Robert Davies, Engagement Support Officer for Social Sciences writes

Just over a year ago I wrote a short blog post ‘Memory Place’ which recorded my reaction to seeing a particular item in our Propaganda Power and Persuasion exhibition and how it evoked memories of the fire at the Cuming Museum, Walworth, a few months earlier. Since then I have been prompted to explore some of the Library’s holdings relating to the study of regeneration and re-development.

Why these particular areas of study? Well, the Cuming Museum, the town hall and the Newington library remain under plastic wraps or behind hoardings following the fire last year, but thankfully they have not disappeared as if part of an illusionist’s amazing turn of prestidigitation. However, over the last few months many other buildings have disappeared behind similar wraps or hoardings to re-emerge as temporary piles of rubble. This is all part of the vast and often disputed project to replace the Heygate Estate with Elephant Park and the wider redevelopment plans for this particular part of South London (or as it was once described ‘London South Central’).

As the re-development progresses I have been taking photographs in an attempt to record how once familiar places are being removed. Often you are confronted with rather peculiar sights such as spotting the wreckage of this car:

Car wreckage at the Heygate Estate. Photograph by author.

This prompted me to wonder: who had left it behind, had the contractors forgotten to ensure that the garages were empty before demolishing them, could the owner not be contacted or had a film crew decided to take advantage of the demolition sites to record a scene for an apocalyptic movie or gritty television crime drama? Maybe it is a left over prop from the filming of ‘Attack the Block’, ‘World War Z’ or perhaps even as far back as ‘The Bill’? To me it is also one of many images which represent the “shock and awe of urban renewal….” as Professor Michael Keith phrases it [Chapter 14, The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration, 2013].

Demolition at the Heygate Estate. Photograph by author.

As you can probably tell I am not a very good photographer. To gain a much better sense of the many types of media being used to research and record changes to ‘material culture, heritage, urban life, place-making practices and spatial politics’ you can read Dr Bradley L Garrett’s blog post on Visual Urbanisms: Perspectives on Contemporary Research and Holly Gilbert’s post Perceptions of the Material Landscape.

A large number of videos, created by a wide range of people, including those recording the oral histories of some of the former residents of the Heygate, can found online  by searching for ‘Heygate Estate’. Other websites worth looking at to gain different perspectives on project include those of the developers and groups such as Southwark Notes , The Walworth Society and 56aInfoshop.

Anyway, I’ll conclude with a select bibliography of some of the latest academic publications on the subjects of regeneration and gentrification held by the library:

Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kazanitz and Alexandra K. Murphy. ed.s. 2014. The Urban Ethnography Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Available in the Social Sciences Reading Room at: SPIS.307.76

Anna Jorgensen, and Richard Kennan. ed.s. 2012. Urban Wildscapes. London: Routledge. Available in the Social Sciences Reading Room at: SPIS.307.76

Michael E. Leary and John McGarthy. ed.s. 2013. The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration. London: Routledge.
Available in the Social Sciences Reading Room at: SPIS 307.3416

Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly. ed.s. 2010. The Gentrification Reader. London: Routledge.
British Library shelfmark: YC.2013.b.1602

Michael Storper. 2013. The Keys to the City. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Available in the Social Sciences Reading Room at: SPIS.307.76

Andrew Tallon. ed. 2010. Urban Regeneration and Renewal: Critical Concepts in Urban studies. 4 vol.s. London: Routledge.
British Library Shelfmark: YC.2013.a.9906

Fran Tonkiss. 2013. Cities by Design: The Social Life of the Urban Form. Bristol: Polity Press. Available in the Social Science Reading Room at: SPIS.307.76

In addition to this very short bibliography there are numerous articles and reports available via our Social Welfare Portal and Management and Business Studies Portal. Whilst writing this particular post I have also found many other collections items which cast light on how current regeneration schemes within the UK fit into a wider social history including the ‘improvements’ of the late 19th century, the development of the garden cities movement of the early 20th century, post-war modernist architecture and urban planning, the entrepreneurial property-led regeneration of the 1980s and redevelopment schemes which have formed part of recent sporting ‘mega-events’.   More of that in another blog post.  

Rubble at the Heygate Estate. Photograph by author.