Downriver, downwind, downmarket, downtrodden, the far east of London has always been the city’s dirty secret. Everything that came into London floated past on its umbilical river, sucked voraciously westwards. From cotton, spice and bananas to immigrant labour, from cars and trucks thundering by on elevated, roaring concrete A-roads, to trains on blackened brick viaducts vaulting above the toxic ground, this was corridor city.
As affluent London leeches eastwards, seeing “potential” and urban “authenticity” in property close to the City, the east itself is moving eastward. London is being pulled into an elastic band straining from the Oxfordshire Cotswolds to the Essex coast, clinging for dear life to a Thames fetishised as the source of that real-estate grail, “riverside properties” - properties with views on to a tidal conduit that, last year alone, washed away a reported 30 billion litres of raw sewage.
But until recently, there was a geographical point at which the nonsense stopped, where the pretence of regeneration faded away and the brakes screeched on eastward expansion. The Lower Lea Valley, an area that follows the banks of the River Lea northwards from where it flows into the Thames at Canning Town, up through Stratford to Hackney Marshes, represented not the East End, just the end. London’s rubbish dump and oil sump, the Lea powered London’s industrial engine and defined its post-industrial necropolis, a dead city of metal-yards, warehouses, wasteground and wilderness marshes, weird nature sucking putrid nutrients from a toxic land. Canary Wharf might have been visible from here, but it was bullied into cowering timidity by the Lea Valley’s huge pylons and piles of scrap. This was like no city ever known, its very finality a pivotal part of London. From Dickens to Conrad, Bram Stoker to Iain Sinclair, this was the London of nightmares, its derelict back garden, unreal estate, a wasteland from where the city remained visible but intangible.
Now, however, this stretch of riverside idyll, which contains some of the very poorest wards in England, is the next big thing. Its 615 hectares of wastelands are now mooted as pure potential, the final chunk of London to be parcelled out to developers, the country’s biggest urban regeneration. And dropped into the mix is the Olympics. Only in London is it conceivable that the city’s principal newspaper, the Evening Standard, would celebrate the remarkable coup of stealing victory from the favourite, Paris, with the headline: “Gold rush: property prices in Games areas set to soar by 50 per cent” (a few hours later its front page read “Terror bombs explode across London”).
The redevelopment of this bit of very-east London is a Brobdingnagian undertaking and one that promises to redraw the map of even this city, so used to change and movement, of shifting loci of fashion and taste. Yet the Lower Lea Valley is just a smidgen of the broader scheme for the creation of the “Thames Gateway”, a 40-mile ribbon of largely brownfield sites stretching east from London through estuarine Essex and Kent to Southend and Sheerness. The 120,000 new homes deputy prime minister John Prescott intends to see built here by 2016 will determine the future of London: from here it could fade out into an endless sea of red-brick Noddy-houses, or it could continue as a proper city. Anywhere else in Europe, such huge development would require an all-embracing plan, a centralised, utopian vision. In London, however, there is a string of individual mini-strategies, an incomprehensible tangle of quangos, councils, consultants, interest groups, developers and so on - each trying to impose an agenda, each bound to platitudes and cliches by diplomacy, all espousing sustainability and diversity.
It is very London to have no overarching vision beyond the notion of development, just vague pronouncements about the biggest new park in Europe for more than a century, or all the new homes the city is going to have to accommodate if people keep on wanting to live there. In the absence of any such vision, it is virtually impossible to talk about the extent of even London’s portion of the Thames Gateway. So it may be more informative to take a slice through this vast regeneration. And the slice which is most advanced in its conception, likely to become most talked about, and - catalysed by the Olympics - to be completed soonest, is a 73-hectare site in the Lower Lea Valley to be called Stratford City.
