Rotherhithe and Bermondsey's best
I pass these three estates on the train every day between New Cross Gate and London Bridge. I've always been intrigued by them, so one morning I hopped off at Surrey
Quays and went for an explore and took some snaps of them: the Hawkstone and Abbeyfield Estates in Rotherhithe, and the Rennie
Estate on the other side of the tracks, in Bermondsey.
Immediately as I left Surrey Quays station, there was my first target: the Hawkstone Estate. Designed in 1958, in very similar style to Robert Matthew's Gorbals Riverside estate of the same vintage, there's a mixture of tower blocks and low rise flats and maisonettes here. The first tower block to be finished here bears a sign of the times: John F. Kennedy House. They were built by Wates between 1958 and 1965.
Then I walked down under the railway arches to the Rennie Estate, a mixture of low-rise fifties blocks, and high rise 60s towers, all built in brick. They were constructed by direct labour for Bermondsey council, and all betray a throwback design style, with the lower deck-access blocks looking almost pre-war in their simplicity, and the towers looking like something out of a point block pattern book from 1949. They're the kind of gently modernistic flats I recognise from New Addington.
Finally I walked back to another Wates estate, this one built in the late sixties: the Abbeyfield Estate, on the edge of Southwark Park. Again there's a mixture of high and low rise here, ranging from another 30s-style but 50s-built block, Bradley House, with its checkerboard gables, through to some brutalist rough concrete low rise flats and then the giant tower, Maydew House, opened in 1968. There are marked similarities here between the Wates design and that of Goldfinger's Brutalist blocks Balfron and Trellick, not least the separated 'service' tower and use of rough concrete, though Goldfinger was a major critic of large panel systems of the kind used by Wates.
Immediately as I left Surrey Quays station, there was my first target: the Hawkstone Estate. Designed in 1958, in very similar style to Robert Matthew's Gorbals Riverside estate of the same vintage, there's a mixture of tower blocks and low rise flats and maisonettes here. The first tower block to be finished here bears a sign of the times: John F. Kennedy House. They were built by Wates between 1958 and 1965.
Then I walked down under the railway arches to the Rennie Estate, a mixture of low-rise fifties blocks, and high rise 60s towers, all built in brick. They were constructed by direct labour for Bermondsey council, and all betray a throwback design style, with the lower deck-access blocks looking almost pre-war in their simplicity, and the towers looking like something out of a point block pattern book from 1949. They're the kind of gently modernistic flats I recognise from New Addington.
Finally I walked back to another Wates estate, this one built in the late sixties: the Abbeyfield Estate, on the edge of Southwark Park. Again there's a mixture of high and low rise here, ranging from another 30s-style but 50s-built block, Bradley House, with its checkerboard gables, through to some brutalist rough concrete low rise flats and then the giant tower, Maydew House, opened in 1968. There are marked similarities here between the Wates design and that of Goldfinger's Brutalist blocks Balfron and Trellick, not least the separated 'service' tower and use of rough concrete, though Goldfinger was a major critic of large panel systems of the kind used by Wates.
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