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Terry's Flat, Kidbrooke, London, April 2012 | Noteworthy Reports | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Terry's Flat, Kidbrooke, London, April 2012

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Disco Kitten

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
The Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, South London, was built by the GLC as social housing between 1968 and 1972 on the site of the former RAF Kidbrooke. It was designed by the London County Council architects of the time and used revolutionary construction techiques - concrete panels manufactured on-site. At the time, it was a futuristic design with big hopes for the future - people were excited to be living there. The site covered 270 acres and had over 2000 homes. These homes were a mix of highrise flats, split-level flats and terraced houses. As well as the flats and houses, there was a boiler house, a social centre, health centre, library, pub and shops.

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But the utopian vision started to deteriorate from the mid-80s, crime increased and the Ferrier became a ghetto. In 2004, permission was granted to redevelop the whole estate and the compulsory purchase and re-housing of the residents began a year later. The flats and houses started to be demolished in March 2009, with the last official residents leaving the Telemann Square flats in 2011 (in November 2012, a number of squatters were living in the Telemann Square flats).

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The last of the Ferrier was demolished in summer 2013 and has been replaced with less attractive and innovative flats and houses - with a small flat costing upwards of £200k.

I'll do a report on the whole estate at some point, but today I just want to show you one small flat of the 4000...

Visited with Immortal Owl

We were just poking round some empty flats in Ronald House, one of the highrise blocks. Looking for bits & bobs of interest - snippets of the lives of those who used to live there. Most of the flats we saw were unremarkable, with a handful of things of interest. We'd covered about 10 flats when we found this...

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The immediate reaction was:

Are all the pictures of the same person?
Yes they are!
And there are loads of photo albums!
And they are full of pictures of this Mary Duff!
WE'VE GOT A STALKER!!!!!

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So we started to dig through all the stuff left behind. It soon became apparent that the chap had two obsessions - Mary Duff and soft porn/Page 3. He had about 6 2" thick A4 folders full of pages cut out of porn mags and newspapers - all in wipe-clean plastic sleeves :D Each folder was dedicated to a different girl so he must have bought a phenomenal amount over the years to amass such a collection.

But that was nothing compared to the amount of photos of Mary Duff.

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Most of the photos in the albums seem to be photos taken at gigs - pretty much constantly throughout the performance. He even put out of focus shots in the albums. There were also photos which were clearly taken of videos while he was watching them on TV.

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....and he kept and catalogued all the negatives.

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And had scrapbooks full of concert tickets, fanclub letters etc.

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In fact, he kept a list of all the times he'd seen Mary perform on stage

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And typed it up

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The list finished in 1995, on number 394. However, the books of concert tickets showed that he kept going to gigs after that date.


He also managed to get his photo taken with Mary a lot

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Continued...
 

Disco Kitten

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
And he seemed to tell people that he'd lost things quite regularly in order to get duplicate copies of photos etc.

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The building was opened in 1972, and this flat had the beautiful original wallpaper in the hall, lounge and kitchen.

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Along with framed photos of naked and semi-naked girls :D



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There were a handful of old family photos

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(I think he's the one on the right)

The last date of any of the paperwork in the flat was 2005 and the calendar on the wall showed 2006.

In a pile of Christmas cards I found about five saying that they hoped he was OK as they hadn't heard from him in a while.

I can only guess what happened to him. Did he die? Did he move into a home where he couldn't take his belongings with him? Or into a mental health facility? With the amount of dedication, time and money he must have put into his obsession, surely there was no way he would have moved house without his collection of almost 20 years of memories?

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But the story didn't end there. We returned to the flat the following weekend and it had been completely cleared. Nothing of Terry or Mary remained. But I couldn't stop thinking about Terry - even though most people would think him creepy, I found him rather endearing. I had to find out what had happened to him. Several weeks of internet searching didn't yield much, so I went to the Westminster archives to search the death record microfiche. And there he was:

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I wonder if Mary ever knew?

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Six

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
That wallpaper is amazing!!

The guys pictures are a little "One Hour Photo" though, thats definitely not a normal fan.
 

dweeb

28DL Regular User
Regular User
Amazing. Oh the days before the Internet... he'd probably just have a hard drive these days.

A little sad in a way, kind of feel like it was a waste of a life, but perhaps he got more pleasure out of his 'hobby' than we do!

Wallpaper is the Tits!
 

Stiletto

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
Love this report. Reminds me of the Alan Partridge episode where he gets trapped in his superfan's house and finds the wallpaper is actually pictures of himself.

Such a sad existence in essence though, probably provided more entertainment to us in death than he ever provided to people in life.
 

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