A couple of weeks ago now my colleague the Acting Archdeacon organised a study day on estates ministry in the Two Cities. In his opening remarks he made the point that here in the centre of London our estates are "hidden". Both by deliberate acts of planning and also in that they are at the back of our minds.
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| The font where I was baptised |
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| The Church of the Holy Spirit |
This set me thinking about my own engagement with ministry on estates, and indeed with living on estates. I was born on an estate, the Riddings Estate in Scunthorpe where my father was the first priest in charge of the then newly built
Church of the Holy Spirit. I was baptised in a font made out of a piece of unworked iron ore underneath a spire formed of three steel girders made in the Appleby Frodingham Scunthorpe steel rolling mills.
Then after a brief moment in which he served in a rural Lincolnshire parish while being the deputy youth officer for the diocese of Lincoln, we moved to Leeds where my Father was Diocesan Youth Officer for the Diocese of Ripon. I remember whenever we went into the town centre catching the bus opposite then newly built Wortley Towers and Wortley Heights. We thought they were so much better than the streets of two up two down
back-to-back houses around our own vicarage, whose latrine block was built against the vicarage garden wall.
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| Back to Back Housing in Leeds in 1970, just when I was there as a child. More pics here |
As an exercise in urban planning the towers have been a
failure; but they were built with the very best of intentions to make life better for people.
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| Wortley Towers and Wortley Heights as they are today |
In the late 1980s I was a pastoral assistant in Paddington, in fact in the
parish where the Acting Archdeacon is now the vicar. I vividly remember one day being asked by an elderly and almost blind parishioner who lived there on the
Hallfield Estate to go with him on a visit to a friend of his in "North London." We took the tube and the bus into what was for me then terra incognita, and got off at a bus stop by a huge field. Towering over it were large grey blocks. My heart sank as we walked towards them and I realised that we were coming to Broadwater Farm of which I had heard only because of the riot there about eighteen months before.
One of the
churches, which I later came to know very well, rang the Angelus, and I was reminded both of God's presence everywhere, and of his incarnation amongst the poor. The estate was, at that time, threatening, and I was convinced that I would have had a lot of trouble had I not been with a black person.
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| Broadwater farm much as I knew it as a local Vicar in the 1990s & 2000s |
When I became a vicar is was nearby in
Tottenham. As well as having a couple of small estates in the parish, and many others round about, a significant proportion of the congregation lived in Broadwater Farm. I would visit there regularly. I came to know the place as full of welcoming homes, faithful people, and while many struggled in all kinds of ways and there was certainly crime and poverty, many people were seeking to do good and to follow God. The community was strong and there was so much more good than bad reputations will allow.
We still make mistakes with our planning. In sharp contrast to what
Father Jellicoe was doing in the 1920s and 30s when Somers Town was built the new estate built at the bottom of my parish at Tottenham Hale was designed to provide security, but as a byproduct this prevents neighbours from being able easily to visit one another. The electronic key fobs allow you entry only to your own block and to get off out of the lift at your own floor. The vision to build the
new church there was partly to do better than we had done in the past.
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| The Church of S Francis at the Engine Room Tottenham Hale |
How good therefore that we were reflecting on ministry in estates; places which can be full of fear, and which often find community difficult because of the very structure of the planning, but which are also places where Christ dwells and his church is active.
Though now my work is in central London, there are many estates here as elsewhere. I pray that the estates, and the positive influence that they have had on me, will not be hidden but revealed as places where God dwells.
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