Plan for estate feels like ethnic cleansing, say angry residents

Protesters have staged a sit-in at the brutalist 1960s estate featured in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange to highlight concerns about a development they say amounts to gentrification and policies they call art washing.

- Diane Taylor

Protesters have staged a sit-in at the brutalist 1960s estate featured in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange to highlight concerns about a development they say amounts to gentrification and policies they call art washing.

The brief occupation on Saturday of Thamesmead's Lakeside Centre, an arts centre in south-east London, is part of a wider battle by residents who claim the soul of the community, along with many socially rented homes, will be lost as part of a huge regeneration by the Peabody housing association.

Thamesmead was conceived by a group of architects at the former Greater London Council in the 1960s and hailed as "the town of tomorrow", providing housing to replace dilapidated inner London homes.

Lesnes, one of the estates built in the area in the 1960s, was famously depicted in A Clockwork Orange. Sixty years on, improvements are urgently needed.