Blackfriars SE1 in the 1970s Preview

This walk starts on Blackfriars Road at the junction with Pocock Street, about 200 yards south from Southwark underground station.

Community workers and volunteers worked alongside community leaders and local residents campaigning for better housing and social conditions. The area housed many people in overcrowded and inadequate accommodation.

A lack of open space, community facilities, essential shops and poor school buildings added to the general feeling of neglect. With the docks moved downstream and many long established local industries closed, large amounts of land became available, opening up a fierce debate over what should replace these former uses.

It was a period of huge empowerment for local residents. Campaigns, protests and direct action were the tools to force local authorities and developers to recognise the communities’ needs. Estate tenants formed associations to negotiate with their landlords and community groups flourished.

There were great successes like at Coin Street with new housing, Colombo Street Sports & Community Centre and the saving of important facilities such as chemists, post offices and launderettes.

This is Blackfriars Settlement, or rather the new Blackfriars Settlement (we will visit the former building next). The Settlement is a thriving local centre and continues to be committed to serving local people and its diverse communities, creating opportunities for people in the area and working to make life better for all.

The first Blackfriars Settlement was at 44 Nelson Square.

In the 1970s Blackfriars Settlement was instrumental in enabling local residents to assert themselves as a community, fight the spread of office development and campaign to rebuild their community.

The Settlement was one of the hubs of social, political and community action in the Blackfriars area. The formation of ‘settlements’ in poor neighbourhoods of Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries spearheaded the birth of the welfare state after the Second World War.

In addition to re-fashioning its approach to youth work, the Settlement spawned three new projects – BIAS (a rights advocacy project), the Community Photography Project, and the Community Action Team.

Many citizens’ rights, especially in relation to benefits and housing, were hard to obtain in practice, either because of Government policy or bureaucratic hostility and incompetence. BIAS tried to counter this, adopting an adversarial approach with active advocacy, and campaigning to change local policy and practice.

Much of the Settlement’s campaign work was driven by the Community Action Team, unpaid activists, working to help local residents form tenants associations, fight benefits crackdowns, campaign against office development and publish the SE1 Community Newspaper. CAT went beyond simple lobbying, using demonstrations, occupations and other forms of publicity, consciousness-raising and action for change.

The Blackfriars Photography Project at Blackfriars Settlement began as one year experiment “to investigate the uses of photography in community development”. It aimed to make art collaboratively, with and for communities, in ways that reflected local needs and culture.

The project provided equipment and film processing facilities for local people to use and to promote and represent their point of view on threats to their local environment.

“PHOTOGRAPHY CAN MAKE YOU CARE HOW THE WORLD IS RUN"

Young people 8 to 18 learned to develop and print their films in the Settlement dark room. These informal sessions, run by volunteers recruited through ‘Time Out’ magazine, grew into regular fixtures four nights a week.

Once a busy shopping street for local residents, by 1975 the shops had fallen into disuse. The block was owned by J Sainsbury whose headquarters were nearby with the intention to demolish and build an office block.

The Blackfriars Community Action Team took over several of the shops and with the permission of Sainsbury created the office for SE1 Community Newspaper and living accommodation for CAT members and others in the rooms above.

Meymott Street is where the office of SE1 Community Newspaper was.

Blackfriars Community Action Team started SE1 Newspaper with North Southwark Community Development Group and many other local residents. The aim was to give residents of SE1 information about what was happening in their neighbourhood and encourage them to become involved in improving local conditions, protecting local jobs and arguing for more and better housing and services for local people.

With much effort! Articles were typed out in columns (old-fashioned device, the typewriter); then fitted and glued (Cow Gum!) onto full-size layout sheets (and where possible with a photograph). Headlines were made with Letraset, by rubbing letters from transparent backing sheets onto paper then glued to the page.

With its idiosyncratic typefaces, typewriter text and layout the newspaper created its own unique style.

The newspaper covered SE1 news from Waterloo to Tower Bridge. A typical print run was 1500 copies. Papers went to newsagents, pubs and cafes and local organisations like tenants’ groups and pensioners’ groups. Some people had their own distribution rounds in their neighbourhood.

Starting in the mid-70s in SE1, over a period of 10 years, several derelict sites and buildings were brought into ‘community use’.

The Colombo Street story typifies the way community action worked. Starting as a campaign to provide a long overdue park and sports pitches in Hatfields off Blackfriars Road, it became a long struggle to secure a permanent indoor sports and community centre.

Eventually Sainsbury’s sold the site to a developer who, in return for planning permission for an office building on Blackfriars Road, granted a long lease for the canteen. Its future use as a sports centre was thus secure.

These gardens and sports areas were a car park run by National Car Parks in 1975. The tenants association in next door Peabody Duchy Street estate led a vigorous campaign to turn the space into a recreation area and they succeeded in getting a government grant to transform the area.

