Photos of Lewisham: Hills, Rivers, Secret Corners and Blatant Skyscrapers

For most of the last 16 years I have lived in the London Borough of Lewisham — first in Forest Hill, London SE23, and, since November 1999, in Brockley, London SE4, which overlooks Lewisham town centre, the commercial heart of the borough. Built up since Saxon times around the River Ravensbourne, which flows into the River Thames at Deptford, the town centre is also the place where the River Quaggy, flowing in from the south east, via Eltham and Kidbrooke, joins the Ravensbourne.

From its valley, Lewisham also wanders up the hills to the south east, towards Lee, and the east, more steeply uphill to Blackheath. These photos were taken between May and August, and capture some of Lewisham’s history, some of its contours, including the hills and rivers, and some of the new developments in the town centre — Prendergast Vale College, a new school on the former site of Ladywell Bridge primary school, which is a positive development, and the high-rise apartment blocks rising up along Loampit Vale, the road from Lewisham to New Cross that peaks in Brockley, whose contribution is almost entirely negative.

The product of an unholy collaboration between Barratt Homes, Lewisham Council and London & Quadrant Housing Trust, the so-called “Renaissance” development which features 788 apartments in eight buildings, including one 24-storey monster  — contributes negatively to the borough because it spectacularly fails to address the chronic need for affordable housing, containing just 146 apartments which are designated as being “for affordable rent,” which (a) may be a lie, and (b) fails to address the fact that there are 17,000 people on Lewisham Council’s housing waiting list, with 350 families living in hostels and 1,000 in temporary accommodation. It also will add enormous stress to Lewisham’s infrastructure, and, in addition, it plays into inappropriate fantasies, entertained by politicians of all parties, that London is overflowing with yuppies whose only purpose in life is to pay through the nose for apartments in high-rise glass and steel blocks that are cynically advertised as barometers of lifestyle and achievement, as I hope to have shown in the photos.

What Lewisham actually needs is a renaissance in social housing, something that the political activists of People Before Profit have been pushing for, as part of a new vision of life and work in the 21st century, in which, along with genuinely affordable, not-for-profit housing, politicians and those with access to money also invest in creating jobs as well, moving beyond the dreadful laissez-faire approach to job creation that has prevailed since Thatcherism in the 1980s, with the idiotic mantra that the market will solve everything, when all the market has actually done is to do away with jobs completely and/or to menialise workers in low-paid retail service jobs with no meaningful future. This is particularly relevant in Lewisham, which, according to the TUC’s Touchstone blog, “is the hardest place in Great Britain to find a job,” with “almost thirty-five dole claimants chasing each vacancy.”

Expect more reflections on the need for work and housing in the future, particularly in connection with photo sets from Deptford, where a long-running struggle remains ongoing to prevent the riverside at Convoys Wharf from being turned into some wildly inappropriate high-rise city, but also with Lewisham, where two other plans are still ongoing — firstly, Lewisham Gateway, next to Renaissance, where there are plans for up to 800 new apartments, including some in yet more new tower blocks, and Thurston Road, opposite Renaissance, where there are plans for 400 more properties.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.