When the capital banned skyscrapers in the 1960s, Croydon stepped in with concrete towers and flyovers that made it a byword for urban devastation. Fifty years later, this most unloved suburb may finally be ready to love itself

When David Bowie wanted to summarise all he found dreary, drab and stifling, there was only one place he could turn. “It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,” he told Q magazine in 1999. “I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something: ‘God, it’s so fucking Croydon.’”

Bowie, whose personality was shaped in the electrifying cultural climate of Bromley, is not alone. Croydon has such a poor reputation that its name has become a neologism for the self-destruction of a town centre – Croydonisation. The town’s inhabitants can exhibit a lowliness bordering on self-loathing. “It could have been worse,” says Bob Stanley, whose band Saint Etienne was formed in Croydon. “In the Domesday Book it was called Crogdene. Imagine if it was still called that.”

Stanley is author of Yeah Yeah Yeah, a history of the pop song, and is currently writing a book about “the magic of Croydon”. He’s one of three former Croydonians who are challenging conceptions of their hometown with Croydon Till I Die, a reading event that celebrates the music, literature and architecture of the suburbs.

'In the Domesday Book it was called Crogdene. Imagine if it was still called that?' Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne

It has been organised at Rough Trade East and Croydon’s Fairfield Halls by Andy Miller, whose memoir The Year of Reading Dangerously found him fondly recalling his formative years in Croydon’s libraries, and wondering why the suburbs rarely featured in the books he read. “I was never embarrassed to come from Croydon, until people told me I should be,” says Miller. “Then I thought, ‘Why the hell should I be?’ It feels like people are allowed to feel proud of where they come from, [as long as that’s] anywhere other than a particular kind of metropolitan suburb. Society needs a suburban joke and Croydon fits the bill.”

Croydon may have often been seen as boring and narrow-minded, but it received additional disdain for its inhospitable appearance, which inspired John Grindrod, the event’s third participant, to write Concretopia, an examination of Britain’s postwar brutalist reconstruction. In the 1960s, skyscrapers were banned from central London and Croydon stepped in, building 49 thunderous tower blocks. “It was an ultra-capitalist version of what a town should be,” says Grindrod, who grew up on the estate of New Addington. “It was all about how many big companies they could attract. The impulse was heroic, but not in an edifying way.”

This redevelopment was devastating. It drove a flyover through the town and flattened entire streets. Watching it happen was Jamie Reid, then studying with Malcolm McLaren at Croydon School of Art, where Reid developed the Situationist-inspired collages he later used with the Sex Pistols. In 1972, Reid’s publishing outfit, Suburban Press, pictured desolate Croydon with the headline, “Lo! A Monster Is Born”. The experience was encapsulated by the opening titles of Terry and June, a popular 1970s sitcom, which saw the suburban couple wandering around Croydon in a state of dislocated confusion. Things worsened as Croydon lost out to the City and Canary Wharf as a business centre. Croydon’s unfulfilled ambition became something else to mock. “When a council can redevelop a whole town like that, it’s going to knock your confidence,” says Stanley.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Croydon Flyover was part of a devastating redevelopment that flattened entire streets. Photograph: PA Archive

But others embraced Croydon. Stanley always thought the town felt “optimistic”, while Grindrod says: “It was amazingly futuristic. It was so dramatic to arrive in a town on an urban motorway surrounded by towers and huge shopping centres.”

Culturally, Croydon has plenty to shout about. The town played a formative role in punk, thanks to McLaren, Reid and The Damned, and would later spawn dubstep. The film director David Lean was from Croydon, as was actor Peggy Ashcroft and singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl. Author Neil Gaiman went to school there, and his Croydon-set short story How to Talk to Girls at Parties (about “the most dangerous place in the universe”) will soon be made into a film. “Suburbs like Croydon are where so many interesting things, certainly in pop culture, take place,” says Miller. The dislocation and anger of punk and dubstep partly reflect Croydon’s alienating landscape. Judge Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra lived in Croydon during the 1970s; one wonders how much the city inspired the feuding tower blocks and deadly subways of Mega-City One.

Croydon also provided opportunities for cultural exploration. Fairfield Halls, built in 1962 as a smaller version of Royal Festival Hall, brought bands like Kraftwerk, T-Rex and Pink Floyd to the suburbs, until the provincial circuit went into decline. “In the 70s, it hosted Sparks and Kraftwerk, and by the 90s it was Basil Brush,” says Stanley. “You can trace the cultural decline of Croydon in the headline acts of Fairfield Halls.”

For Stanley, pop culture hinged around Beano’s, the biggest secondhand record shop in England until its closure in 2009. There, he pursued musical interests that led him to form Saint Etienne with Pete Wiggs. The band were proud Croydonians, but they were almost alone in that. “When you think about musicians from Croydon, it’s hard to get past Captain Sensible,” says Stanley. “Nobody else admits they came from here because it’s so uncool.”

