I found the file in the downloads of the shared work computer I use to raise purchase orders of alcohol, it's titled Deptford Creekside Conservation Area Appraisal. I can’t remember downloading it, but I must have, having only moved to the area last month.
Since I moved in, I introduced myself to our next-door neighbour. My flatmate told me she’s lived in the estate since the late seventies. She remembers it as the DFRS, The Dykes and Faggots Residents Scheme—when queers hung out behind the trompe l'oeil mural, in the community space, The Pink Palace. She has a cat and a dog, and an ex-girlfriend upstairs she speaks to pretty often. I often find her sitting downstairs, looking out over the estate’s trailing entrance road.
I was probably watching some inane video, likely of the supermodel Shalom Harlow because that’s all my phone's interested in showing me at the moment. I scan the text of the document for any mention of dykes or faggots. Harlow walks for Versace's Spring Summer 1993 collection, in the corner of my eye, over and over again. Turning, walking and turning again, in slips of fabric. Looped. The fancam features Demons by DaKid, whereby the repeating track slows a rotting burrow into my brain.
My brain worm and I read about Creekside, the historic docks, the development of industry in the nineteenth century and the ingress of punk and pub rock as a byproduct of urban deprivation in the twentieth. The estate is included in the conservation area bounds as an exemplar of postwar housing regeneration, the dkyes and the faggots are found under section 5.2.4, 'The Crossfield Community'.
There's an excerpt written by someone called C. (Chris) Mazeika. He writes how 'it was rumoured that there was a very helpful Housing Officer at the time who would look favourably on applications from lesbians and gays.' By way of consultation, he makes the case for the Crossfield Estate as a site of queer heritage.
'In the 1980's and early 90's the gay community faced an onslaught by the Thatcher government through Section 28. Gay urban identity was very political. Along with our Enemy Within badges left over from the Miners' Strike, we wore pink triangles, read the Pink Paper (available at The Albany along with Capital Gay), and met in the Pink Palace. Whether lesbian or gay, we wore Levis 501s, Doc Marten shoes, MA1 air force jackets and lived in gritty council blocks such as Frankham House. There was a strange correspondence between us as marginal people and the buildings, one of found values and mutual recognition, nobody wanted the flats and nobody wanted gay people.' –Chris
Bugged, I haunt a string of old blogs hosting anecdotal information on the estate and its queer history. Bars, clubs, community spaces. After a moment, I find a picture of Chris in The Guardian, holding a friend of his, Steven David, in the Broderip Ward of Middlesex Hospital, in March 1993. Chris was a shiatsu therapist on the ward. Sat on a patterned loveseat, the cove of Chris's side supports Steven’s back, with his legs propped over the armrest’s edge. Chris holds him, hands clasped over one shoulder looking down past his head. Steven reaches back, his grip mooring himself in place.
Beneath the photograph, Chris writes about his neighbour and friend in Deptford; who, he writes ‘was never my partner, [but] he was, in a way, the love of my life.’
‘He never got really ill there; he wasn’t one of the living skeletons you saw. It wasn’t unusual to turn up for a visit only to be told he was shopping over the road in Heal’s, or had gone clubbing the night before and hadn’t made it back yet.’ –Chris
I found a picture of Steven, out the back door, at home with the nurse who cared for him, Sarah. She embraces him, turned from the camera’s sight. Chris writes in The Guardian that the ward began to empty in 1996. Patients suddenly got better, though Steven was one of the unlucky, who died before treatments advanced.
‘Steven died on 1 October 1993. I can still remember his mum lifting him from his coffin to hug him for the last time.’ –Chris
In partnership with the Terrence Higgins Trust, Gideon Mendel’s two-week document of the wards was released in a book titled Positive Lives (1993). The photographs were published again in the 2017 photobook, The Ward. In early 2023, the book was reprinted to coincide with an exhibition at Fitzrovia Chapel, London.
In a documentary produced for the exhibition, The Ward—Revisited; Sarah Macauley, Steven’s nurse from the photograph above, recalls the conversations surrounding Mendel’s request to document the ward and its patients. Jane Bruton, the ward Sister was hesitant, she had tired to maintain the privacy of her patients. There was no signage, no indicator that the ward treated those with HIV and AIDS.
‘But I really wanted it. I remember that. I think I wanted the opening up. You know, I think it was something that… To try and explain to people in the outside world—just to my friends, to my parents, what I was doing, what was happening and what was happening on the ward. You know, everybody died.’ –Sarah
There’s more to look through and tell than can be included in a newsletter.
The patients’ character, in a small blinking refraction, is preserved with the work of the ward; in Mendel’s photographs and documents; in books, articles and interviews; in Chris’s writing, and the bureaucratic documentation for a conservation area boundary in Deptford. A connection to place tethers the past and holds it there.
—Andy x