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thamesmead community commons

Thamesmead Community Commons (TCC) was a proposed vehicle for empowering existing residents of Thamesmead Estate in the face of wide scale change and externally-driven regeneration. Through a balance of bottom-up and stakeholder development the proposal aimed to mitigate the cyclically historical failure of masterplanning alongside an ongoing erosion of local identity.

The Commons is a framework for fairly elected residents to represent their neighbourhood constituencies on decision making platforms - such as the Regeneration Champions’ Board - for issues concerning their immediate localities, as well as those affecting the full extents of Thamesmead.

By developing an understanding of existing networks of  social amenity, in-between sites were identified within the suburban fabric. Further architectural proposals primarily sought to strengthen and serve rather than displace.

Thamesmead, from its inception till 2001, had a dedicated Newspaper and radio station. In celebration of Thamesmead’s 50th anniversary, artist Verity Jane Keefe has revived this tradition through the ‘Earwig Community Press’. We imagine that the Earwig takes off; a place for local news, events and stories, and speculate it’s future as a medium through which the TCC’s message is communicated.