The Heygate Ruins

 1. Welcome

After three days I stormed around Heygate with bravado, inviting friends in to tour the skeletal remains of this dead complex. Playing host like I was its sole discoverer and king.

But my first day here was a long confrontation with the spooks and bogeymen that waited around every corner and behind my back.

I first walked through the steel doors with slow steps and a frantic heartbeat, feet to floor with precise silence, peering with fear and reverence round every haunted corner. As each day passed the doors were being welded shut behind me and I moved through the corridors with a growing confidence and a sense that what was here needed to be kept and shared.

These are my four days of romantic apocalypse adventure in the desolate Heygate Estate, an abandoned council housing project in south east London. It has fulfilled its life cycle and is now sealing up and breaking down, soon its life will end and we can forget this failure of futurism forever. But for now, close your curtains, play Pruit Igoe on your headphones and follow me in.

Heygate was built to seal away the poor, containing them behind massive fortress walls until they turned noisy and violent had to be moved on.

Projects like these were once the brightest totems of modernism, modern man, with his mighty new concrete, would defy every random and chaotic intent of nature, impose human order in the form of eighty foot, right angled living spaces, regular repeating squares, the same for everyone, over and over and over.

It’s hard to believe that Heygate wasn’t deliberately designed to isolate its inhabitants, the blocks are connected by a network of off ground walkways that even lead to second story shops. Living here your feet would never have to touch the same ground as those on the outside.

2. Dancers and Beasts

Monsters do lurk in the corridors of Claydon block, a soiled graffiti sketchpad and zoo of urban demons.

Please, don’t let me style myself as any kind of urban warrior man, because given half a flimsy chance I would, gleefully and fraudulently. With a provincial suburban upbringing, graffiti gets discussed with a cringe worthy pretension which I would love to avoid in this blog post (too late?). We of quiet retiree suburbs knowingly admire the irony and subversion of street art, I think I even got a scout badge for tagging community awareness slogans on condemned hospitals once.

Anyway Claydon block is the most recently emptied of Heygate’s five massive outer constructs, the residents are gone and the doors are yet to be welded closed. By the end of the year, everything painted on these walls will be torn down. Two artists stand out in here, one populating Claydon with anthropomorphic clouds, missiles and demons, another with a series of portraits, oversized male faces of aloof scorn, and bright, dancing women.

  

Among tags from various inventive characters such as the ‘Menstrual Bleed Crew’

  

  

Outbursts of anger, naughty words, slightly non sequitur political observations and dry irony on every lift door

And a special mention goes to ‘Doris is a Boris’

  

I’m sure she is.

3. The Orchid Thief

I wonder who these were painted for. For practice, or whimsy, or to pass on a message in the last few months of the life of this fortress?

Others did come here with an express purpose, someone has left in these corridors a trail of treasures which make the absolute highlight of my expedition. From the ground floor of Claydon, up six floors are pasted a series of objects, toys, animals, cards, held to the building with green tape.

In my first-day-hysteria I thought the rat was real and very nearly ran away, never ever to return. Once I decided it was a simple random curio, put here as a prank, or just to break up the monotony of the tiled walls, I photographed it and moved on. Only to discover more and more.

Rat, boar, frog, ace, 50. And more, a shred of cloth and another 50 (both printed on paper napkins) you can among the graffiti above. I can’t help feeling they’re a tribute to someone, a friend and resident, their meaning is so private as to be obscure, but placed so publicly and precisely as to challenge the discoverer to understand.

In two locations a visitor has pasted orchids onto the decaying ruins. For why? I’ll end this chapter by leaving you to your speculations.

4. Apocalypse Tourism

Oh no.

The oil will all be gone. The world is going to turn on us. Solar radiation will cause the earth’s core to explode. Explode? Melt? Whatever, didn’t the Mayans tell you this? The Pana-wave cult? No? Maybe it was Southwark Council.

The apocalypse will be lots of fun, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it’s gonna be a blast. That every day we bury our urge to break free and go feral, build shelters, forage and hunt. I don’t actually advocate doing this, I doubt it would go well for most of us.

Instead we flood our pop culture with images of a ruined world, zombies and ruins. Hiding in cinemas so we can emerge into the light when we’re done with the fantasy. WellI say fuck Roland Emmerich, go spend a couple of hours kicking the dust around Heygate.

Find, literally, the ruins of society, step over the mass produced rubble, kick silently through piles of detritus that was once someone’s life.

  

No apocalypse ever happened here, simply, as one resident cheerily puts it, ‘natural wastage’, where there used to be thousands of people, now there are none.

But we can play act, poke at a smashed TV and melt a garden chair, there are no adults here to tell us off. So I believe anyway, until, while playing in a dirt pile, I make my final and most surprising discovery. That people still live here.

5. Signs of Life

I knew I wasn’t the only apocalypse tourist. Trainer and hoodie clad photographers are never far away in Heygate’s courtyards, groups of free-runners descend here every Saturday, and the cut-through from Walworth to New Kent Road takes shoppers and school run Dads through a perfect pool of silence before they emerge into the constant sirens of Elephant and Castle.

But when one such shopper, a nonagenarian with a 90 degree spine, wheeled her shopper buggie through the iron barred door of one of the smaller block’s within the Heygate Keep, I was stunned.

I wanted to ask her why she was here, did she feel safe in a place where almost no one passes by, did she feel solitude or isolation when every other door in her building was a sealed grey panel? I didn’t have the heart to knock on her door, and snooping around the back I felt I had made the right choice.

Broken windows and graffiti’d wall, she’d been harassed enough. So why stay? I drew my conclusions, I’ll let you draw yours. A resident I bumped into in the much less graffiti’d Marsten Block, (having photo’s his window),

told me that the stress had seen off many of the older residents, and that others, having lived here for forty years or more, were obstinate in seeing through their final days in Heygate. When a floor of any of these buildings sees its final resident depart, council workers swoop in and seal off the ends.

With my eyes open to the idea of inhabitants here, I found five occupied flats, windows barred but not yet sealed.

The subtle difference between a garden tended and abandoned, junk strewn and stacked. Heygate is not finalised yet, for all I revel in its decay, others just live here. But they can tell their story on their own blog.

I could find more and more to photograph here, every little item with a narrative of its own.

But it’s time to put this post out of its misery. I would preserve it all if I could, my own little apocalypse playground.

For me this is a playground. Ultimately, this aftermath of stressed human nesting presents a brilliant and enjoyable game, a mystery: who were the people that left these clues behind and what came to pass that they left their televisions and toys in the dirt? A shame really that the answer is bureaucratic council failures and an experiment in depressing architecture, what draws in the apocalypse tourist is a romantic and dreamy rejection of the hum-drum, the modern, the technology we are wrapped up in.

We can escape our little comfort cocoons in the technopolis that nurtures us and pretend to be Tyler Durden. But we’re not.

And truthfully this gloomy tomb of brutalist-modernism is a warning and a message, about the places we build, the places we put people, the way we see our homes and our cities. We’d better listen up.

Heygate and its contemporaries are part of the old discussion, the post war rebirth of a country that could turn its technology to massive creation for the first time, the obsessive concrete fever-dream of a society in hyper-growth. But now has come the time to hold the crowded world in reverence.

We who live in the post peace are trying to save the world from overconsumption and fossil fuel excretion by embracing the technology of our generation. In Heygate we can witness the death of a modernist monstrosity that could have been our future. It is a post apocalypse landscape, we should see its warnings, understand them well, and then tear it down.