These gardens are one of the positive outcomes of the long fight (the Coin Street campaign) to prevent offices being built on the derelict land on Waterloo's riverside. The site previously housed the Eldorado ice cream factory which had become derelict. The gardens are part of a 13 acre site which includes Oso Tower Wharf, Gabriel's Wharf, the riverside walkway and the co-operative homes around the gardens. The sites were transferred to Coin Street Community Builders by the Greater London Council in 1984. Carry on into the park, the housing on the right is the Palm Co-operative, another of the victories in the campaign for social housing instead of offices.

After a decade-long community campaign the 13 acre Coin Street estate was bought by the GLC in 1984 and then sold to Coin Street Community Builders.

Part of the estate, Stamford Wharf, now Oxo Tower Wharf, near Blackfriars Bridge, was converted into homes run by a co-operative, affordable work spaces, shops, cafes and a rooftop restaurant.

Bankside Yards is on the site of the former ‘Edgers Scheme’, a huge commercial development on this site in the 1970s. It was a giant computer centre for Lloyds Bank built on redundant railway land next to Blackfriars Road (just east of Blackfriars Bridge).

A strong campaign resulted in Falcon Point council homes on the riverside being included in the scheme. In 2020 the computer centre was demolished to make way for Bankside Yards. In the 70s intense development in SE1 consisted of office-led schemes.

Sumner Street was once the centre of a thriving community. The picture shows the street in about 1890 with the chimney of the first Bankside power station showing top left. This street and many others around it were later demolished as the station expanded.

The local community identified the vacant spaces and buildings on and near Bankside as an opportunity to improve social conditions. They were determined that their views should be heard. The whole length of the North Southwark waterfront was historically of economic importance.

The original power station, built in the 1890s was replaced after WW2. At the end of the 70s it too closed, leading to another series of fundamental changes in the area. Tate Modern art gallery opened in the defunct power station in 2000. Since then the area has witnessed a huge demand for luxury housing developments.

In 1976 the Council wanted to sell its Greenmore depot site on Bankside to promoters of the Globe Theatre. North Southwark Community Development Group (NSCDG) put in a planning application for family housing on the site. This was lost on appeal. Ironically the real site of the original theatre was a few streets further inland.

An SE1 Newspaper story printed interviews with Bankside residents about their housing situation. One of them pleaded, “Where are our young people who get married supposed to move to?” A government minister at the time stated that “Bankside wasn’t a suitable place for families to live”.

Courage’s Bottling Plant near Southwark Bridge closed in 1981. The Greater London Council bought it and the Coin Street sites nearby under its “Community Areas” Policy. The GLC and Southwark Council subsequently developed the Courage’s site for family housing and a sheltered housing scheme.

This started to reverse the steep decline in local population and in addition ensured that there were enough children for the recently opened new primary school on the former site of Redcross Way Buildings nearby.

Take a moment to look at Cromwell Buildings and the plaque inside. This block of flats was built in 1864 and was one of the earliest examples of low-cost housing built for the working poor of London by philanthropic institutions. It was another 30 years before councils started to build housing themselves.

North Southwark Community Development Group (NSCDG) occupied this building on the corner of Great Guildford Street and Copperfield Street. North Southwark neighbourhoods were withering away as the population aged and tenement housing was demolished. No new housing was being built to replace it because land was so expensive. Young people had to move out of the area to find a home when they married. Schools were outdated and their rolls were falling. The area lacked community centres and open spaces.

NSCDG formed in 1972 to give a voice to local people campaigning for improved social conditions in the Borough and Bermondsey. In 1974 it set up a Community Planning Centre funded by an Urban Aid Grant. The key obstacle for community-led regeneration was the cost of the land on the South Bank.

NSCDG was a federation of community groups and individuals based in or living in North Southwark. It campaigned for development to meet local need especially affordable housing, jobs matching local skills, open space, better public transport and local shopping.

Alternative proposals were needed to resist the ‘big money’ development schemes promoted by Southwark Council’s ‘Thameside Strategy Plan’ at Hay’s Wharf and Bankside.

NSCDG, after door-to-door consultation, published a ‘Residents’ Plan for Bankside’ which identified sites which should be developed for council housing and community facilities.

The Greater London Council (GLC) changed its policy emphasis in 1975, supporting NSCDG’s call for more council homes on the South Bank.

Community campaigns established links with political parties and took part in local politics. Campaigning through trade unions and tenants’ associations was essential to change public policy.

Demonstrations galvanised support and publicised local issues.These often led to policy challenges within London and nationally.

Direct Action! Intervention at council meetings, public inquiries and sometimes the occupation of buildings gave the public a voice - and, crucially, sought to change the course of events.

The extent of community initiative in Blackfriars and SE1 was partly due to residents’ response to unacceptable local conditions but also because communities had the means to fight back, supported by action centres funded by charities and critically at times by local councils.

This tour shows a snapshot in time of independent citizen action; of people standing up for themselves in the face of huge pressures from vested commercial and political interests.

Conditions in Blackfriars have improved since the 1970s, but poverty and development pressures in SE1 have not gone away. And on a wider vista, the passage of time has seen many challenges to the vision of an inclusive and caring society.

For more information about the amazing spirit of community action in SE1 please go to se1stories.uk