Data Uncertainty: Southwark’s Disappearing Estates

I’ve spent some time recently working towards a situation in which the whole dataset for patients registered to General Practices in the London Borough of Southwark is coded to address level. Previously I had been working with the data at postcode level and I wanted to start investigating the effects of households on uptake of service, and well as profiling patients at a finer granularity and integrating geographically more sensitive analyses. The geocoding project obeyed the general rules set out for this kind of work; it was reasonably easy, in the end, to address match 92% of the data by scripting, somewhat frustrating to push that total up to 99% (through semi-automated methods of address matching) and all but impossible to match the last 0.5% of patients.

This last group, roughly equivilant to 1500 people who have given addresses which i cannot, even manually, match. This tends to be because, perhaps unwittingly, the postcode doesn’t exist, there is too much uncertainty meaning it could relate to several possible places or the house or the road simply does not exist. In some cases it was easy to clean up the data, for instance it became clear that in a number of cases the addresses actually related to boats moored in South Dock Marina, London’s largest marina. Obviously people that live on boats still need health care, but do not have an address as such, in this case I registered boats to the Dock Office. Similar issues occured with students registered as living in one of Southwark’s numerous student residences, the student’s transient nature meant that there were numerous different ways of recording their residences. In a similar vein it was interesting to deal with the fairly substantial group of people who were either registered as NFA (no fixed abode) and to the GP surgery’s postcode, or to one of several shelters or missions such as the Salvation Army or St. Mungos. This aspect of the data gives an insight that is otherwise quite hard to get at, naturally homeless people require health care from time to time, and it order to receive it they need to go into the system in some way, the fixed address structure of registration means these people occur as somewhat anomolous results within the database. This has the potential to give an insight into the homeless situation in Southwark. Finally there seemed to be some trouble matching patietns that were registered as living in care homes, again these were easy to address match, it was simply that the address information itself had been misreported, or simply read the name of the particular care home in question.

Having gone through the unmatched patients and weeded out cases such as those above that were valid patients, but who didn’t neatly fit into a database with an address-based structure I was left with what appeared to be whole sets of estates that were completely unmatched. I ran a series of wildcard searches on the AddressLayer2 database I have set up in order to try and find these estates, but kept returning empty sets of results. One of the estates that I couldn’t match was the “Sumner Estate”, this rang a bell as I used to live in Peckham and cycled through this estate everyday on the way to LSE, I vaguely remembered reading about its scheduled demolition in The Economist in about 2006-2007. I did a quick google search and found that it was in fact part of the Aylesbury Regeneration scheme, a £2.5bn regeneration by Southwark Council that aimed to clear and rebuild some of Southwark’s worst and most notorious social housing estates. This estate was bad from the beginning and in fact lasted fewer than 50 years, with the most recent 20 being acknowledged as in a state of critical decay.

Aylesbury Estate. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/se9

I conducted a number of further searches on google of the following places: Wood Dene; Alison House; Marchant House; Yeoman House; Saul House; Sharpness House; Rainswick Court; Lambourne House; Silwood Estate; Kingshill; Dobson House; Dufrey House; Ayton House; Habington House; Hordle Promenade South and North; North Peckham Estate. I found that all of these houses or estates had been demolished at some point in the mid 2000s. This accounted for around 600-700 patients in my dataset, the larger issue here is data uncertainty: if there exists people in the dataset that don’t actually exist in reality then we have an issue. Having said that, the 600 people that I uncovered as having a defunct registered address only accounts for 0.17% of the dataset, so maybe it’s not too bad. What I actually wanted to focus on here is the hidden nature of these regenerated places.

In conducting internet-based searches for information on the various housing estates listed above I found a very dark picture. To start with inforamtion is very scarce, there is little record on Southwark Council website express regarding regeneration and which blocks were torn down. Some information came from copies of local papers and bulletins. Sadly a great deal was also associated with news media that was reporting the regeneration of an estate as an aside to far graver news, most notably the murder of Damilola Taylor on the North Peckham Estate. Indeed several estates were conspicious in their absence from any online resource or comment other than court documents acknowledging that a defendant heralded from such an estate. In redeveloping large estates, whole roads were removed, the aforementioned Hordle Promenade North and South, as well as Clanfield Way or Walkford Way. The legacy these roads leave however is quite interesting, Hordle Promenade North is a Google maps POI despite no longer existing. Similarly the postcode for Clanfield Way – SE15 6EW remains a poi, allocated to a different stretch of road now, as well as SE16 6EY former postcode for the now demolished Walkford Way. Occasionally planning documents deal with house and estate clearing in a very matter of fact way. There is almost not voice online for any of the inhabitants of these places.

It is easy to view the city as a static entity, it changes so slowly compared to the pace of life, and yet when changes do occur they are easily assimilated into our internal map, as if a change never occured. However, these estates still linger, as hidden reminders of the palimpsestic nature of the city – slums torn down and regenerated, deprivation papered over, tragic events of the past lapsing into memory, slowly forgotten as the city turns over and adjusts its morphology.