Barton's Britain: The Becontree estate

Built to replace East End slums, it became home to football managers and archbishops

'We used to have flamingos in the park," remembers the controller in the local cab office, stretching back in his chair as the radio crackles. "They had to take them out because people were shooting them." He smiles. "In those days the houses were luscious and beautiful. These days they're small and poky: a very small kitchen, a very small front room, three bedrooms, one large, two small, but having lived in mine 25 years it makes not a jot of difference. The only thing I don't like is that from the street door you can see straight to my toilet door."

The Becontree estate, in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham, has a population of 100,000 and is the largest public housing development in the world. Between 1921 and 1932, 27,000 houses were built here as homes for heroes after the first world war, and to rehouse the residents of London's East End slums. For the first time, they had running water, indoor toilets and private gardens, but its residents were still poor enough to earn the estate the nickname Corned Beef City (because it was thought to be all they could afford to eat). Still, over the years, the streets of Becontree have been home to some formidable names, among them Alf Ramsey, Terry Venables, Max Bygraves, Dudley Moore, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey.

Becontree was built with a mind to at least steering the behaviour of its residents – there would be no lodgers, no community centres, and its streets and municipal gardens carried signs that commanded no cycling and no ball games. For a time, the council even hesitated to allow telephones.

Today, there are speed bumps, 20mph zones and bollards to prevent cars parking on the pavement. Its streets, famously, were near-identical, but walking them now it is noticeable how its residents have worked hard to make these homes their own with pebbledash, paint, mock-tudor effects, porches, trellises, decorative butterflies. There is extravagant topiary, trails of wisteria, green doors, red doors, white doors and, for a while, residents confide, a passing fad for fishponds. 

Barry Watson, 67, lives with his wife, Shirley, and their retired greyhound, Olly, in one of the estate's desirable suntrap houses on Gale Street. Shirley grew up 10 minutes away, on the same estate, in a two-bed home that belonged to her parents, who moved from Hackney when their house was bombed in the war. "When you first moved in you had to keep the hedge cut, the front garden tidy, the curtains had to look clean and the lightbulbs hung at the front of the room so they didn't cast shadows," she recalls. 

Things have changed since they moved in – the house itself has been renovated, with a remodelled kitchen, a new bathroom and a stairlift for Shirley, but the neighbourhood too has altered. "We've had a lot of people move in from other countries," notes Barry. An Indian family lives on one side and Brazilians on the other; across the street is a Nigerian family. "We enjoy it," he adds, and tells of joint parties and neighbourhood barbecues. "It is a lovely feeling to have neighbours on all sides who are friends."

More unsettling has been the explosion of McDonald's and takeaways, the death of the greengrocers and fish-mongers, the rise of the supermarket, the closure of schools and pubs – the Fanshawe, the Fiddlers, the Chequers, the Anglers Retreat, the Church Elm, which had the longest bar in Essex and was full of workers from the local Ford plant, all now long gone.

"It's changed vastly," says the cab office controller. "People used to be proud of their gardens, now they stuff rubbish in the privet, and the grass has become drives." He sighs. "I've cabbed in the area for 30 years. I remember the flats being built. I remember when the A13 was not a lot wider than the road out there. I remember when there was a paddling pool in the park and my mum spent some of her money on some bright green knitted trunks for me, and I forgot them and I remember walking back home, tears in my eyes." He smiles at the memory. "Would I change it?" he wonders. "I'd like to go back to 15 years ago. But you can never go back. And I'm too old to move now. If I won the lottery, I'd tour the world and come back here and put a granny flat on my house."