WALTERS WAY & SEGAL CLOSE

The Architect Walter Segal and London’s Self-build Communities. A Look at Two of London’s Most Unusual Streets
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The story of two tiny roads in Lewisham, south London, and of Walter Segal's designs for twenty self-build homes they contain.


Text by Alice Grahame. Foreword by Tom Dyckhoff, Introductory Note by John McKean, Afterword by Jon Broome. Photographs by Taran Wilkhu

Walters Way and Segal Close are two tiny roads in Lewisham, south London. The twenty homes they contain are unusual, both in the way they look and in the way they were conceived and built. Designed by German-born modernist architect Walter Segal, they were part of a council-run scheme that allowed ordinary people to build their own homes. Thirty years on they are still standing and have been adapted to meet the needs of today’s residents.
This book by two by two residents of Walters Way and Segal Close, journalist Alice Grahame and photographer Taran Wilkhu, tells the story of how the streets came to be built and the of estate’s development since. Neither Grahame nor Wilkhu are the initial inhabitants of their respective homes, but when they moved in they both got fascinated instantly by the story of how and why they were made. The book was created in collaboration with the occupants of both streets, who all opened their houses and shared their insights of life on a Segal estate.