The fascinating history of Rotherhithe’s Silwood Estate – from weathering Nazi bombs to its turn-of-the-century regeneration – is revealed at a documentary screening this afternoon.
Silwood Estate: Our History – Our Home will be shown upstairs at the Surrey Quays shopping centre, at 6.30pm on Thursday, February 15.
Featuring stunning archive footage of the 1950s estate, and interviews with the characters who called it home, it’s the work of Rotherhithe’s born-and-bred filmmaker Micky Holland.
Micky, who is Arts Editor at Southwark News, said: “I moved there when I was three, with me, mum and little brother; it was brand new then and only half of it was built, the other half was a building site, and there were still some of the old houses that the new flats were replacing.
“It was more or less my home up until I was about 30, it was my childhood, my early adulthood – My son Jimmy grew up there.”
Micky started filming the estate when it was being demolished as part of a regeneration scheme in the late ‘90s.
He said: “When I heard that they were going to knock Silwood down I wanted to film the blocks of flats so I always had a memory of them, that was about 1998, and I kept going back to film the buildings as they became derelict and empty, and the big machinery pulling them down. It was very sad.
“Eventually, a Facebook page was started and I reconnected with some of the kids I used to play with and we would swap stories online.”
The documentary covers more than 80 years and concludes with interviews with residents who still live there.
“And all those people who cover the years from 1940 to 2020 are connected by living in the same streets, going to the same church and the same school,” Micky said.
This estate was allowed to deteriorate into a deplorable state in the 1990s and 2000s by Southwark Council. When I went by I used to think how people lived there. IMHO this was just planned dereliction, as with Aylesbury and other estates, to pave the way for demolition and privatisation. A Local Authority strategy frequently employed to devalue property prices in selected areas, community morale and dilute opposition to planning applications. What replaces these 1960s social housing projects is rarely aesthetically or socially better IF the original housing had been properly maintained and modernised over time.