Now on YouTube: Tidemill Documentary ‘The Battle for Deptford’ Celebrates Community Solidarity and Resistance

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It’s now a month since filmmaker Hat Vickers’ documentary film ‘The Battle for Deptford’ had its world premiere at St. Nicholas’ Church, in Deptford Green, as part of the Deptford and New Cross Free Film Festival, and three weeks since it had its online premiere, and I thought it was time to do my bit to promote it, in case anyone out there who’s interested in resistance to environmental destruction and the baleful housing ‘regeneration’ market hasn’t seen it yet.

The launch was an inspiring event that brought together over 200 people, many of whom had been involved in the focal point of the film, the long struggle to save the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, a magical community garden, and Reginald House, a structurally sound block of council flats next door, from destruction as part of a fundamentally flawed and destructive housing project. Afterwards there was a lively Q&A, at which I was one of a number of panellists, and another lively Q&A followed the online premiere a week later, revealing an appetite for the resumption of the struggle for housing justice, and against environmental destruction, that has not been dimmed by two years in which the Covid lockdowns largely prevented large-scale protests from taking place.

The struggle to save the garden and Reginald House began in 2012, when the old Tidemill primary school closed and moved to a new location in nearby Giffin Square, and Lewisham Council first proposed to redevelop the site of the school as housing, with the Victorian school buildings converted into ‘luxury’ housing, and with new residential blocks built on its former playground, and on the garden, which, with its beguiling concentric circles, its Indian bean trees, and its extensive tree cover that mitigated the worst effects of traffic pollution from nearby Deptford Church Street, had been designed by pupils, their parents and their teachers in the late 1990s. Also included in the plans was the demolition of three blocks of council flats — two on Giffin Street, and another on Reginald Road.

As part of the struggle, the proposed demolition of the Giffin Street blocks was dropped, and community activists began working assiduously to get the council to amend their plans for the garden and Reginald House, working first with Assembly, property guardians installed in the old school, who opened up the garden, and were “awarded a Pocket Park grant [by the GLA] to transform the garden into an accessible and unique wild space in the heart of Deptford”, as the ‘Old Tidemill Garden’ website explained, and then, when they were moved on, taking over the garden as a community space.

Significantly, in their negotiations with the council and the developer, Family Mosaic, which later merged with Peabody, community activists’ efforts to increase the initially derisory ‘affordable’ housing component of the proposal were successful, and the amount was increased from 11% to around 50%, “an achievement for which the campaign is never officially credited”, as Anita Strasser recently wrote on her ‘Deptford Is Changing‘ blog, in a review of the film.

The campaigners also sought to create a situation whereby the community had “a voice as stakeholders over the future management and usage of the site”, but although a credible alternative design for the proposed housing was put forward that would have spared the garden and Reginald House, it was ignored by the council and by Peabody, and in September 2017 plans for the re-development of the site, featuring 209 homes in total, were approved by the council.

It was around this time that Hat, who lived in the estate next to Tidemill, began filming the garden’s guardians as they continued to campaign for the plans to be re-drawn, and held numerous events in the garden, and it was also at this time that I became involved in the campaign.

The culmination of this increasing campaign of resistance was the two-month occupation of the garden, from August 29, 2018 until October 29, 2018, which only came to an end when the council hired the violent and notorious union-busting firm of bailiffs, County Enforcement, to evict the occupants in a dawn raid, and then paid them to guard it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for several months, at a cost of nearly £1.4 million (to add to the £1 million spent guarding the school from imaginary squatters).

Hat’s film deals with the occupation, the harrowing eviction and the equally harrowing destruction of the trees on February 27, 2019, but it also includes numerous other events along the way, one positive example being the joyful carnival march through Deptford, just after the occupation began, which ended at the community-organised Party in the Park in Fordham Park, in New Cross, whose theme, appropriately enough, along with all the live music and entertainment, was the housing crisis.

Other events featured include our polite but determined protest at Peabody’s offices, where we requested an audience with a senior official, and were presented with the Head of Corporate Services, a slippery character who had recently been poached from Barclays in Hong Kong, and whose presence rather undermined the claim that Peabody is a not-for-profit charitable organisation dedicated to helping the poor, rather than what it has become: a housing developer, with a secondary role in the provision of allegedly ‘affordable’ housing, whose ‘surpluses’ rather than ‘profits’ can’t disguise the fact that, like purely private property developers, it secures much of its backing from international corporate investors.

Also included is the notorious occasion, at a Lewisham Council meeting, when the chair imperiously told a restless crowd in the public gallery, “I’m standing up, and I understand that, when I stand up, everybody sits down and shuts up”, and the equally notorious appearance by then-Cllr. Joe Dromey at a local election hustings in the garden, on May 1, 2018, when he ignored the estimated £100m value of the development, and emotively claimed instead that it was all about providing a home for Hayley, a woman he had allegedly met, who was living in temporary accommodation.

However, the film’s greatest strength is that it presents Hat’s personal perspective, as someone deeply involved in the campaign — a perspective that focuses on the power of community, and on the importance of demanding community involvement in development plans. The film literally teems with people drawn into the struggle, mostly through the love of the garden, but also through indignation that the plans involved the demolition of a structurally sound block of council flats, whose residents had been given no say in the matter.

The film also demonstrates, unerringly, that the community solidarity that can be achieved through resistance is worthwhile, as, even if the specific battle is lost, as it was with Tidemill, that solidarity is enduring.

I’m honoured to have been included in the film, as one of those interviewed during the long and invaluable process of its painstaking editing by Hat, along with Heather Gilmore, Andrea Hughes and Andrea Carey, local activists involved in the campaign from its earliest days, Diann Gerson, a resident of Reginald House, and local resident Ian Thomas.

The video is below (although you’ll have to click through to YouTube to see it), and I hope that you have time to watch it, if you haven’t seen it, and that you’ll share it with anyone who might be interested in seeing a microcosm of the wider struggle against environmental destruction and housing ‘regeneration’ play out in a little corner of south east London. Please also get in touch if you’re interested in showing the film, especially if you’re part of a housing campaign and/or involved in environmental activism.

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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 (and see the latest 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 he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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