The following article first appeared in The Guardian, in March 2000 and it focuses on Thamesmead, linking it to A Clockwork Orange which was about to get a fresh release. It is no longer available on the Guardian website so far as I can tell, so I am preserving it here (unless they throw a cease and desist my way for copyright violation).<\/p>\n
It makes very interesting reading and I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate. Was Crossness ever known as Crosswell? Did people really claim the children were lacking facilities when the Tavy Bridge fountain was around? Judge for yourselves how well it portrays the truth – it’s certainly an unusual piece.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Welcome to Clockwork Orange country<\/strong><\/p>\n When Stanley Kubrick wanted a setting for a tale of alienation and Monday March 13, 2000<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A Clockwork Orange opens with Alex and his Nadsat-speaking droogs sipping The postcode is real, London’s most extreme in numerical terms. This is Kubrick and his designers found the sets by trawling through the latest Thamesmead, a name chosen by readers of the now defunct London Evening News, More than 30 years on, Thamesmead itself would benefit from a little tender
\nultraviolence, he knew just where to go. Jonathan Glancey follows him to
\nThamesmead, London SE28<\/p>\n
\ndrug-laced pintas in the wonderfully over-the-top interior of the Korova
\nMilk Bar. It is real “horrowshow”, as Alex would say approvingly. A pop-art,
\n70s-kitsch S&M dungeon with pools of excessively bright light amid dense
\nshadows, the Korova was designed by John Barry (not the composer) and was
\none of the few sets built for Kubrick’s notorious film, re-released on
\nFriday after an absence of 26 years.
\nApart from two other interior sets, A Clockwork Orange was filmed on
\nlocation in and around London. The immediate reason was cost: the film’s
\nbudget was $2m, chicken-feed in Kubrick’s terms, even in 1971. Yet, at the
\ntime, the locations that would best express the dystopian world Alex and his
\ndroogs inhabited had just been built by architects, most of them employed by
\nlocal authorities. If the Korova had existed it would have been somewhere in
\nthe Tavy Bridge shopping centre, Thamesmead, London SE28.<\/p>\n
\nwhere Alex lives in one of the concrete “neighbourhood” blocks linked by
\nelevated walkways. It was underneath one of these, by the shopping centre,
\nthat Kubrick filmed the droogs attacking an old tramp. Later, when Alex
\n(played by Malcolm McDowell) becomes the subject of medical research at the
\n“Ludovico Institute”, he is really in Brunel university, Uxbridge, another
\nbrand-new concrete megastructure.<\/p>\n
\narchitectural magazines. These were mostly in love with Thamesmead.
\nNaturally the mini-new town, planned from 1961 by the London County Council
\nand built from 1965 by the architects department of the Greater London
\nCouncil, won awards.<\/p>\n
\nwas designed as a brave new home for 60,000 lucky Londoners, who were to
\nlive in a cluster of ostensibly rational, pre-fabricated concrete
\n“neighbourhoods”. Each neighbourhood would offer between 1,500 and 1,700
\n“dwelling units” for between 8,000 and 9,000 residents. Neighbourhoods would
\nbe connected, South Bank style, by elevated walkways, and meet in a large
\ncivic piazza with a shopping centre. The site, east of Woolwich and
\nPlumstead marshes, is on wet ground, squeezed up beside the old Crosswell
\nsewage treatment plant where the fine Victorian steam compound rotative beam
\nengine that pumped London’s effluence from its centres of population is now
\nbeing lovingly restored.<\/p>\n
\nloving. In parts it looks like a film set, so strange is the town-planning
\npremise on which it is founded. Concrete towers, flanked by two artificial
\nlakes, rise around a set-piece square facing the Thames. This original core
\nis then wrapped around with the sort of tweedy, bricky, neo-nothing family
\nhouses many of us fear will swamp the banks of the Thames as John Prescott’s
\nLondon overspill housing policy is translated into action. The strangest
\nviews of the area are those you can get from a boat heading towards Southend
\nand the Channel, or those framed by the ruins of the abbey built from 1191
\nby Sir Richard de Lucy as a penance for the murder of St Thomas \u00e0 Beckett.<\/p>\n\n