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The Heygate estates in the Southwark council, is the kind of council housing solution which was considered futuristic in the 1960’s, as modernist architect Le Corbusier was widely infl uencing urban planning throughout Europe. After 40 years from its construction, the Heygate and Walworth area in the Borough of Elephant and Castle has been classed as a highly deprived area by government and council agencies. In terms of crime, home office statistics place it in the top 0.5% in the country. In the Southwark area unemployment levels are higher than the London average (4.36%) with the Heygate having the highest level at 7.84%. According to the Crack House Protocol 2004/2005, compiled by the Home Offi ce and Southwark Council, the Heygate and the wider Walworth road area have the highest number of reported crack houses in the borough and are still considered to be heroin hotspots. The Heygate estate can operate like a small and detached world. The high concentration of illegal, criminal and drug related activities which have historically characterized the area around the estate, make it compulsory for those who live there to develop a defensive sense of belonging. To an outsider they might seem like impenetrable, alienating and even threatening spaces, but to those that live there they are intimately familiar spaces. To be able to understand a closed environment, like the Heygate Estate, I believe one has to be able to perceive what it means to look from inside that closed environment towards the outside world, what it means to look out of the inhabitants’ windows onto the street, onto the rest of the rest of the
housing block, towards the rest of the town and other people. The ongoing project which I have taken an excerpt from, shown in the following pages takes peoples daily routines to show their drug habits
and general lifestyle which even when off drug seems to stigmatise them and infl uence them heavily. The use of heroin and crack, whether past or present, for these individuals is the driving motor of their daily existence, and although they desperately try to hold control over their lives they are continuously catapulted into the drug related routines. The outreach agencies talk of their clients as having a user’s career of 15 to 20 years. This means no matter how hard they can try to put them on rehabilitation programs, they will most probably go back to the drugs. This is why more than helping them to get off they reach to drug users to give them the possibility and knowledge of not dying from blood borne viruses, unsafe injecting practices and overdose.

Steve, Tracey, Del Darren and Madaline have probably never seen each other, although they all live in the same neighbourhood. The world they live is very similar, because they are all heroin and crack users and their lives are driven by this habit.
This “monkey” which they all carry on their backs has destroyed their relations with the society which sorrounds them, as well as their personal lives. Their daily routine evolves entirely around drugs and they cannot keep away from the damage which these do to them emotionally, physically and fi nancially.
Staying with them day after day , I realized how they truly live a parallel life to their environments, in which they walk and act completely unnoticed and anonymously, almost as if they were invisible.
Steve and Tracy, also known as Ginger and Hammy, are always together, because the thing they care the most about is that if one of them gets arrested while scoring drugs, their dog Sooky would not be left alone.
Steve has just turned 29 and injects in his groin both heroin and crack together, a practice called speedballing. This at least 6 times a day, on top of his prescribed methadone. His last 12 years have been out of home, without shelter untill 3 years back when he was assigned a place in a shelter hostel in Southwark. Recently when I asked him about the area in which he lives, he said to me, “If I have to be honest, it is difficult to get out of drugs when they are in your face.”
Del Boy and Darren have a very special relationship. Social services have tried to break this many times but without success. They have been dividing everything for the past 8 years, the carboard they lay on when they were sleeping rough and now a social housing fl at assigned to Del about 18 months ago . It is in such a state that they have ended up sharing the same bed in one of the rooms where they do everything. As meticulously as they divide their begging shifts and incomes they register all monetary outcomes which go on drugs. For the 3 times the dealer comes to their house, they note in their “drugs usage” log, as they have titled it, how much “brown “ and “white” they buy, on each round. This is adding up to an average of 2000 pounds a month, more than most people would earn on salaries.
Madaline has been clean from heroin for more than a year, but the signs of the heroin use are evident on her body and deep in her mind. She has had a heart attack, a trachetomy and when she decided to withdraw and go into detox she came close to having her leg amputated, because of an abscess, where she kept injecting, which was at a dangerous stage of infection. She is very proud of being clean now, but is tackling daily with depression and a sense of being lost, as well as all the grief and anger given to her by the rest of her family because of years of heroin abuse.

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