Life on Peckham’s Estates in the 70s and 80s

Livvy Murdoch (LM): Can you tell me a bit about your connections to Peckham, past and present?

Russell Newell (RN): My grandmother and mother moved to the Redbridge Gardens estate, Peckham, in the early 60s when it was first built and I was born in Peckham in 1965, where we lived until 1968. We then moved to a small town called New Romney on the Kent coast. So I had two contrasting experiences in my formative years, traversing periodically between the rural flatness of the Romney Marshes and the hustle and bustle of Peckham and Brixton, visiting relatives. My London trips were usually split between Peckham, where my white English grandmother lived, and Brixton where my Jamaican family were based. Coming from my rural childhood environment in New Romney to my grandmother’s fourth floor flat in Peckham felt like the height of modernity.

I returned permanently to London with my mother in 1976. Our first Peckham home was on the Sumner Estate, built prior to World War 2. The estate was in a state of disrepair and the flats lacked central heating which meant they were in low demand. At that time, in the 70s, it was possible to get quickly rehoused under Southwark Council's 'hard to let' scheme, so we moved in. The surrounding community was very interesting to me. For the first time in my life I had friends from a variety of backgrounds. The area was also an exciting place to explore.

I still have strong family ties to Peckham - my daughter, her mum and our grandchildren still live there, as well as various nieces and nephews.

LM: How would you describe Peckham and the estates at the time you were growing up?

RN: During the 70s and early 80s, Peckham and the surrounding neighbourhoods still had a post-war feel. Lots of old bomb sites and dereliction. Over the years my family lived in three different housing estates in Peckham: Redbridge Gardens, Sumner and North Peckham.

Through my mother's grassroots activism I came to know two sides of Peckham. One side - largely north of Peckham High Street - was generally poor and working class, predominantly composed of pre-War and post-War housing estates that replaced the 19th century slums and the destruction wrought during WW2. South of Peckham High Street became more and more affluent the further south you travelled towards Peckham Rye and Dulwich. Here you would find middle and upper-middle class residents in pleasant tree lined streets with larger Georgian and Victorian single occupancy houses. I traversed both sides of the divide and knew members of both communities.

LM: How did you come to photography?

RN: I first remember being interested in the act of looking and taking photos on a family trip around the age of 11. I was using a toy camera that took real film but for one reason or another the film was exposed incorrectly, possibly due to light leaks. A year or so later I was at the house of a wealthy kid I knew who lived in Camberwell and he showed me his SLR. It was a Zenith B (a basic, but solid Russian make). The minute I held it in my hands I knew I wanted one, so I nagged my mother to buy me a second hand Zenith B for my 12th birthday - it was £22. The camera's optics and ground glass became the new way I looked at everything.

My photography practice is almost entirely self-taught and developed through informal education opportunities. I have been a book lover since childhood, so when I got my camera I went to the library and found books on the subject of photography. The book that inspired me the most was Independent Photography - A Biased Guide to 35mm Technique and Equipment by Robert Foothorap. Foothorap was a Nikon advocate hence 'biased' in the title. I still have the book. It contains fantastic hand-drawn illustrations by his wife Gretchen and looking at it now the first photo in the book was a brilliant black-and-white street portrait Foothorap took of an African-American in Watts, LA shot using a 105mm Nikkor lens. It was a beautiful, technically sharp and sympathetic portrait - and thinking about it now, that image must have influenced me. The book went through every stage of the black-and-white photographic process, from making an image to darkroom processing. I started taking photos of everything I could. I found a local community darkroom in the Pitt Street Settlement Community Centre round the corner from our flat in Peckham where we lived. A little later on I’d go on to build a small darkroom in my own bedroom.

LM: What was your relationship to politics? How did you engage?

RN: I was in my early teens when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and I remember my mum saying to me how difficult it was going to be for my generation. A couple of years later, on 11th April 1981, I inadvertently cycled into the middle of the Brixton Riots with my brother on our way home one Saturday afternoon. That was the first time in my life that I witnessed police brutality and violent struggle. I also got caught up in the Peckham riots that same summer and was arrested and beaten quite badly by cops.