Despite conventional shibboleths about the inaccessibility of this part of east London, Stratford is, in fact, a part of Britain very well catered for by public transport. Its living used to come from the gargantuan Great Eastern Railway carriage and railway works, an enterprise that at its peak in the mid-19th century employed 6,000 people. These disused Rail Lands, as they became known, will now form the heart of the new Stratford City. The site is bounded on one side by one of the most remarkable yet unremarked-upon civil engineering works in the country. The high-speed Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) is the first major new railway in this country for more than a century. The £5bn line is spanned by 152 bridges and will, when its second section is completed in 2007 (the first section, from north Kent to the Channel, opened in 2003), facilitate a journey from London St Pancras to Paris in around two hours and 15 minutes. A sunken concrete “box”, in which the rail line sits, slashes through the centre of the Stratford City site, in a manner bracingly reminiscent of a Victorian London dominated by brick viaducts and deep cuttings. A brand new CTRL station, Stratford International, will be built on top of this concrete box, knitting the area’s fabric into continental Europe. Meanwhile the existing Stratford regional rail station, to the south-east of the site, will remain for local traffic - it is already on the Jubilee and Central Underground lines, tying it into the City and Canary Wharf.
As Malcolm Smith of Arup Associates, the first architecture and urban design practice engaged to create a masterplan for Stratford City, says: “If the currency of movement is time rather than distance - and Stratford City might end up closer to Paris than to Heathrow - then the area’s relationship to Europe changes completely.” Stratford, already a key reception area for immigrants attracted by its relative cheapness and centrality, now has the potential to become one of Britain’s most truly international places.
So perhaps it is appropriate that the pattern for new housing in the development is high-density. Apartments will take precedence in the central section of the site, while what are described as “family homes of all kinds” will be in the majority in its northeastern quarter, where they are intended to “relate in scale and character” to the stock London terraces of neighbouring Leyton. Stratford City is, as its name suggests, being planned as a city and not a suburb; but such a density of housing is unusual for a country that naturally leans towards driveways, closes and back gardens. The borough of Newham, in which Stratford City sits, also experienced the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968, the definitive end of the dream of streets in the sky and the high-rise solution to social housing. Deprivation and sub-standard accommodation remain real here. Will Stratford City become an enclave, an alien intervention in a place of dormitory and buy-to-let flats, sandwich bars, chain pubs and chain stores? After all, the only nearby precedent - the redevelopment of Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs - is not promising: it singularly failed to provide jobs for local people unqualified for work in the financial sector, and saw them limited to low-wage, service-sector positions.
“There’s got to be something real here,” agrees Keith Priest of Fletcher Priest, an architectural practice working with Arup on planning Stratford City. “It can’t be just an architect’s drawing of cappuccinos and balloons - you know the kind of thing. It needs to be a place in itself. To make it a place, we have to begin with the public spaces - because if you have good public space and then the architecture which comes along is only average, at least you are left with good public space. If the public space doesn’t work, no matter how good the architecture, people won’t want to be there.”
Such self-deprecation is an attitude perhaps not usually associated with architects, but, as Smith says, “the project needs a humility of approach. This is no place for the architecturally heroic.” So how, I asked them, do you create an identity, make a place of this size? How does it relate to its surroundings and to the wider context of London?
“The contours of the Stratford City site have been generated by the displaced earth from the CTRL tunnel,” Priest explains. “The new work will allow this area, which was previously cut off from London by rail and road, to be reconnected with the city for the first time since the end of the 19th century. It is about stitching areas together: the boundaries of this place are much bigger than the site.” Priest’s colleague Jonathan Kendall nods in agreement: “It’s the Not-Canary-Wharf syndrome,” he says.
The layout of the new city is being arranged around a grid - which, all the architects tell me, has proved to be the most flexible of urban systems - taking as its starting points the River Lea, the railways and other infrastructure, and the sea of terraced houses in next-door Leyton. “The topographical patterns of the larger area are picked up,” says Kendall. Tall buildings are aligned on an axis with London’s existing skyscraper clusters, while the Olympic Park will now take up position at the southern end of the city, in an area that had already been dedicated to parkland before the decision to award the games to London.
