You can’t miss it walking through Southwark Park. An enormous, twenty-six storey building towering over the park and the nearby area. There’s nothing anywhere near as tall as Maydew House in Bermondsey.
Built in the early-mid 1960s, Maydew is also a relic of an earlier time in London, the postwar council-house building boom when local authorities were empowered – and had the resources – to build social rent homes at scale.
Of course, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government cut that off at the knees, determined as she and her successors were to weaken local authorities, which she often saw as a threat, and centralise power in Westminster.
Her radical right-to-buy scheme, while enabling many to buy their own home for the first time, also took away one of the incentives for councils to build as many new homes.
What’s going on at Maydew House? A breakdown of why everyone had to leave the Bermondsey block
Why invest in housing when you could be forced to sell it off at a price substantially below market rate?
Some may find irony in the fact that at a time when Southwark Council is starting to replenish its diminished housing stock, in an echo of the golden age of council house building – with plans to put up 11,000 homes by 2043 – one of its flagship blocks has lain empty for seven years.
And despite nearly two full pages of coverage in this week’s paper, we still don’t know exactly why. Plans have changed twice over the twelve years of the project, from selling off the block entirely to building private flats on top, to the current plan of keeping it entirely social rent, which we applaud.
But why did it take two sets of works to remove the asbestos, why were they four years apart, and why did costs go up fourfold from the original estimate to the final bill? These are questions that we will try to answer in the weeks ahead.
What’s going on at Maydew House? A breakdown of why everyone had to leave the Bermondsey block
In time Maydew House can be a flagship again, especially given the desperate need of council homes. As far as we are aware the plan is still to refurbish 144 of the flats and to build over 100 more in the area surrounding the tower block. The timescale for this is next year, although given that we have not seen or been told about how far the council has got on with the refurbishment and building, this looks like a tall order.