Once the tower blocks of the Beaumont Estate have finally been dismantled will they be recorded amongst the lost treasures of London like the Blitzed effigies in the Inner Temple Hall. Doubt it. Who'll weep for the home of the notorious 'Beaumont Boys' who just last year beat a man to death over a drug debt of £1.50 (I think that was the balance to pay, not the whole amount -- not to make light of the affair). How long till they are a question on The Robert Elms Show. Do they say more about our city than the effigies that would have only been seen by a select few ever could?
2 comments:
After living for 5 years on the 19th floor of a tower block in Tower Hamlets, I can tell you that utopian architecture can be a distopian hell to live in.
Of the 4 flats on my floor I never even met 2 of the inhabitants and my neighbour oppsite was a virulantly racist alochoholic whose unconscious body I frequently had to step over when I left my flat.
I was burgled 6 times in the last year I lived there - the metal security grill made no difference at all, and my post was regularly stolen.
Heroin was smoked in the stairwells, which I had to carry my bike up (19 flights) because the piss-filled lift was more often than not broken. One room in the flat was unusable because of water running down the walls and black mold... in the 5 years of living there, the council were unable to do anything to rectify this.
In the end, the relentless burglaries, racial attacks in the car park that left our car smeared with the victims blood as he tried to crawl away from the iron bar-weilding psychos who beat him nearly to death, and the damp conditions spreading through the flat made us leave.
It might be sad to see these blocks taken down - but in reality they were shit to live in.
It is a great pity your experience of tower block dwelling was so hellish. I lived for a while in my boyfriend's flat on the Nightingale Estate in Hackney, or Fortress Nightingale as it was affectionately (?) called. Whilst our experiences there (mine over a couple of years, his over 15) were not entirely dissimilar: muggings in the often piss-stained and sometimes blood spattered lifts (in which someone once decided to set alight their motorbike)I wanted to make a comment in defence of some aspects of tower block life.
Our flat was not only solid, but was also silent - apart from the ghostly, disembodied voices emanating from the surrounding flats and coming in to ours through the heating vents. Our neighbours were friendly and invisible in equal measure, which has been the case everywhere I have lived. The flat was also spacious, with high ceilings, which is not the case with the Housing Association box in which we now reside. And the view could be spectacular - on a clear day we could see St. Paul's and in the good old days when Hackney Council still paid for fiestas on the Downs we were in a prime position to enjoy them from up high.
When my boyfriend moved there as a 'hard to let' tenant, he had spent the best part of the previous decade being chased around London by the wreckers, from one short-life housing co-op to another. The tower block flat signalled the end of this time when homelessness was always round the corner. Maybe that partly rose-tinted our view of the place, but certainly it was the first stable home he had.
It seems most of the problems with tower block living are economic ones: blocks built on the cheap, unmaintained and left to rot etc. As such, I guess more people shared Gustav's distopian experience than our slightly more rosy one.
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