Concrete tower blocks and raised walkways ring an artificial lake, built as a planned town from the late 1960s.
What Thamesmead looks like
sits at the centre of South Thamesmead, footpaths and a fountain along its edge and concrete tower blocks rising straight out of the water on three sides. Raised pedestrian walkways run on their own level above the roads, crossing and on wide concrete bridges with their own ramps and stairs.
The early blocks are raw concrete, some reaching twelve storeys, with balconies stacked in long straight runs under flat roofs. Later phases switch to brick, lower and closer to the ground, built around courtyards rather than towers. Harrow Manorway crosses on a flyover, its underside painted over with graffiti and faded colour panels, a low gravel path running underneath on the Ridgeway.
The Green Chain Walk crosses on a footbridge striped in blue, grey and purple, running on past willow trees to a canal lined with brick terraced housing. opens past the lake's eastern end, a tarmac path crossing grass and post and rail fencing toward the towers beyond the trees.
Several of the blocks nearest the lake are currently wrapped in blue scaffold netting as Peabody works through its ongoing redevelopment. New brick apartment buildings are going up alongside the original towers, and some of the walkways and underpasses from the original estate have already been replaced or demolished.
Shot in Thamesmead
The E4 series Misfits used the Lakeside Centre on Southmere Lake as the gang's community service base over its run from 2009 to 2013. Stanley Kubrick filmed A Clockwork Orange around Southmere and Binsey Walk in 1970 and 1971, and the blocks that lined Binsey Walk in the film have since been demolished under Peabody's redevelopment of the estate. The 1996 film Beautiful Thing filmed around Yarnton Way and the Tavy Bridge area beside South Mere Lake, since redeveloped as Cygnet Square. The BBC series Informer (2018) filmed across the Thamesmead estate, without naming one street or building.
Misfits, 2009 to 2013
The gang's community service team is based in the Lakeside Centre, a brutalist building on Southmere Lake's north shore. The building and the lake in front of it both recur across the show's run.
Bijlmermeer went up between 1968 and 1975 on the same plan as Thamesmead, towers rising out of parkland with cars kept on elevated roads above pedestrian routes at ground level. Both estates keep people and traffic on separate levels across the whole site, which few other planned towns from this period still do. Bijlmermeer's original blocks are built on a hexagonal honeycomb plan, so a wide shot that shows a block's angled corners gives it away. A straight run of elevated road or walkway keeps the comparison intact. Try searching elevated roads above pedestrian routes now.
Eastwood is the Sert Jackson complex on Main Street, completed in 1976. Its ground floor lifts into a pedestrian arcade on poured concrete columns, the same device Thamesmead uses to keep walkways clear of the roads below. Roosevelt Island sits in the East River with the Manhattan skyline down most sightlines, so a frame standing in for Thamesmead has to stay close to the arcade and off the water. Try searching pedestrian arcade on concrete columns now.
Marzahn is a prefabricated estate whose blocks went up from 1977 under the WBS 70 panel system. Blocks of five, eleven and twenty two storeys are picked out in different colours. Together they form the largest such estate built in Europe, and the repeated concrete towers match Thamesmead's scale at a distance even though the construction method is different. Marzahn's panels are smoother and more repetitive than Thamesmead's board marked concrete, with a regular grid of joint lines across the whole facade, so close facade shots give the system away. Try searching WBS 70 panel system now.