I first witnessed and experienced the power of grassroots activism in 1978 with the Peckham Action Group which was formed of people from both middle and working class backgrounds to successfully fight against a huge Peckham redevelopment project led by the incumbent Labour led Southwark Council.

LM: How did your relationship with photography become more formalised?

RN: My relationship with photography developed in two ways. Firstly, in my early to mid-teens I spent a lot of time reading books and studying the life and work of great photographers such as W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank and Ernest Cole. The second was through finding those willing to educate and mentor me. While I was awaiting my court hearing, after being arrested during the riots in Peckham, my solicitor warned that my non-attendance at school in the preceding years would weigh against me. So my mother enrolled me in a photography project that ran a magazine called Schooling & Culture. This project was set up by a group of educators who graduated from Birmingham University under the tutelage of Stuart Hall. Schooling & Culture helped me create and publish my first photo essay (about Rastas in Peckham). The project was set up and run by Martin Lister, Dave Hampshire and Adrian Chappel. This was the first time I learnt how photography and writing could give me a voice. I was eventually given 6 months probation and 90 days ‘intermediate treatment’. What this meant in practice was attending another photography project in Peckham and being tutored by Tony Hall - another student of Birmingham University - who also worked with Schooling & Culture. He continued to teach me about storytelling and narrative and helped me publish a second article featuring photographs I’d shot of Pope John Paul II's visit to London.

When I was 17 I managed to get a job as a press photographer and writer at West Indian World newspaper in Tottenham, London. It was during my time there that I reached out to Network Photographers and became friends with Martin Slavin who encouraged me to create a portfolio of my work and continue taking photographs of the world around me. Over the next year or so Martin helped me edit the images I was taking of the North Peckham Estate. By this time I had quite a sophisticated home darkroom with a Fujimoto enlarger as its centre-piece and very importantly an Amstrad PCW Word Processor. We assembled a new portfolio and Martin reached out to the Architects Journal who agreed to publish a combination of my photographs, poetry and prose. The article won the 'Best use of photography in a business magazine' at the 1987 National Magazine Publishing Awards.

Martin was one of the most influential and important people in my life, he was a great artist and very funny, we were close friends for 25 years. We drifted apart when I moved to Kent in 2010. We reconnected in 2023 by which time he had sadly succumbed to Alzheimers but we still had some great moments. When I showed him the folios we created together he was moved to tears. Martin died peacefully on 20th March 2025.

LM: Your surroundings seem to play an important part in your work – from the architecture of the local estates, to natural light. Can you tell me more about your consideration for composition in your work?

RN: I was always interested in chiaroscuro and the interplay of light and dark, the play of shadows. I can remember being inspired by a photograph of a chair in shadow (Quiet House - Black Mountain, 1949) by Robert Rauschenberg I saw in a Time-Life book. In terms of framing I like asymmetry and negative space. I guess the balance of opposites.

I like to carefully compose a frame with the expectation that something unexpected will occur. Whether that’s the presence of a person, a change in the light, the weather or some other event. I like to immerse myself in the serendipity of the moment, and its endless possibilities. Sometimes this means waiting for long stretches to get the perfect image.

The North Peckham Estate provided lots of interesting visual opportunities: fleeting glimpses of movement through these brick and concrete frames at the intersections of stairwells and walkways. I was always fascinated by windows lit up at night - the arrangement of the estate meant that many dwellings faced each other, overlooked by walkways and I took comfort in the glow, and the knowledge of the lives being lived within.

LM: At the heart of your work are the people – the communities that formed around the estate. Can you talk more about your relationships within these communities?

RN: Peckham had a lot of different constituencies and I tried to connect with them all: the Afro-Caribbean community, musicians (mainly Jamaican), Rastafarians, young people, friends and their parents, neighbours, local politicians, community activists, community workers, cannabis dealers, petty criminals and street hustlers. I tended to move through all these constituencies with my camera - I was sociable and always keen to make new connections. Being the local photographer was my identity really - it's how everybody knew me. This was a pre-digital era so photography was still technically inaccessible to most people and a bit mysterious. I was treated as a local curiosity really, a slightly nerdy kid with a camera they came to tolerate, if not trust. I brought several of those constituencies and relationships together when I made a short film with Julian Henriques called 'We The Ragamuffin'. Largely because I think people trusted or at least tolerated me and my camera.

