The stairwell on Blakes Road in the North Peckham estate where Damilola Taylor lay dying on November 27, 2000, is long gone.

Seven years after the murder of the 10-year-old schoolboy, a £290 million regeneration of the whole North Peckham Estate has erased the rows of rundown high-rise flats and maisonettes.

In its place is a sparkling new sports centre, named after Damilola, with a list of fixtures and attractions posted outside. A new leisure centre and an award-winning library have been built nearby.

Choice private town houses and flats now sit cheek by jowl with smartened-up council homes in a rebuilding programme offering 2,500 homes.

The rebuilding began in 1995, five years before Damilola died, to replace a dismal 1960s development.

But if the backdrop has changed for the better, acts of wanton gang or drug-related violence are still frequently played out in this corner of southeast London. Life here, it seems, is as cheap as ever.

The bulldozing was well under way when Damilola died at the hands of a gang of street thieves and both police and the council said that by the time the main redevelopment was completed in 2002 things had changed for the better.

A spokeswoman for Southwark Council said yesterday that the regeneration had “absolutely worked. It’s changed. Peckham now is a different place to what it was ten years ago.”

Andrews & Robertson estate agents were offering a house in Blakes Road, where Damilola died, claiming: “The district has been the subject of extensive regeneration and is now quite a desirable place to reside.” Yet the Home Office still considers Southwark a high-crime and high youth-crime area. The crime rate has been rising since 2000, driven by increases in crimes of violence against the person committed by youths and children.

Violent crime in the borough has risen from 10,000 incidents in 2000 to 2001, to 12,500 in 2005 to 2006, even though huge sums of money have been thrown at the problem.

Some social workers say that they are not surprised, arguing that new homes have failed to address or remove the underlying problems.

“My kids sum it up well: nice new houses but the same old s**t happening inside them,” said Camilla Batmanghelidj, a leading child psychologist who works with emotionally abused and violent youngsters in the area with her Kids Company charity.

She said: “There is still a lot of violence. Just because you regenerate buildings you don’t change the emotional fabric. There are other investments to be made apart from bricks and mortar.”

She said murder, domestic violence and child abuse still occurred and the introduction of private housing had not made a difference. New residents could themselves become victims.

Some residents given new homes agree with her. One woman said it was “a rough area” and changing the houses did not change the people living in them. Residents, she said, still worried about trouble at night.

But not all agree. Last year, at a memorial service at Damilola’s school, Oliver Goldsmith Primary, headteacher Mark Parksons said that he believed the newfound willingness of the children to talk to their teachers about their lives was evidence that things were changing.

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