Croydon came to be seen as a place where nothing happened, and little was done to challenge this perception. In 2011, the Conservative council slashed the arts budget, flogging ceramics from a local museum, closing the arthouse David Lean Cinema (which they ran, and is only alive again thanks to a campaign by volunteers) and scrapping a local music festival.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Parts of Croydon town centre were devastated by the 2011 riots. Photograph: Getty Images/David Goddard

Croydon was then hit by the riots of August 2011: shops burned and one man was killed. Months later, the Allders department store closed, and the town’s major employer, Nestlé, moved to Crawley, leaving huge empty towers. This was the town’s nadir. “So much is undeveloped,” says Miller. “It’s urban deprivation in the suburbs.”

Things are slowly changing. As well as a new Labour council that has reinvested in the arts, there is a huge £5.25bn redevelopment plan. Jo Negrini, the council’s executive director of redevelopment, jokingly said “third time lucky” in reference to previous failed masterplans – but insisted that this time the regeneration is for real. Around 30 blocks are being built or converted, as the council attempts to transform redundant offices into high-value residential properties and attract new firms: 170 start-ups are set to occupy one tower called Tech City. And there’s a new shopping centre from Westfield and Hammerson to replace the ageing Whitgift Centre. “It’s a real indicator of the market,” says Negrini. “People are saying if Westfield will invest, there must be something going on.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pete Wiggs, Sarah Cracknell and Bob Stanley of St Etienne. Photograph: Karen Robinson

The eye-watering £5.25bn figure is the combined cost of private investment and public spending: some money is coming from the Mayor’s Regeneration Fund, some from the council itself, and some from corporations, including the £1.5bn that Westfield is pouring into the enormous shopping centre. The council wants to partly cover its costs by getting devolved powers that would let it raise local taxes on new developments – something that has yet to happen.

Joanna Rowelle is associate director of Arup, one of several firms involved in the redevelopment. She likens Croydon to Stratford before the Olympics. “London is growing, so we are looking for places that look like a good opportunity, and Croydon is well located for that,” she says. It’s on a trainline linking the tech clusters of Brighton and Farringdon, she notes, and will also likely benefit from the gentrification of London, which is forcing the middle classes back into the suburbs they thought they had escaped.

Local residents, like Sarah Wickens, are watching and waiting. “The snobbery really annoys me,” she says. “But it’s true that the town really doesn’t make the most of itself.” Wickens is one of several locals hoping to stimulate Croydon’s cultural scene: she co-organised Croydon Fun Palace, an alternative arts and science fair in October 2014. Other new cultural initiatives in Croydon include an arts space in Matthews Yard, featuring a gallery and theatre, and Rise Gallery, which has brought contemporary art to the bedraggled St George’s Walk shopping centre.

Even New Addington, the troubled estate outside of Croydon, is getting some much-needed attention. When Grindrod lived there, it was the sort of place the other Croydonians looked down on. “It felt like it was miles from anywhere, up on this hill,” he says. “You could take the 130 bus to Croydon and it took an hour. It’s only later I realised it was in zone five.” Now, New Addington has benefited from the attention of Turner prize-nominated architecture collective Assemble. Funded by the post-riot Outer London Fund, Assemble were appointed designers-in-residence and got to work in the market square: a concrete space they animated with a tea dance, parade, sessions and cake decorating that involved all spheres of the community. They then made physical changes – a stage, skateboard ramps, new positions for market traders – which have been widely praised and achieved a nomination for the New London Architecture’s 2013 award for best public space.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The future of Croydon. Photograph: Croydon Council

“It’s a slow process,” says Wickens. “There are exciting things happening, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s quite coming together after the cuts. There are also questions about the role of developers, which will be huge in the next few years.” In particular, she worries the demolition of the Whitgift Centre is the beginning of the end for Croydon’s divisive but eye-catching concrete townscape – which gives the town both its awkward reputation and its aura of uniqueness.

On this, Negrini is reassuring. “There are some great examples of 60s architecture – and there’s some crap stuff. There are treasures we want to maintain, like Lunar House and Apollo House [both by Centre Point architect Richard Seifert]. We don’t want to bulldoze everything like we did in the 60s – we want to embrace the legacy of this place. We’ve already done that with the conservation area of the old town, but the 60s stuff is just important.” The council is also organising a music festival and refurbishing Fairfield Halls. “There is a real issue of public perception of Croydon,” she says. “We are very keen on changing those perceptions, and culture has a big impact on regeneration.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lunar House, an example of Croydon’s 1960s architecture. Photograph: Andy Hall

Turning Croydon into a place that David Bowie can talk about without sniggering will be difficult. Stanley hopes that, whatever happens, Croydon’s strange spirit will survive. “It’s a typical suburb, but it’s also like nowhere else I know – Terry and June and Jamie Reid at the same time,” he says. “It’s that mix that’s so fascinating.”

But not fascinating enough for him to live there. Despite their affection for the town, neither Stanley, Grindrod or Miller are residents, though Miller insists he remains one in spirit. “I’m like the Sean Connery of Croydon – I don’t live there any more, but I am fiercely proud of it. What I want to tell people at Rough Trade East is: do you know what Croydon is? It’s where you came from before you went to events like this. It’s where most people live.”

Croydon Till I Die is at Rough Trade East, London, on 28 May and at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, on 11 June