I put down the 35mm camera for a big chunk of the 1990's. I went to LA in 1994 and met some really interesting people in film. Charles Burnett looked after me and introduced me to some other filmmakers. The person who inspired me the most was Ben Caldwell, a filmmaker and community activist from the 'LA Rebellion' era based in Leimert Park. He has a long running community centre there called Kaos Network (still thriving). When I got back to the UK I proposed a project to him called 'Video Penpals'. Over the following year we got young people from Peckham and Crenshaw to make video diaries and send them to each other. It was great.

LM: Where do you find yourself and your work now?

RN: In 1994 I was introduced to the 'internet' by Kim Bull, co-founder of one of the UK's first digital agencies 'Obsolete', based in a Bankside warehouse. She was fascinated by Video Penpals. The Obsolete team introduced me to new technologies and helped me build my first website 'The Real'. This shaped my professional career; I have been managing digital and creative projects ever since. This has enabled me to fund my personal creative projects including painting, perfumery, photography, film and craft-making. For example I threw myself into painting in the late 1990s to try and translate some of my experiences of Peckham and its people, in a freer, more abstract way. I made quite a bit of work focussing on the colour and movement around me.

In the early noughties I started to put together an archive of my work. The whole process of creating the archive (scanning negatives, retouching digital files etc) took about 10 years. In 2006 I began to re-engage with photography; I purchased a 10x8 large format camera, an old Sinar Norma. I focussed on still life, portraits and landscape including Peckham, New Romney and my old school in Pimlico as subject matter. I moved back to Kent in 2010 and settled in the Medway Towns, a perfect landscape for me, equidistant between London and the coast, constructed around a river valley. It’s a visually stunning area but has large amounts of poverty due to the decimation of local industries and Chatham Docks in the 1980s - the area has not fully recovered. I have continued to produce images with my large format camera and over the last 15 years have been filming the landscape in the Medway Towns.

One of my favourite recent projects was with Louise Shelley and Showroom Gallery between 2013 and 2015. Louise had the idea to 'reactivate' Schooling & Culture Magazine after I shared a copy with her containing my work. We published two new issues and the original magazine was archived at Mayday Rooms. The process was so much fun and Louise brought together a fantastic collective of mainly women, students, designers, teachers and the original Schooling & Culture founders to realise the project.

For the past 7 years my focus has been on young people and mental health. In 2018 I founded a music and mental health tech startup called Isofi. Mental health is an issue that has permeated my life through family, friends and personal experience too. Growing up, it was never really discussed like it is now and I’m glad for the developments.

LM: What do you think the future holds for Peckham?

RN: There are still multiple sides to Peckham for me. The first is personal, ancestral and familial. I still have real connections in Peckham and I care what happens there. The second is more sociological, psychological and philosophical. On one level, the space that Peckham occupies is a kind of mysterious Heideggerian 'clearing' where all truths are possible. There’s also a fleeting, ineffable centre to the idea of 'Peckham' - a Lacanian space of raw experience, unprocessed trauma and displacement - where its physical, psychological, historical, linguistic and cultural boundaries are in constant flux. Like many geographies, there are many Peckhams and multiple realities and power structures that overlap. Each constituency is attempting to anchor to a fixed point and construct authentic meaning while simultaneously having to negotiate with another ‘authentic’ version of itself. There are so many opposing or contradictory forces and structures at work it feels impossible to say what the future actually holds for Peckham.

Probably the biggest influence on the area’s future is capital which has been accumulated in different and unexpected ways in Peckham, but predominated by outside investment, culture and local community, however, will play a part too. Robert Hewison's book Passport to Peckham, a thorough, accurate and sensitive historical survey of Peckham from Medieval times through to the present day. The book really captures the different communities who have shaped (and continue to shape) Peckham over the years. Robert interviewed me and I contributed some photos, I recommend it!