Ah yes, the Olympics. While the games’ main site will be right next to Stratford City, “most of the conversations we have are about looking beyond the Olympics,” says Priest. “We’re making sure nothing in the city will be built for 2012 only to be pulled down again.” Indeed, it is envisaged that the athletes will be housed in what will, after the games, become one of the city’s residential centrepieces, next to one of its much trumpeted public spaces - a series of stepped lakes linked by waterfalls, known as The Cascades.
London won the Olympic bid partly because of the architectural quality and ambition of the proposed buildings, partly because of the ongoing implementation of the Stratford City project. The assessors saw that this was not a bid proposing an isolated white elephant, but an adjunct to a city under construction, its infrastructure already in place. “Stratford City was designed as a piece of stand-alone urban development,” confirms Malcolm Smith. “The Olympics is able to appropriate a part of it, but it was a city before it was an Olympics’ site, and it will remain one afterwards.”
The Olympic decision has triggered an awful lot of opaque backroom deals and options between landowners, the London Development Agency, and developers LCR, Westfield, Stanhope and Multiplex - deals no one was willing to talk about on record. But the line from everyone I spoke to was that, while the Olympics are a good thing for the Lea Valley - bringing people into the area and providing a cash boost for certain projects - the games take a back seat to the planners’ focus on redevelopment.
Reams of printouts on my desk claim to show the Olympian benefits to house prices and employment. The increase in property values in Olympic cities in the five years leading up to their respective games averages out at around 66 per cent, according to property investment group Inside Track; 63 per cent in Athens, 50 per cent in Sydney, 19 per cent in Atlanta and a whopping 131 per cent in Barcelona. But these figures don’t necessarily tell the whole story. The statistics quoted for Barcelona cover 1987-1992, when the international economy first crashed into recession then climbed back up towards boom time, and coincide with an urban renewal programme that has achieved mythical status among architects and planners. Barcelona’s Olympics were just a small part of a visionary, and ongoing, programme of exemplary public works that has made the city one of the most habitable and enjoyable in the world. And the increases in Athens’ property prices were largely as a result of the Greeks’ last-minute construction panic, which stopped building work in the rest of the city: this is inflation, not added value.
Sydney’s figures are perhaps the most useful and impressive when trying to make predictions for east London. Homebush Bay, a brownfield, ex-industrial, well-located site, has clear parallels with the Lower Lea Valley; but it is worth noting that while house prices in Homebush rose 70 per cent in the run-up to the Olympics, they rose by 39 per cent in Australia as a whole over the same period, and the property market in this area was, in effect, created by the infrastructure and redevelopment put in place for the games.
In fact Stratford, as one of the few London locations that has remained affordable across income brackets, had already been enjoying house-price rises. And the immediate effect of the Olympic announcement was to cause stagnation in the housing market in the affected area, as sellers withdrew their properties from the market in anticipation of huge rises in value.
There is also a question about the desirability of a local property boom - do we want to see the pricing-out of the very locals who need to stay to make the new city a community, rather than just a dormitory? In order to avoid this, Stratford City’s planners are attempting to create a socially diverse area, one that allows flexibility for upward movement within its confines.
“Though the first phase of development will accommodate 1m sq ft of commercial, 1.5m sq ft of retail, 460,000 sq ft of residential and 370,000 sq ft each of hotel and leisure space,” Priest tells me, “the really important thing for Newham council has been employment. More than 30,000 new jobs will be created in Stratford City - and that’s not counting all the workers who will be required for its construction. At the moment, the sign of success in this area of London is absence from it. We need to introduce a mechanism that allows people to move up socially, but still remain here.”
