Home on the Heygate Estate

The flatmate gave me a lift back from Burough Station. We circled around and around, trying to find a parking space, the four walls of the estate looming up all around us. After being away for a couple of weeks, the estate, with it’s rows of windows and gangways studded with floodlights was overwhelming. We drove around the front of Claydon House and back again, along Heygate Road before an Asian family in white robes got into their min-station wagon and pulled out.

Way up on top of the estate, the wind turbine was going full blast, the vibrations and droning of it’s heavy blades resonating about the parking lot. “If we can hear it down here,” the flatmate said, “imagine how it is for those poor bastards who live right below.”

The hi-rise in front of the Alexander Fleming has gone up a few more stories, accumulating a covering around it’s lower stories like skin forming around ectoplasm. This morning walking up Rockingham, I noticed the beginning of another hi-rise going up on the site of one of our old locals (a pile of rubble when I first came back last year). Part of the new development one presumes – one of the propaganda posters in the shopping mall promises that of the 440 new units created, 140 will be ‘affordable.’