Charlie Hawksfield
In this way the Heygate estate was ahead of the game, its maze of walkways and tunnels
create a mesh of weaving paths around the estate and under the Elephant and Castle roundabout.
They are playful and irrational, some curve gracefully up to the first floor level (see figure 3)
others jut out of the blocks over the street like exterior staircases. In the tunnels under the traffic, artwork has been scrawled crudely on the walls, with the dripping ceilings and the roar of traffic. They fit neatly into the Situationist’s Unitary Urbanism model.
Constant wrote in Another City for Another Life- “we envisage covered cities in which
the layout of roads and separate buildings will be replaced by a continuous spatial construction elevated above the ground, including clusters of dwellings as well as public spaces” (Constant 1959). This is exactly what Tim Tinker had in mind when he designed the car parks, walkways and public spaces. He made the street obsolete, created unconventional elevated spaces connected by imaginative routes. I think Constant especially would have loved aspects of the Heygate estate (from certain angles it even looks like some of his designs for New Babylon).
These small innovations make the Heygate different from the French modernism of Le
Corbusier. Yes the blocks are built for household comfort, and the architecture is unbelievably ugly, but there is a sense of play here, and the galleries, walkways and tunnels should have set up lively social interactions. So where did it all go wrong?
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