The Peckham Experiment
A conversation with author, Guy Ware
Guy Ware is a critically acclaimed novelist whose previous books include The Fat of Fed Beasts (2015), Reconciliation (2017) and The Faculty of Indifference (2019). His short stories have been anthologised in the Best British Short Stories and, in 2018, he won the London Short Story Prize.
We knew we definitely wanted to read Guy’s new novel for a a few reasons. First, it’s called The Peckham Experiment, which means that it must have something to do with what was going on in the Pioneer Centre off the Queen’s Road (long before that building was turned into flats). And, second, the cover features a blurb by friend of LiB, Will Wiles, who we trust when it comes to recommendations (and whose thoughts on blurbs are well documented).
As well as putting the book on our Christmas list, we sat down for a conversation with Guy about how he was inspired to write the book in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, how the stories of our cities become warped and simplified over time, and why nobody is taking to the streets to demand rights for tenants in 2022.
Hi Guy. Before we get into talking about the book and the experiment that inspired it, we have to ask you the same question we ask everyone, which is ‘what’s your relationship to London?’
Well, I’m not London born and bred. I was born in Northampton but I moved here in 1987. I’m in New Cross now and I’ve been here for 20-odd years. But before that I was in Poplar and Bethnal Green.
As for what brought me here, it’s the usual story: work. My first job was in emergency housing for homeless ex-offenders. I worked in a couple of hostels in Brixton and West Norwood. That took me into local government, because they were the people who had the houses and the money. I worked in and around local government since that point really, until I retired a year or two ago.
For a lot of that time I wasn’t writing. It was something I wanted to do when I was young and I set it aside when I went to university. I came back to it much later, when I had children. Now you might think that, with working full-time and having children, that I had enough to do, but I think having kids helped trigger something. So I started writing again and gradually got more serious about it.
We can’t really ask you where the idea came from for the book, because the title kind of gives it away. But this isn’t a non-fiction book about the Peckham Experiment, it’s a novel that takes that experiment as a kicking off point to explore some much bigger themes. Can you explain how you put those connections together to start writing the novel?
(N.B The Peckham Experiment was set up in the 30s and - very basically - gave families access to health facilities and activities to see if that would encourage them to take a vested interest in maintaining their fitness. You can read more about it here.)
There were two things that came together to make this book really. Just around the corner from where I live is the building that was the home of the Peckham Experiment. It sits just off Queens Road. Just walking past that on the way to the station got me curious about it, because it’s a fabulous building.
When I started looking into the history of the experiment I remembered that one of my first jobs in London was working for Southwark council. In the 90s they were doing lots of redevelopment work and one of the things they did was sell that building, the Pioneer Center, for redevelopment as flats.
It was part of a big deal that led to the redevelopment of Peckham town square and the development of the Peckham Pulse, a supposedly innovative approach to integrating leisure service and health care. Which is exactly what the Peckham Experiment had been doing 60 years earlier! What goes around comes around I guess.
So there was that local interest in the initiative itself and some of the background and the post-history to it. But the initial trigger to start writing this novel was actually Grenfell.
At the time of the Grenfell fire I was working for London Councils, which is a membership body for all of the boroughs. So I was dealing with all 32 boroughs and the City, and obviously that included Kensington and Chelsea.
Apart from the sheer horror of the tragedy itself, one of the things that struck me about Grenfell, was the historical echoes with Ronan Point.
Okay, we might have to pause here and talk a bit about Ronan Point, because it’s not one of those London events that people necessarily know about. When I saw that your novel featured a building that collapses in 1968, it rang a bell for me but I had to turn to Google to remind myself. So, for anyone else who isn’t familiar, Ronan Point was a tower block in Canning Town in Newham that partly collapsed just a few weeks after it had opened in the spring of ‘68. A gas explosion caused one entire corner of the building to just sheer off and five people died.
That’s right. The received wisdom about Ronan Point is that it’s a bit like the Rolling Stones at Altamont in that it marks the day that idealism about tall tower blocks died. But that’s not quite true. It can’t be, because Ronan Point happened in May 1968 and we carried on building tower blocks beyond that. Grenfell Tower itself was built in the early 70s.
Part of what my book is about is how these kinds of stories get simplified, and the simplified version of this story is that planners were in love with these tower blocks until one of them fell down and people discovered that living in streets in the sky was terrible.
Neither of these things are entirely true, although they do have elements of truth about them. It’s not that some people did not find living in tower blocks horrible, they did. And it’s certainly not true that a large chunk of Ronan Point didn’t fall down, because obviously it did and it was only by sheer good luck that no more than five people died.
Nonetheless it was a big blow to the confidence of the developers and the building industry and it did lead to significant changes in planning and building regulations, particularly about what you had to do to make sure that buildings would stay up. Ironically, Grenfell Tower stayed up because of those changed regulations. Sadly they didn’t stop it burning.
So when Grenfell happened, and you were working alongside some of the councils responsible for its construction and maintenance, you must have had a very strong and terrible sense of déjà vu?
That moment in July 2017 triggered a lot of thoughts in me. Because, as I said, I was a local government insider and I knew people who had worked at Kensington and Chelsea. So on one level I was horrified by the way the reaction to the disaster was managed, which was frankly terrible. But on another level I was thinking ‘These are people who are very much like me’.
Now the public inquiry has demonstrated that some of the people involved, particularly among the suppliers, were quite conscious of the risks and were hiding them. But there were also lots of people involved who were operating in a system that was essentially incentivised to cut corners and which generated an absolutely horrific outcome.
