Southwark Council spent nearly £3 million on two sets of works to remove asbestos from an estate that includes Maydew House, a Bermondsey tower block that has stood empty for seven years.
The council shelled out £2.954 million on removing asbestos from the Abbeyfield Estate, which features the 26-storey block next to Southwark Park, in both 2017 and 2021, according to a Freedom of Information request.
That is considerably more than the £641,000 it was originally expected to cost, according to a report in trade publication Inside Housing from 2010.
Maydew House, on the western side of Southwark Park, has stood largely empty for seven years while the council has been refurbishing it. Southwark said this was because it was a “complex” project. The News has asked the council why there were two sets of works, why they were four years apart, and why the actual cost has turned out to be more than four times the estimate.
Maydew had 144 flats before Southwark got the large bill for removing asbestos and moved everyone out. Two residents who did not want to move out commissioned an independent report in 2010 which disputed the need to decant residents to remove the asbestos.
The council has been revamping the properties for years, and is also adding more than 100 new homes, including flats on the site of the nearby Bede House. The centre will be moved into the lower floors of Maydew House itself.
After residents were first moved out of the building, facilities managers Equans were brought in to strip out the asbestos the first time and carry out a “soft strip” – a construction term that means leaving nothing but the frame of the building behind.
The block was handed back to Southwark in February 2021, who then hired builders Bouygues, who carried out more works.
The council took on security for the block again in October 2021, which has cost them £111,604 since then, according to Southwark’s Liberal Democrats, who are in opposition to Labour, who control the council.
The Lib Dems’ Cllr Victor Chamberlain called the spend “wasteful” and pointed to the more-than 1,200 empty council homes in the borough. Council finance chief Cllr Stephanie Cryan said it was not a waste of money because Southwark has a responsibility to protect its property, adding that three-quarters of the empty homes in the borough were privately owned.
Maydew appears to have been the site of some daredevil ‘urban exploration’ in recent years. One user of the 28 Days Later urban exploration forum claimed in a 2019 post that they and a friend climbed to the top and had a beer. The user said: “Work on Maydew Tower has seemed to come to a halt, leaving it in a state of decay, and making it a target for us explorers”.
The new Maydew and Bede development will have 255 homes in total, all of which will be council homes. The council said in 2020 that the flats should be ready for tenants to move in in 2023, but has not provided an update since then despite questioning. Cllr Cryan said that the council would say more later this year.
Southwark had previously said that about 50 of the homes in the refurbished block would be for private sale, meaning a net loss of council homes. This plan also included a five-storey rooftop extension. The council got permission for this plan in 2018, but never implemented it and the permission lapsed. The new plan, for all social rent homes, was first considered in 2018, according to council papers, and was given permission last year.
The entire project was expected to cost £61.5 million in 2018. Without the £6.9 million that the rooftop build would cost, this drops to £54.6 million.
The concrete building will be covered in a “terracotta cladding” that architects Haworth Tompkins say is to improve the block’s “thermal performance” and make it “more sustainable”. The architects say that the cladding and the mineral wool to be used as insulation are made of non-combustible materials.
The Freedom of Information found that the asbestos removal and other building safety work was finally completed in June this year. Southwark also paid just over £242,000 for Monarflex scaffold sheeting, which reduces wind impact.
Maydew House has not been entirely empty since residents were moved out, because it has sometimes been used for temporary accommodation over the years. People housed in temporary accommodation complained of a lack of running water in 2016.