving up without a fight. There is an application by the modernist heritage body Docomomo to have the building listed, and the Save Leigham Court campaign, comprised of residents and supporters, has more community action planned. Susan, a daughter of one of the residents who has been active in the campaign, told me that although having to struggle for the homes that many of them have spent a large portion of their lives in has been exhausting, it has also instilled a new sense of pride in the residents, both for the unique architectural qualities of the estate and for the social objectives that are embodied in them.

To stay up to date with any developments in the campaign follow saveleighamcourt.wordpress.com and housingactivists.co.uk.