Part of what I wanted to do with the book was to look at the story of those organisations and the people who work inside them and trace how these things could get to that tragic point. So, I set the novel a week before the Grenfell fire happens, on the night before the general election.
Tell us a little bit about the two brothers at the centre of the book and how you use their stories to weave together some of these moments in London’s history.
The narrator, who is one of a pair of twins, is preparing for his brother’s funeral the following morning. So the next day he is going to get up and vote, and then he’s going to go to the funeral and give a eulogy for his brother.
In essence, what he’s trying to do over the course of the night on which the book is set, is make sense of the whole second half of the twentieth century! He’s working out a lot of guilt and rivalry and trying to figure out who was on the right side of history.
The two brothers, JJ and Charlie, were born in this area back before the war. So their family was part of the Peckham Experiment. They were the people who used the center. And again there’s a simplified version of the story here. The one that says everything was horrible until the aftermath of the Second World War, when there was a great flowering of radical socialist ambition that produced the welfare state and the NHS. And life was dandy until Mrs Thatcher started tearing it all apart.
That not entirely wrong, but it’s also a gross simplification. What the book shows is that the Peckham Experiment predates the welfare state and that it was very utopian in its own way, and very ahead of its time. But it was also controversial from the start, and one of the reasons it was controversial was that you had to pay to be a member and that was done partly to fund the place, but also to keep out the riffraff. So, right from the off there’s this tension between the radicalness and the utopian-ness of the organisers and a degree of control being exercised over the experiment that they were running.
The experiment got shut down during the war and the building was requisitioned. But then it was reopened almost by popular demand. Former members petitioned MPs in the new 1945 Parliament and they managed to raise the money to reopen it. But it didn’t last very long, and it closed for good in 1950. One of the reasons it didn’t last was that it was running counter to the spirit of the NHS, and essentially the NHS stamped it out.
There’s other aspects of that pre-war radicalism in the book. For example, the boys remember their father, who was a Communist, being involved in rent strikes in Peckham in the thirties and fighting the fascists. So there’s these reminders that it just didn’t all emerge out of nowhere in 1945.
There seems to be this theme here about what happens when imperfect, complex individuals become part of something bigger than themselves and how motivations and ‘best laid plans’ are impacted by very human emotions.
The two brothers in the novel are determined to build the new Jerusalem, because they’ve had this radical upbringing, but they take slightly different paths to it. JJ goes and works for his local council as a housing manager, and he gets rapidly promoted and becomes housing director. Whereas Charlie has always had a slight problem with authority, and part of that is because he’s gay, which is not something that the Peckham Experiment could really accommodate because the whole idea was based around the nuclear family.
So Charlie takes a slight swerve and goes to work for a private developer who sells buildings to local authorities and that leads him into world that built Ronan Point. And while his motives are mixed, they’re not impure. It’s not that he doesn’t genuinely think that most of the housing in London needs to be cleared away and improved because it was horrible slums. He genuinely is trying to improve the lot of people in London, but he gets sucked into a world that seems to deliver on that promise by building places, but there’s an awful lot of baggage that comes along with that.
It’s something we’ve been thinking more about since the closing statements at the Grenfell inquiry. That need to try and untangle those threads of corruption and irresponsibility and ignorance in order to find your way back to some point of blame; and the utter futility of ever being able to do that in a meaningful way.
There was a diagram that came out of the inquiry recently mapping how all the various organisations were blaming each other, and it reminded me that it’s not just the motives of individuals that can get complicated; it’s the organisations as well. Particularly large organisations that develop interests of their own, almost independent of the people who work for them.
For a long time, I had an epigraph in the book that was actually a quote from the Hillsborough inquiry, which was about the “instinctive prioritisation of the reputation of an organisation over the citizen’s right to expect people to be held to account for their actions.”
I’ve seen this in action and I dare say I’ve done it myself. I’ve worked for several councils in London and there is an extent to which that’s what you do because there’s a reputation to defend.
So one of the big questions in the book is, is it better to stay within an imperfect system and try and manage it as best you can, do what good and limit what evil you can, or to step away and have nothing to do with it?
Before we leave you, I just wanted to ask about the rent strikes that feature in the book. Obviously we’ve written quite a bit about the rent crisis we’re seeing in London right now, and it’s interesting that, even though things were bad at that time, people had somewhere to turn. They could take to the streets. We don’t see people taking to the streets today, even though the situation is equally unjust and untenable.
I think part of the reason why there isn’t the same sort of organised or amplified resistance today is that there are not as many local authority tenants.
’Right to buy’ and buy-to-let has done just as much damage for tenant’s associations as it’s done for the ability to deliver any social housing in the first place. So if you’re an individual tenant dealing with an individual landlord, you’re in a very different position and a much more vulnerable position in many ways.
I’ve just written an article for Big Issue North on the book and I was doing some research for that on the relative price of properties. The last flat I could find that sold in the Pioneer Center, where the Peckham Experiment was, went for £625,000. That was a two-bedroom flat. That’s something like 16 times average earnings.
It’s always very difficult when you do historical comparisons of money, but I did come across statistics somewhere that said, in 1935, when my two characters would have been four years old, the average house price was 1.75 times average earnings. If that’s anywhere near true then it just shows how out of kilter things have become.
The absurd inflation of property prices in London - as in many towns and cities across the country - has driven a massive growth in renting at a time when local authorities are no longer able to meet that need. If we return to 1930s renting levels - where the majority of Londoners never expected to own a home - we may also have to re-learn the radicalism of the following decades that I describe in my book, to challenge the power of private landlords and create genuinely affordable alternatives.
The Peckham Experiment is out now in paperback and eBook. Buy it here.
You can find Guy on Twitter here.