Essay Part 1 | Essay Part 2 | Essay Part 3
The RTPI survey indicated that the will to build better homes was not a universally shared aspiration and that the second-rate could triumph. This left me in slightly pensive mood, as I took a taxi from Wapping, the east London home of The Times to view Abbotts Wharf (page 38), one of this year's award winners, a 201-dwelling development by Telford Homes and East Thames Housing Group on a former industrial site by the Limehouse Cut canal. However, the taxi driver found it so hard to believe that an award-winning scheme could have arisen in this particular part of Limehouse that he took me instead to one of the warehouse developments on Narrow Street, on the river, the Belgravia of the borough. Resorting to liberal use of rhyming slang, he explained his strategy: "No, darling, you can't mean Stainsby Road on the Limehouse Cut. I grew up there; it don't half pen and ink in summer and nobody who could live anywhere else would want to buy there, or even rent there."
His view changed, however, as he finally turned towards the Limehouse Cut and saw the improvements being made to his childhood playground; a few derelict factories had given way to agreeable homes and the odours of the past had also vanished. The Abbotts Wharf development comprises four separate blocks of two and three-bedroom flats, arranged around a new marina, formed by diverting the canal. The architects were Jestico+ Whiles and the scheme is a mixture of private ownership, shared ownership and affordable rent. The blocks are set in such a way that all residents, whatever their tenure, enjoy sunlight at some time in the day. They also enjoy a relatively large amount of internal space: these are not the cubby hole flats that so upset planners and everyone else.
The scheme may be mixed tenure, but which types of resident live in which apartment block is only discernible from the choice of curtain material - there is no other evident social hierarchy: the concierge, for example, is at hand to help everyone. The buildings are finished in white render, with smoked glass balconies and random blocks of ochre, orange and shocking pink, giving a Miami-style exuberance to a still scruffy, but increasingly resurgent part of east London. The neat rubbish chutes in the courtyard that lead down to underground bins - a Dutch-innovation - lend a Continental European orderliness to the layout.
The nearest station to Abbotts Wharf is West Ferry on the Docklands Light Railway which also serves Canary Wharf, now Britain's best known example of contemporary architecture and successful industrial regeneration. In the piazza cafes and the busy and glamorous shopping malls that run underneath the glittering investment bank headquarters it is today almost impossible to remember that, in the early Nineties, the Canary Wharf project was seen as a white elephant. On the short trip back to Wapping on the DLR, I reflected on the Canary Wharf's record and the outlook for another far greater and much more complex regeneration initiative - that of the Thames Gateway: West Ferry is at the westernmost tip of this 40-mile stretch of land. Many of the homes that will be built as part of this endeavour will be mixed-tenure schemes, like Abbotts Wharf. But, if they do not live up to the high standards of this development and the other deftly handled inner city schemes that have been recognised in these awards, the consequences of failure will not only be a renewed conviction among the public that former ages knew how to build better, but also a diminished quality of life for those with no other option but to move into these homes. Moreover, if the future holds only poky, pastiche style flats, crammed tight into sites, far from amenities, then not only will the burgeoning interest in the new fade away, but Nimbyism will become the favourite British pastime.
Back to top
Essay Part 1 | Essay Part 2 | Essay Part 3 |
Exercise class on Highpoint's roof terrace in 1942
Large family, small home, no private space
Canary Wharf, London Docklands, a dream 20 years ago