A Walk around Tamarisk Way & Pendeen Court, Cippenham

 

 

 

Pedestrian entrance to social housing complex at Tamarisk Way, Cippenham

 

The only thing missing from this happy vista is a regular patrol of greatcoat-wearing guards barking orders in German accompanied by Alsatian dogs straining at the leash. The dingy architecture, the humourless symmetry of the buildings, the joyless communal lawns, the unnecessarily fenced entrance all serve to give this complex a charming concentration-camp vibe that can only mean one thing: social housing. And indeed, this development does contain a high proportion of council-rented flats.

The small, prison-like windows look out onto a shared lawn area that boasts a couple of scraggly bushes and stunted firs but no mature, full-size trees; all that’s missing is a watchtower and barbed wire. There are no benches or any area to stop at. As nothing is to be ’wasted’ on these people, there’s no garden, or even any allowance for residents to create their own. There aren’t even any flowers.

The blocks are identical in size and style, with little discernible divisions between where one flat ands and the next one starts. There is no variation in elevation or angle. The brickwork is doom-laden and the building entrances as unceremonious as a gas-bill. The dark window frames, a favourite of 1980s house design, add to the barracks-like feel and the general despair of the place.

 

Well, you’re not here to be entertained: the rules of social housing are in full effect, with individuality replaced by a levelled, communal underclass identity, with no visual stimulation or aesthetic quality that would make you want to linger, and a bland, institutional feel that belies any attempt at social support or mobility and heads for a kind of collective punishment instead. Like a kind of lower-class social POW camp, there is to be no escape. (*Bang!* thud.)

 

 

(Above) Taken from the communal lawn area at the centre of the development. With only the flat grass patch and the joylessly-squared hedge (somebody put it out of its misery, please!) to flatter the eye outside, the residents instead beam in aesthetic pleasure from afar using their satellite dishes. No birds do sing, no kids do play… The green space might have been a bit more lively, but the small sign on the right gives the usual ‘NO BALL GAMES’ order, which is a kind of shorthand for ‘no kids’, ‘no frivolity’ and ‘no fun’.

The depressing nature of the buildings continues undiminished, and even the merged gable in the corner doesn’t break the monotony-- if anything it makes the place look slightly creepier, as if two unwilling entities were forcibly merged into the same space, an apt metaphor for social housing if ever I heard one.

 

 

The other side of the communal lawn. The complex looks a little worse for wear, despite only being built around 1990.

 

 

 

Pendeen Court complex, Tamarisk Way

Many of Slough’s vulnerable end up along Tamarisk Way, including the homeless or about-to-be-homeless. The area sees its fair share of crime too, with local crime reports over the last decade giving Tamarisk Way as the address of people variously convicted of dealing Heroin, knife possession, kidnapping and beating, robbing, and in one disturbing case, terrorizing neighbours with loud music, threatening behaviour and by posting excrement through their letterboxes. A couple of years ago the local playground lost some of its equipment to arson.

The council-owned flats are far from charming too. Residents in Pendeen Court complained earlier this year that they had been without hot water for five days, with one couple adding that the squalid flat they had been moved into had a broken toilet seat, broken pipes and “blood all over the floor by the cooker in the kitchen, lifted tiles, a broken cupboard that is thick with black mould underneath”.

 

Meanwhile this family lives here at the mercy of the council with the threat of being moved across the country to Doncaster dangling overhead, as the council has difficulties in housing people in Slough-- a symptom suffered before by the victims of Slough’s housing crisis (the last time this was reported in the local press the affected people were offered housing in Leicester, which at a mere hundred-odd miles away seems practically next door when compared to Doncaster ).

 

All this will come as no surprise to anyone viewing this area; it looks punitively depressing and that’s exactly the intended effect. Like all social housing it is partly a punishment, perhaps designed to encourage people not to linger on the public purse but more likely designed simply as a reflection of the way people at the lower end are supposedly to be viewed, with their need of charity resented and their social backgrounds loathed, worthy of contempt and undeserving of solace. It is a place designed to contain the undesired and the uncherished, with poorly-furnished flats for poorly-furnished lives and an architecture as grim and merciless as the forces that toss these people around like so much human flotsam.