This project imagines an alternative history for Cliffe Fort, an abandoned Victorian military site on the southern banks of the Thames, east of Gravesend. Like many defensive structures across Britain, the Fort was left to decline following World War II despite the patent national scarcity of resources at the time.

As the Fort entered its second life as a ruin, eight new towns were being built on unspoilt sites around the capital, rehousing half a million Londoners who had been displaced by the bombings and slum clearances. Responding to the endemic short-sightedness of government planners, the scheme puts forward a more constructive and malleable legacy for the Fort, proposing its reappropriation as an experimental ninth new town with an architecture salvaged, improvised and adapted by the inhabitants rather than imposed by the state.

Setting out to question Silkin’s early new towns, built interventions are framed as a sequence of monuments to the long-lost qualities of life in the slums of wartime London. The drawings follow the site’s evolution over a century, from its conception at the end of the war and through the vastly changing contexts of the twenty-first century.