These sentiments are echoed by Viv Ramsey, Newham’s chief planner. “We want Newham to be a place where people want to live and stay. That’s what makes a sustainable community.” George Cochrane of the developers Multiplex concurs. When Stratford City is finished, he says, “there are going to be 4,800 residential units here, with roughly 30 per cent of that as affordable housing. We will also supply the community facilities: a library, an employment and enterprise centre, and nursery, primary and secondary schools. The quality of these schools is critical - we know the middle classes are attracted to an area because of the quality of the local schools.”
In its current state, the Lower Lea Valley is about as close to a blank canvas as London can get. But close as it may be, it is less a clean sheet than a grubby palimpsest. Stratford City’s masterplan acknowledges its direct surroundings in terms of the barriers of existing and planned infrastructure, from the gargantuan CTRL to the clogged artery of the north circular. It also recognises local topography, geography and the site’s wider context - but what the plan does not do is address what is already there.
Of all the conversations I had while researching this piece, the most interesting was with the architect William Mann, who has written perceptively and lyrically on the Lower Lea Valley. His practice, Witherford Watson Mann, was one of those commissioned to make studies of the businesses, communities and open land that currently exist on the Lea Valley sites that are earmarked for redevelopment, and to suggest approaches for their future.
Mann refers to the Lea Valley’s “bastard countryside”, a place where “artificial and natural landscapes interact to a surprising degree, and the creeping colonisation of the valley by hard, synthetic materials seems to be held in check, even reversed by resurgent wilderness”. Mann’s is the only acknowledgment of the character of a remarkable part of the city about to be destroyed. This is a place, he points out, where a giant concrete-crushing plant sits next to a gourmet smokehouse, which last year exported six tonnes of smoked salmon to the US for the opening of a billion-dollar Las Vegas hotel.
He also understands that although the Lea Valley is a desolate place, this does not mean it is unnecessary, that it has no value. Every city needs a hinterland, somewhere the less attractive activities critical to civilised urban life can find a home, from the northern outfall sewage works and pitbull-guarded scrap-metal yards, to the remnants of London’s engineering industry pounding away in huge anonymous sheds. Before the area can be redeveloped, these businesses will have to be paid to relocate. Where is this activity - production, distribution and disposal - all supposed to go? Who wants London’s next wasteland on their doorstep? And how sustainable is it to push such companies far out of the city, with the concomitant pollution, traffic and migration of jobs?
Mann is not trying to answer these questions; only to ask them. For the moment he proposes knitting together what’s left of existing urban centres through the use of wending timber walkways, which will pass over the marshy scrublands like ghostly memories of the railway viaducts which carved up the city a century and a half ago. This would be a way of establishing routes and ways, linking up separate parts of long-term developments that don’t yet exist, and creating a place for their eventual, physical form in the local collective consciousness. The hope is then that the new city, when it is finally complete, will be less alien, less isolated, not an Isle of Dogs/Canary Wharf-style imposed and fortified yuppie enclave. In the meantime, these delicate paths would help to highlight and view a unique ecosystem, an amphibian landscape of mud and reeds, a wilderness haven far more enthralling than the parks that will replace it.
Then there are the rivers themselves. It all comes back to rivers. Among the scandals of the new development is the packaging off and sale of the best plots by the Thames and the Lea as incentives to developers to build on less attractive land. This de facto privatisation of the riverscape shows that little has been learnt from the disastrous developments that followed the decline of London’s docks, and which have seen the Thames treated shabbily and incoherently, the city’s single finest topographical asset and raison d’etre demoted to the cliche of an estate agent’s brochure.
The Lower Lea Valley is the development on which the whole of the Thames Gateway - and John Prescott’s plan for half a million new homes in the wider south-east - will be judged. It is a key project, the most important in London in a generation. It means the loss of the city’s weirdest, most ominous landscape - a fragile, muddy environment of waders, reeds and cormorants - and some of the last vestiges of London’s history as a maker of products, not just a provider of services. If we destroy these things, we must replace them with something of value. Whatever is built here needs, as Mann writes, “to be made sufficiently supple and robust to match the richness of reality”.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic.
