‘Frankham Walk’: Peabody’s Cynical Rebranding of the Destroyed Old Tidemill Garden Site in Deptford

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So finally, Peabody, the charitable housing association turned private developer, has rebranded the destroyed Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden site in Deptford, and the ‘regenerated’ old Tidemill primary school next door, as ‘Frankham Walk’, featuring, as its advertising hoardings show, “Your dream home” — if your dream home consists of a 1, 2, 3 or 4-bedroom apartment, a duplex or a townhouse for private sale or shared ownership, with private sales for 1 to 3-bedroom flats ranging in price from £337,500 to £690,000, and with shared ownership deals ranging from £84,375 to £172,500 for a 25% share, plus monthly rent and service charges.

There are, or will be 144 properties in total in ’Frankham Walk’ — 51 for private sale, 14 for shared ownership, and 79 that, we are told, will be “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list.” A further 65 properties — 27 for shared ownership, and 38 “affordable rent homes for local people on Lewisham Council’s waiting list” — will, we are also told, follow when 2-30a Reginald Road, an existing block of 16 structurally sound council flats, is demolished and replaced with new housing.

The name ‘Frankham Walk’ was probably arrived at after the longest deliberations in the history of 21st century ‘regeneration’ projects, because of the contentious nature of the development, which involved the two-month occupation of the garden by campaigners, to try to prevent its destruction, its violent eviction by bailiffs hired by Lewisham Council, and millions of pounds spent by the council guarding the empty school and the destroyed garden.

For my detailed archive of articles about the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, see here, here and here, including my article about the destruction of the trees, four years ago, and my most recent article about the shoddy treatment of residents and temporary tenants in 2-30a Reginald House, published last July. Please also feel free to watch ‘The Battle For Deptford’, Hat Vickers’ wonderful documentary about the occupation, and to listen to my song ’Tidemill’ recorded with my band The Four Fathers, and released last August, to mark the fourth anniversary of the occupation. Also see my photos of the occupation here.

Regarding ‘Frankham Walk’, no one could argue, with 9,921 households on the council waiting list in the London Borough of Lewisham, that the provision of 117 new “affordable” homes in the development (or 104 after the 13 existing homes in 2-30a Reginald Road are deducted) is not something worth celebrating, although the council’s obsession, over the years, with trumpeting it as the biggest delivery of social homes in the borough in a generation only shows how broken the provision of genuinely affordable rented housing has become. Over the last decade, thousands of new homes have been built in Lewisham, and yet most of these have been for private sale or for market rent, and have done nothing to shift the alarmingly huge numbers of people on the council’s waiting list, which will barely be dented at all by Frankham Walk.

It’s also noticeable that Peabody are over-egging their green credentials at Frankham Walk, advertising 48 new trees on their advertising hoardings, as though obliterating from history the 74 trees that existed in the garden, and were largely torn down, and also claiming, on their website, that they “will increase the amount of green space and gardens that are accessible to everybody, plant more semi-mature trees than there are now [or were before the garden’s destruction], and provide new private green space for new and existing residents.”

The garden was a kind of ecological Tardis, which appeared much bigger when you were inside and under its mature and semi-mature tree cover, which also helped to mitigate the horrendous air pollution from traffic on nearby Deptford Church Street. Despite their fanciful CGI presentations of what the new green space will look like, it primarily consists of dull generic lawns hemmed in by tall buildings, which will, I am sure, have little or no atmosphere.

It also remains to be seen if, as Peabody also claim, “We take pride in our homes and estates. To ensure that quality doesn’t end at handover, we provide comprehensive programmes of ongoing maintenance as well as regeneration and improvements to the public realm.”

Sadly, the aftermath of most new housing development projects — including Peabody’s — is that, once the development is complete, and some saplings have been planted and some basic landscaping has been undertaken, the “ongoing maintenance” actually disappears into thin air.

I’m happy be proven wrong, but my experience of the fruits of the ‘regeneration’ industry across the capital, which I’ve chronicled in depth in my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, makes me doubt that Frankham Walk will live up to its hype.

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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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