In 1931, when Indian civil rights hero Mahatma Gandhi visited England, he was offered a suite at the Savoy. Instead, he opted to stay in the East End, and visit the Becontree estate – Britain’s first council estate, built for the working-class heroes of World War I.
An experiment in modern living, this was the start of a new vision for families who had spent generations in the slums. Gandhi found it inspirational.
“Love surrounded me here,” he wrote in the visitors’ book at Kingsley Hall, the church and community centre which hosted his visit.
Emily Saville, whose dad had been wounded at the Battle of the Somme – meaning they qualified for a home on Becontree – was eight years old when Gandhi visited. Her mum was in the Women’s Fellowship at Kingsley Hall. Now 99, she asks her son John to move her wheelchair to one of the building’s side exits.
Watch ‘Becontree 100 years’ from 2pm today at The Mirror
“He was standing exactly here,” she remembers. “I shook his hand. ‘Meet Uncle Gandhi’, they said. I thought he was a funny little man – we’d never seen anyone like him. I had no idea who he was.”
This is just one of many fascinating stories we uncovered during a Daily Mirrors project celebrating 100 years of the Becontree estate – which this week culminates in a short film made with residents.
A unique collaboration with film students at Barking and Dagenham College and Northern Heart Films, on Thursday night ‘Becontree: 100 Years’ opened the Romford Film Festival at the Premiere Cinema. The film has been nominated for two festival awards – best documentary and best local film – with juries’ verdicts due next week.
The Becontree area is named after a huge tree that once spread across the local heath, and belonged to a man called ‘Beoha’. At four square miles and housing 100,000 people, the estate is still the biggest in Britain, but – in terms of today’s housing crisis – dwarfed by the scale of its ambition.
Hundreds of miles from the Scottish border, it even has its own bagpipe band – the Dagenham Girl Pipers. The world’s first female pipe band was set up in 1930 by a Scottish vicar who trained up girls from his local Sunday school and dressed them in Royal Stuart tartan.
Fearing damage to his reputation, the Revd Joseph Waddington Graves originally trained the girls in secret. At their peak, the girls performed at 400 events a year all over the globe, including to Winston Churchill.
The pipers had to be evacuated from the Black Forest when World War II broke out. But not before Adolf Hitler was heard to remark “I wish I had a band like that.”
We asked Pipe Majors Lily Tillot, who has been a piper for 56 years, and Carol Deacon, in her 50th year as a piper, to play on the soundtrack to our film. “I’ve been to Singapore, Oman, the Middle East, all over Europe, South Africa,” Lily tells us.
“I used to live on the Becontree estate myself. I remember the friendliness and the sense that every house was the same. It was where East Enders came after the war, people from Bow and Bethnal Green. In the 1930s when Ford was here, it was the place to be.”
The rest of the soundtrack comes from another legend of the Borough, Billy Bragg, whose mum lived on the Becontree estate. The Bard of Barking donated his 1983 song ‘To Have and Have Not’ about growing up in the area.
It was the passing of the 1919 Housing Act – which permitted London County Council to build outside its territory – that saw the ‘Standing Committee on the Housing of the Working Classes’ resolve to build 29,000 dwellings to accommodate 145,000 people within five years.
The homes were desperately needed for families displaced by slum clearances in the East End – and wounded and traumatised soldiers coming back from the fronts of World War One.
People moved into the first homes on Chitty’s Lane at the tail end of 1921 – the first time many had lived with electricity, running water, inside toilets and gardens. By the time of the ‘official’ completion ceremony in Parsloes Park on 13 July 1935, the Becontree estate was home to a community of 120,000 people.
Famous names hailing from the estate include 1966 World Cup winning manager Sir Alf Ramsey and Martin Peters who scored the second goal in the final. Another England manager, Terry Venables lived here, and so did England footballer Paul Ince and commentator Jimmy Greaves. Actor Dudley Moore learned the piano at Kingsley Hall.
Entertainer Max Bygraves sang in the Fiddlers pub, while Singer Sandie Shaw attended the local secondary school. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey grew up on Becontree too.
Not bad for an area snobs dubbed ‘corned beef estate’ based on the supposed diet of residents.
Today, the estate has new struggles and new strengths. It is in the second most deprived borough in London, Barking and Dagenham, and in the top ten nationally. With the local car industry decimated in modern times, in many ways it’s a ‘Red Wall’ town outside the red wall.
Yet despite Margaret Thatcher’s best efforts with right to buy, Becontree remains an incredible community. Almost universally, the people we spoke to for the film said how proud they were to be from Becontree. Newcomers were at pains to stress how welcome they felt.
“The first people to live here were a generation of war heroes and that still comes across on the estate,” says Zaphira Kapnisis, 50, whose partner Chris is the Director of Kingsley Hall today. “The war heroes and their families have given the community a sense of looking out for each other.”
Chris adds: “There is a such a rich heritage here, that’s being celebrated during the centenary. Families moved here from the East End of London – bringing with them some of the challenges of the slums and social issues and injustices. But also the way people support one other.”
The couple talk about the incredible community effort during the pandemic during which 40,000 items were distributed. “You get all the ups and downs of life here, but it’s the most friendly place I’ve ever experienced,” Chris says. “There’s a real community spirit and can-do attitude.”
Barking and Dagenham students shot many of the contributors themselves – a tall order for teenagers at the very start of a brand-new Photography and Moving Image course. And when they asked people, ‘who are you and what do you want?’ they came up with moving and intriguing answers.
David Bennett, Lecturer in photography at the college says the students were “learning how to make a film whilst making a film”. He adds: “Most of the students working on the film were born and bred in Becontree and had no idea that it was an estate, let alone the world’s largest. Making the film has altered their image of the place that they now feel much more connected to and are now aware of the beautiful idiosyncrasies the estate holds.”
Our film takes inspiration from a short documentary by the Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski. Made in 1980, Talking Heads asked a cross-section of Poles of all ages two simple questions: “Who are you? What do you want?”
When local Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas was spending time in hospital with a neurological disorder, he watched the film and wished he could see people in his constituency asked the same questions.
“I am incredibly proud of all the Barking and Dagenham College students who helped with the film which perfectly represents the borough, its history, and the diverse communities that make it such a special place to live,” he says. “I would strongly encourage local people to watch the film when they get a chance. It’s a heart-warming and honest account of life on the Becontree Estate in Dagenham.”
This week, Emily Saville turned 99 years old. Most of Becontree was open fields when she arrived as a young child. The market gardens that had been compulsorily purchased by the LCC had left vegetables and fruits growing wild across the area.
Within years, air raid shelters were dug beneath the vegetable beds. Her long life would see her spend World War Two making military uniforms in the local factories.
In 2022, in Kingsley Hall, where Emily met her late husband Bill, and saw Mahatma Gandhi, there is a social supermarket and a food and clothing bank, but no longer any fields. Slowly, the pandemic’s weight is lifting, and much like its original inhabitants, people are emerging shell-shocked into sunshine.
We met security guard Steve Wright, 43, visiting the garden he planted at Kingsley Hall in memory of his late wife, Sarah. “Becontree is a place I love,” he says. “A place my kids have grown up in and my wife loved. I’m happy to be here. It has its ups and downs, but it’s filled with love, and it’s really including. There’s a joy to being here – it’s not just a place to live, it’s a huge family.”
