Single Aspect Blog

It was the singing of Jerusalem that got me, accompanied by the camera tracking past block after block of newly completed modernist housing.  Here I thought is an anthem to a brighter future, a better tomorrow, a brave new world.  Then as the music drew to a close the camera zoomed slowly in on a notice board and I read the word Aylesbury.

Click the photo to watch the film

Oh the poignancy, the bittersweet realisation that having just watched a documentary about the way of life in Bermondsey at the turn of a decade (1969/70) I am watching forty years of history repeat itself as at least one of the new estates (the Heygate) in the film heralded as the saviours of slum riddled neighbourhoods are themselves coming down in a terrible and premature end to a bold and well intentioned exercise in improving peoples lives.

Then it was called slum clearance, now it’s called regeneration.  Then it was intended to house the displaced residents, now it’s intended to house a different class of people.

History_of_the_Aylesbury_regeneration – Southwark Council

Heygate_estate – Southwark Council

Livefromtheheygate.blogspot.co.uk/ – A resident’s view

The film is a touching documentary about the way of life in an area now greatly changed in those forty years, and in the process of being gentrified.

Narrated by Benny Green, himself a Londoner, though sadly no longer with us, it starts with life in the pubs and moves on to cover all the important aspects of life in Bermondsey being the markets, the docks and casual labour, the end of the docks and loss of employment, the annual hop picking excursion to the fields of Kent, boxing, poverty, and slum housing which is where I came in.  Click the photo to watch the film.

n.b. The section to which I refer at the beginning, the singing of Jerusalem occurs at 7:11 of Part 5.

Last year the BBC Radio 4 programme Front Row broadcast an item about the Aylesbury and Heygate estates.  You can listen to it here:-

Aylesbury_Heygate.mp4