You didn’t get a good view of Skygarden when you arrived by road. Stromberg had surrounded the central tower with five long thin blocks, each nine storeys high, a very conventional design that, one architectural critic complained, obscured the exuberance of Stromberg’s central conceit. These were built in a conventionally slipshod manner which certainly obscured the exuberance of most of the people that lived there, who also comprised the bulk of the population of the estate. Arriving from the Elephant and Castle side you emerged from under the railway bridge to get a quick glimpse of the tower before turning into the estate and dropping down past the, by then, sealed-off garage areas of the blocks and into a narrow culvert sunk six metres below ground level. It was just wide enough for a VW Beetle and a Mini to pass each other and the pavements were only a little bit wider than curbs, pedestrian traffic having theoretically been channelled onto the walkway that was suspended overhead. During the 1981 riots the residents had built a barricade across the culvert and waited with petrol bombs and stones, but the police declined to turn up — I don’t blame them. Back then the Skygarden had been as close to being a real no-go estate as ever existed in the fevered mind of a journalist but Sergeant Daverc said its glory days were long past, and you were as safe there now as you would be in Chipping Norton. Certainly it was home to fewer professional criminals.
The access road opened into a sunken tarmacked area that surrounded the base of the tower, the outer perimeter of which was lined with garage doors. The actual garages, built just slightly too small for modern-sized cars, were set into the soil of the surrounding landscaping. Above these doors was another metre and a half of concrete cladding topped by a chain-link fence beyond which I could just see, despite the fact that I was effectively standing at the bottom of a wide hole, tufts of grass and the tops of distant trees. I was willing to bet big money that the fence hadn’t been in the original plans and wondered how many kids had injured themselves jumping down from the park before the council put it in.
We’d asked Frank Caffrey to drive the van for us, since out of his London Fire Brigade kit he looked the part of White Van Man. It was a character he certainly grew into when he elected to stay in the cab and read the Sun while me and Lesley unloaded our stuff.
Like his hero Corbusier, and many of his contemporaries, Stromberg had had a strange phobia about ground-floor flats. In Skygarden the lower ground floor was strictly for loading and unloading and what is always referred to on blueprints as ‘plant’. The ‘ground floor’, where the elevated walkways converged, was for pedestrian entry, community areas and storage. Thus ensuring that no matter how far down the block the council parked your granny, she was still going to get some much needed exercise when the lifts stopped working.
After we’d got the sofa bed out the back of the van and were taking a breather, I glanced up and saw a white kid in a navy-blue hoody staring down at us from the nearest walkway. I know trouble when it’s below the age of criminal responsibility, and while my first instinct was to arrest his parents on general principles, I gave him a cheery wave instead. He gave me a blankly suspicious look before whipping his head out of sight.
‘The natives know we’re here,’ I said.
The doors to the atrium were constructed from heavy metal and wire mesh reinforced glass. We used one of our heavier boxes to jam them open while we hefted the sofa bed towards the lift.
‘You all right in there, Frank?’ called Lesley as she strained to lift her end.
Back in the van, Frank gave her a cheery thumbs-up.
The atrium had a concrete floor and what looked like recently repainted plaster-covered breezeblock walls. Stair access was to the left, doors leading to ‘plant’ to the right and a pair of reassuringly familiar dimpled graffiti-resistant lift doors to our front. I pressed the call button. There was a red square of plastic inset into the wall above the door which remained resolutely dark.
‘Shouldn’t we at least get the rest of the stuff into here?’ asked Lesley.
‘I want to check the state of the lift first,’ I said.
I put my ear to the cold metal of the door and listened — there were some comforting rumbles and clanks from above. I stood back and the doors opened.
It was urine and graffiti free, which is always a good sign in a lift, but it was small — an expression of the architect’s faith that the proletariat were unencumbered by such bourgeois affectations as solidly built furniture. Me and Lesley had to wrestle the sofa bed into an awkward diagonal to get inside. Leaving the rest of our stuff in Frank’s care, we ascended to our new home.
The flats in the tower came in two basic varieties, two bedroom and four bedroom. The four-bedroom flats were on two floors linked by an internal staircase and the two-bedroom flats were stacked one on top of the other with an external staircase leading up to the top flat. Thus the lifts only went to every other floor and Stromberg had cunningly managed to combine some of the disadvantages of a terraced street with all the disadvantages of a tower block.
When we reached the twenty-first floor we managed to extricate the sofa bed with just a bit of scuffing to the armrests and only minor damage to the lift doors.
For some reason, Stromberg had designed a hexagonal central shaft that ran up the middle of the tower so that for the first few years you could lean over and stare all the way down to the basement level. Since it didn’t function as a light-well and it was ten times wider than needed for the building’s tuned mass damper, it was a bizarre bit of architectural whimsy even for the late 1960s. The tenants soon put it to good use as a combination waste disposal area and emergency urinal and after two suicides and a notorious murder case, the council installed heavy duty wire mesh to seal it off from the walkways.
Our flat, of course, was right on the other side of the shaft. As we lugged our increasingly heavy sofa bed around the walkway, I noticed that half the flats on our floor had been sealed shut with steel security doors. COUNTY GARD was neatly stencilled at eye height and attached below that a legal warning to all squatters that it was a crime punishable by six months in prison or a?5,000 fine.
‘Or both,’ said Lesley with satisfaction.
The front door for our new flat was a plain modern design lacking those traditional panels of frosted glass that allowed light in and your more entrepreneurial neighbours a chance to determine whether the place was occupied or not — just in case you had some big ticket items lying around unwanted.
Inside, the flat had been painted mostly white with a hint of apple and recently enough for the walls to be clean — although we did leave a graze at waist level in the hallway as we squeezed the sofa bed in. We plonked it down in what I assumed was the living room, and sat down to recover.
I’ve got to say that Stromberg was consistent in his architectural principles. The hallways were narrow, the rooms were too long and the ceilings were low. It also had sliding patio doors out onto a huge balcony — the size of a small urban garden. You could have added an extra bedroom to the flat and still had enough balcony left over to feed pigeons, hang washing and dump all the stuff you couldn’t be bothered to wrestle down the stairs.
‘Right,’ said Lesley. ‘We’d better get back downstairs before Frank drives off in search of a fry-up.’
Fortunately he was still there when we reached him, trapped in his cab by a formidable white woman who was bending his ear. Dressed in an M amp;S blouse and Peacock budget slacks, she was the type of large white woman who’s been apprenticing for the role of saucy granny since late adolescence. By the looks of it, this one was going to graduate in the top two percentile.